Beautifully Animated Owls Fails to Fly
After he and his brother Kludd (voiced by Ryan Kwanten) are captured by a group of renegade evil owls bent on species dominations calling themselves The Pure Ones, young Soren (Jim Sturgess) realizes he must escape make the perilous journey to the tree of the fabled Guardians, the Owls of Ga’Hoole. They have sworn oaths mend the broken, make strong the weak and vanquish evil, and this is just the kind of nefarious nonsense they’d want to know about so they could put a stop to it.
Soren uses his gizzard in Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole © Warner Bros.
Based on the series of best-selling children’s books Kathryn Lasky, director Zack Snyder’s animated family epic Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole isn’t as far removed from 300 or Watchmen as you might assume. Like those pictures, this one is filled with eye-popping spectacle and hypnotically paced to a kinetic rhythm intrinsically its own. It is a beautifully animated visual marvel, filled with signature moments that very nearly stopped my breath cold.
Sadly, also like the majority of Snyder’s features this one has a script so full of holes and that cares so little about character development it almost plays like cinematic shorthand. Elements of Star Wars here, Lord of the Rings there and The Secret of Nimh all over the place abound. Having never read any of Lasky’s books I have know idea how close this stays to the source material, but as far as John Orloff (A Mighty Heart) and Emil Stern’s (The Life Before Her Eyes) is concerned it cribs and steals with almost unabashed abandon. I felt like I’d seen this story a good number of times before, this one adding so little new to the equation it at times begins to play like a fantasy-adventure greatest hits compilation.
It doesn’t help matters that there is no sense of time and space. Soren and his ragtag group of newfound friends (three other owls and nursemaid snake, voiced by Emily Barclay, David Wenham, Anthony LaPaglia and Miriam Margolyes) seem to take forever to get to the land of Ga’Hoole, encountering hardships aplenty. But when the Guardians are in trouble and are in the need of rescuing, the crew somehow manages to make the reverse flight in what feels like no time at all, joining the fight with The Pure Ones almost right at its starting point even though the left ages after the main squadron.
Additionally, Snyder and company spend no time developing their idiosyncratic group into fully dimensional characters. While Soren and Kludd (the latter becoming enraptured by The Pure Ones, setting up a brother-versus-brother dynamic that doesn’t pay off nearly as well as it needs to) have a tiny bit of heft to the respective storylines, the rest are nothing more than rote one-dimensional archetypes. While the vocal actors do their best (especially a wickedly malevolent Helen Mirren portraying the evil owls sinfully seductive second in command), no matter how hard they try few of them rise above the maudlin nature of the screenplay. This film is all about the razzle-dazzle not seeming to care an ounce whether or not the audience becomes emotionally invested in what’s going on, almost taking it for granted that the familiarity of the plot and the awesomeness of the visuals is all that’s required in order to entertain.
For some maybe this will be true. I image kids will eat a lot of this off, and even though it does get a wee bit violent towards the end and has the potential to scare the very little ones the majority of the adolescent preview audience I saw it with seemed more or less pleased. In all honesty, this is one of the most magnificently animated epics I’ve ever seen, some of it (most notably an oceanic flying lesson conducted during a raging thunderstorm) rivaling anything either Pixar or DreamWorks have ever come up with.
But it wasn’t enough for me. The bad guys are just black hat bad with no nuance, no subtly and no notable reason for the depravity. More than that, their plan is vague at best, all of it having something to do with using metallic “specs” found in the upchucked remains of an owl’s last meal. There’s a lot of talk about using one’s gizzard to navigate and how those specs interfere with that, but neither item is gone into enough to make much more than a passing impact upon the viewer.
There are 15 books in Lasky’s series, and I imagine that much of the development and logic I was longing for could be found by digging in and devouring them one after the other. I got the feeling while watching Legend of the Guardians that Snyder and company were trying to throw in way too much, not caring if it made sense just as long as the mention of signature moments, plot points and characters remained. But in the end it all just becomes a gigantic blob of animal-driven fantasy nonsense, and as sublime as all of it looks pretty pictures can only get you so far when the story consistently flat-lines.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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