Ellian et le sortilège

Spellbound may be built on a mix of various ideas from other animated movies however, it also has a fantastic message tucked inside of its fantasy adventure centring on the effects of divorce and how it can threaten to break a family apart. It comes to a satisfyingly mature conclusion and weaves its main message into most of the set pieces along the way which is enough to make up for how clunky the dialogue can be throughout by over-explaining the themes.

Rachel Zegler offers further proof that she can really belt out a tune whilst anchoring the film with an unwavering determination to help her parents. There's a solid amount of fun to be had watching Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem have to relearn human behaviour and John Lithgow is the best part of this. He's fine at first but once he swaps bodies into a much cuter character he becomes the highlight and gets the best musical number.

Vicky Jenson's direction keeps proceedings vibrant and playful, never going too long between musical interludes and despite a run time going towards 2 hours, it's actually nearer to a clean 90 minutes excluding credits. The animation ends up being the middle ground between Disney and straight to dvd with music by Alan Menken that brings some life into the film whenever it's beginning to falter even if all the songs here are forgettable and comfortably some of his weakest.

After 3 songs I could not even remember the melody of the first song. The story is forced and just try to follow the a storyline that is a mix of previous films. The characters are not developed and the animals are just a mix of different animals to make it look like fantasy, but it is just cheap script to try to captlize on other stories. The family was very disappointed with the story even if it is a adventure, there is too that is genuinely funny and lilte that iS original. Trying to make "Frozen" mixed with Pokémons is not very inovative. I couldn't make all of the kids sit through the whole movie.

Wow, it's funny that I went from watching the best Netflix animated series in Arcane Season 2 to now watching one of their most average and forgettable animated movies in Spellbound (2024). Yeah, I wasn't that big of a fan of this movie, but I didn't hate it.

Positives for Spellbound (2024): The animation in the movie looks fantastic. I thought that Rachel Zegler was decent as the main character and while I have my criticisms toward some of the things that she's said, she was good in the movie. And finally, there are some good musical numbers in the movie.

Negatives for Spellbound (2024): This movie is just very forgettable and I am struggling to remember the plot of this movie. Also, why are Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem and John Lithgow doing here, their characters barely do anything in the movie except show up when the plot needs them the most. And finally, this movie has that generic Netflix atmosphere to it, to where I feel like I seen this type of movie from them too many times.

Overall, Spellbound (2024) is an animated movie that exists on Netflix and that's it. Maybe, some people are going to enjoy more than me, but this movie was just whatever for me.

It would have been nice to know that this movie was mainly about divorce before sitting down with my family to enjoy a nice family movie.

The toddler enjoyed the first song or two, but she had lost interested by the midway point, definitely was not paying attention during the climax.

I say midway, but the pacing of this thing was all over the place, so I'm not really sure how far we were in or how long the movie was.. but at some point it took a turn and went from being a movie about a girl breaking the spell her parents are under (like Spirited Away) and dove straight into a "we need a divorce, but its not your fault" movie.

I didn't see anything about this in the marketing, although to be fair I don't know if I say any marketing besides a quick trailer.

It might not have been so bad if this movie hadn't also been so bad, I chuckled at a few throw away lines/sight gags, but that's about it. The plot was weak, the voice acting could have been better, and the animation felt off to me, but I can't quite describe what exactly. The lips didn't feel like they lined up right?

A sweet film but more so an important topic! There are better animations such as The Wild Robot that also tackles a heavy topic, but I am glad animations like these exist for kids. Give it a chance!

The music is decent and the voice actors are okay, but showing that families do not operate in straight lines or are perfectly constructed, is probably more important for kids to see than an excellent animated production.

Let's celebrate more films like these that are courageous enough to tackle important topics and critique them less harshly. Your kids will enjoy this film and the parents will likely reflect on a few things they could do differently too.