Princess Ellian, heir to the throne of Lumbria, has a problem: A year earlier, her parents, traveling through the Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness, fell under a curse. That sort of thing happens when you’re passing through a wood “so dark they named it twice” — but let’s not cast blame. The curse transformed the king and queen into roaring, rampaging monsters. They can’t comprehend much or speak, but they can be distracted with chew toys.
Ellian (voiced by Rachel Zegler), now 15, has assumed their duties and, along with two government ministers (Jenifer Lewis and John Lithgow), helped hide news of the metamorphosis from Lumbrians at large. She hopes that somewhere, deep under her parents’ new scales and feathers, the minds of the king and queen are still there. So, too, may viewers of “Spellbound” occasionally sense the enchantment zones of their brains lighting up, more as a reflexive response to dim memories of past animated features than as a genuine reaction to the derivative pastiche onscreen.
The movie, directed by Vicky Jenson, one of the filmmakers behind “Shrek,” has assembled all the standard ingredients: fairy tale trappings; a treacherous, “Oz”-ian journey across a mystical land; wizard types voiced by Broadway pros (Nathan Lane and Tituss Burgess), for comic relief; and would-be earworms by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater that are catchy in the moment but that you might struggle to hum afterward. Lithgow’s “I Could Get Used to This,” an “Under the Sea”-style showstopper that his character sings after swapping bodies with Ellian’s purple rodent pet, is an exception.
It isn’t fair to say that “Spellbound” lacks musical or visual invention. Zegler can belt out a song, and the evil storm that transmogrified the royals is pleasingly lo-fi. (It looks like a scribble-scrabble twister.) But the magic feels distinctly, almost insultingly poached. Ellian rides with her friends on giant, flying cats (shades of “The Neverending Story” and “How to Train Your Dragon”). The idea of emotions made physically manifest is a concept that animated features have used quite recently (“Inside Out,” “Soul”). The oracles played by Lane and Burgess, who argue about having traded in multiple wands for a universal fob, engage in the sort of self-conscious riffing that has become a de facto requirement of family filmmaking.
The king and queen eventually find their voices — one assumes that Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman, reunited from “Being the Ricardos,” were well-paid for what sounds like swift work — but even flurries of excitement, like an escape over a quicksand desert, can’t shake the sense that “Spellbound” has been consciously designed to play things safe. One of its big numbers is called “The Way It Was Before,” words that sound suspiciously like a mission statement.
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