Spellbound

This is a good movie, particularly for families navigating the challenges of divorce. At its core, this film is really about the emotional struggles and complexities that arise in such situations, especially for children. I do wish it had been marketed with this theme in mind, as it's not something we would have chosen as a family if we had known. However, it does provide an opportunity to explore and discuss a child's feelings of anger and confusion when caught between parents. That said, the movie is much heavier than what most viewers are likely expecting. While I enjoy musicals, the songs were unfortunately not very memorable and felt overly long, which detracted from the overall experience.

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.

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.

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.

The story was new but didn't hold my attention. The starting of the story was not captivating, it started off very randomly.

They could have portrayed the struggles of the girl in a better way. Portraying her struggles through songs was more on happy side, it never showed the pain.

The shock for me (and shocking for the princess as well..lol) was the ending. I really didn't except an animation movie to talk about it. No child would want their family to go through that phase, and this director and production house decided it was a good thing to show kids about it. That is the disappointing thing for me.

But definitely, the overall plot of how darkness entangles a person's life and makes them monster is a great plot. If the plot revolved around the main idea, it would have been a great movie.