Spellbound is a weak attempt to recreate some Disney magic

Princess Ellian (Rachel Zegler) has a little problem. As Spellbound begins, she breaks the fourth wall to directly address the audience that her kingdom is unusual. You see, some other kingdoms have mice or mosquitos. Her domain, meanwhile, has…monsters. Not just any monsters, though. Those hulking brutes were once her parents. King Solon (Javier Bardem) and Queen Ellsmere (Nicole Kidman) were transformed into their beastly forms after a visit to a nearby enchanted forest went awry.

Ellian is exhausted after a year of taking care of her monstrous parents. She and her advisors are resigning themselves to the idea that the original rules are lost forever. Now it's up to the Princess to take over everything. However, Ellian quickly learns that there’s a chance to reverse things. Venturing deeper into that forest and following strong beacons of light could lead to a cure for her magically altered parents. Knowing the destination is one thing. Transporting a pair of creatures more prone to licking than listening…that’s a greater challenge.

For its first animated feature, Luck, Skydance Animation (whose Head of Animation is John Lasseter, former Pixar head honcho who left the outfit over misconduct allegations) created a rudimentary Pixar knock-off. Specifically, that film explored the world of good and bad luck through a workplace scenario evocative of similar backdrops from Monsters Inc. and Inside Out. Now, for Spellbound, Skydance has turned to mimicking 1990s Disney fairy tale musicals. This Vickey Jenson directorial effort even utilizes composer Alan Menken, a critical figure in the history of Mouse House melodies. Lyricist Glenn Slater, who worked with Menken on Home on the Range and Tangled, is also here.

The intent was clearly to craft a computer-animated fantasy yarn standing toe-to-toe with Beauty and the Beast (which Spellbound producer Linda Woolverton wrote!) and The Little Mermaid. Instead, Spellbound most often evokes the Porch Pals episode Itchy & Scratchy. Spellbound also unfortunately harkens back to a troublesome lack of villains in modern Disney Animation movies. Raya and the Last Dragon and Strange World desperately needed a concrete baddie for their stories. So too does Spellbound cry out for some actual conflict. A generic darkly colored tornado dubbed “The Darkness” or a mean general just won’t do for instilling some tangible tension into these sterile proceedings. A really campy gay-coded baddie would inject some actual fun into this buttoned-up production.

Jenson and company are so averse to having any in Spellbound that even an early song involving two of Ellian’s advisors planning “a benevolent coup” to protect the kingdom doesn’t generate problems. This pair of schemers immediately let Ellian in on their plan!  The proceedings get even more inert once Lauren Hynek, Elizabeth Martin, and Julia Miranda’s screenplay devolves into episodic exploits involving Ellian and her monstrous parents traversing various fantasy landscapes. Obstacles like quicksand or a tunnel that personifies good and bad thoughts are disposed of as quickly as they’re introduced. One sequence involves Ellian encountering multiple other members of her purple pet/best friend Flink’s species. Only for a few seconds does it seem like they couldn’t be friendly…then there’s no problem whatsoever!

There’s little adventure, growth, or consequences within these digressions. How will this keep the attention of younger audiences? Heaven forbid Spellbound have something like Gaston, Kent Mansley, or Ramses to provide concrete dangers into the story. Safeness permeates every inch of the movie, including in its dreadfully generic animation. The Skydance Animation Madrid animators are doing their best with some unimaginative design work that makes every single character look too cuddly and ready to become a plushie. No jagged edges exist in the world of Spellbound. The king and queen's beastly forms are round creations that never look dangerous. A pair of Oracles, Ludo (Tituss Burgess) and Sunny (Nathan Lane), just look like blue gumdrops. Flink looks like Grimace and a rat got caught in that teleporting machine from The Fly.

Humans, meanwhile, look like the standard post-Incredibles approach to slightly stylized CG humans. Ellian specifically has the same gigantic saucer eyes every CG Disney Princess (namely Anna and Elsa) has. Such uninspired characters design a world that looks cheap and distractingly clean. A dearth of crowd scenes and overly polished environments keep reminding viewers of Spellbound’s cheaper origins. No Spellbound backdrops lived in, everything looks like it could have been pulled from a tech demo reel. These obvious signs of cost-cutting are more forgivable in the 2011 episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. It’s a more puzzling attribute when you have enough money for Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem to belt out show tunes.

Modern computer-animated films like The Wild Robot and the Spider-Verse features keep finding new ways to push visual boundaries. Spellbound, meanwhile, rigidly goes through the motions of what computer-animated films “should” look like. Only one or two musical numbers opting for dream-like imagery, such as a tune about “following the light” sung by Ludo and Sunny, disrupt the visual monotony. Thank goodness for Menken and Slater’s music, which does provide some of Spellbound’s brighter patches. An early flamenco number shared by ministers Bolinar (John Lithgow) and Nazara Prone (Jenifer Lewis) is an early highlight of the entire feature.

That inspired bit of musical influence informs a song with lots of clever details. My personal favorite is how the background rattling in the tune emanates from a servant chopping a nearby hedge. It’s also great that Menken and Slater aren’t afraid to make Spellbound’s tunes sound like musical numbers straight from Broadway. Modern titles like Wish opt to deliver ditties that could inhabit pop radio with ease. Spellbound, meanwhile, features lyrics rife with very specific plot point references and overlapping harmonized dialogue between characters. Alas, Slater doesn't come up with a rhyme here as ingenious as pairing "femurs" with "dreamers" in Tangled's "I've Got a Dream." However, rhyming “marvelous” with “larva-less” still gets him a bronze medal in wordplay.

Unfortunately, even those tunes eventually run out of steam. Musical numbers become scarcer in Spellbound’s second half. When they do, they’re told in a very standard visual fashion and with an overdose of sentimentality. There are no toe-tappers here to give the lifeless proceedings a pulse. What a waste of poor Rachel Zegler. She has the singing voice and vocal energy to be a perfect leading lady for one of these animated musicals. She deserved her own Tangled, not what amounts to, despite some musical high points from Slater and Menken, a direct-to-video knock-off.

Nothing encapsulates Spellbound’s lack of creativity better than its groan-worthy stabs at quasi-meta jokes. Winky lines about handing a frog-based form of transportation five literal stars or self-referential dialogue about fairy tales indicate Jenson wants to harken back to her 2001 co-directorial effort Shrek. However, Spellbound’s flat script never gives these gags enough energy or life to register as amusing. Worse, these comedic digressions just make attempts at straightforward sentimentality ring hollow. Something like Enchanted masterfully balanced functioning as both pastiche and a reminder of why fairy tale musicals can be glorious. Spellbound (save for Zegler, Menken, and Slater’s contributions), will merely inspire yawns and children to quickly ask if they can rewatch The Mitchells vs the Machines or The Wild Robot instead.