While I accept that I’m not in the carefully-calculated demographic for this movie, which must be eight-to-ten year-old girls with few other entertainment options, it’s hard to imagine that even the target audience will find very much to like here.
Since the success of Pixar’s Toy Story, producers have been quick to exploit the malleability of animated movies. Thanks to digital animation, no character, landscape or plot event is impossible – and you don’t need an expensive star to play a talking slug.
Even better, animated movies are perfectly adapted for marketing toys, books and other spin-offs to children – surely one of the main reasons why Epic was made at all.
It sure wasn’t the story. The movie is based The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs, a book written by millionaire children’s author William Joyce, who is also the executive producer and screenplay writer of Epic.
One might pity director Chris Wedge, charged with making an “epic adventure” from his boss's uninspired tale about little soldier men who fly around on hummingbirds protecting the life-force of the forest from rot-wielding goblins (called “boggans” here).
Our attachment point for this sub-scale adventure is needy adolescent Mary Katherine (Amanda Seyfried), known as ‘MK.’ She’s gone to live with her father, a crackpot boffin studying... tiny soldiers who fly on hummingbirds. But MK doesn’t believe this nonsense.
Oh, how wrong she is! Like Alice in Alice in Wonderland, MK is shrunk down by the magical overlord of the forest, Queen Tara, a tiny Texan Gloriana and Barbie doll voiced by pop-singer Beyoncé Knowles – and the most stupidly annoying character ever in an animated movie, redeemed only by the fact that she dies and disappears a few minutes later.
But not before she’s put the “life of the forest” into a random seed pod - and MK, naturally, is the Chosen One who will carry this pod to Mordor, or wherever it needs to go. She’s escorted on her quest by the chief hummingbird rider, Ronin (Colin Farrell), and the talking slug (Aziz Ansari) and snail (Chris O’Dowd). They’re off to see a wise caterpillar (Aerosmith dinosaur Steve Tyler), who riddles like Yoda but looks like Jabba the Hutt.
One bright light in this terrible sludge is the boss boggan Mandrake (Christoph Waltz), who raves that the traditional balance of nature must come to an end for a new “age of rot” to blossom. After the scenes with Queen Beyoncé, you can understand his point.
What stops me from giving just one star to Epic is the technical work. Animation house Blue Sky have made some excellent movies, including the Ice Age series and the wonderful Rio in 2011. Here, the animators do their best with the hummingbirds and daisy people and all the rest, and manage, somehow, to rise above the unpromising raw material.
The character art follows an awkward line between cartoony and realistic, but that’s one of the least of the problems with Epic: the biggest are that’s it’s a boring and wasteful exercise in by-the-numbers film-making that’s likely to be be quickly forgotten, even by the children it’s targeted at.
Two stars (out of five)
Director:
Chris Wedge
Stars:
Amanda Seyfried
Colin Farrell
Beyoncé Knowles
Christoph Waltz
Aziz Ansari
Chris O’Dowd
Steven Tyler
Runs:
102 minutes