Spellbound

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's been a while since I've seen an animated movie with so many cheesy clichés. Teenage princesses in musicals breaking the fourth wall like it's a Nickelodeon show. After 20 minutes there were already at least 3 or 4 songs, which transform any non-Disney animated film into a bad imitation.

The plot is repetitive, boring, endless with irrelevant events that could have been omitted to leave this feature film at least in 90 minutes.

The final message is interesting, but the journey was too long and boring to pay it the attention it deserved. The visual aspects were good, but there are also details that look unfinished, to say the least.

In short, a forgettable film in the Netflix catalog.