Rachel Zegler’s Netflix Musical Misses Magic

There’s a scene midway through “Spellbound,” the new Netflix animated movie musical starring Rachel Zegler, where we briefly wander through an expansive forest captured in an oddly throwaway montage. Looking down at a group of characters venturing into the vast unknown, we glimpse a shot of butterflies all taking off into the sky.

At this moment, my mind immediately flew to this year’s beautiful “The Wild Robot,” where a similar scene plays out. However, though alike in the broad strokes, the execution of each could not be more different. Where the wondrous “The Wild Robot” patiently permits us to sit with its stunning and vibrant visuals, allowing us to fully take in the awe of the moment, “Spellbound” just lets this slip away. It is without any wonder or whimsy, the animation all looking rather flat to the eye rather than bursting with depth that takes the breath away. Instead, it is capped off by a derivative dad joke.

This brief moment is only one of the many ways “Spellbound” is unable to emerge free from the shadow cast by several other superior works, though it best betrays the film’s ultimate lack of imagination it never overcomes.  

Leading the way through all of this is Zegler’s determined Princess Ellian, a young elven-eared girl who is unexpectedly tasked with overseeing the kingdom of Lumbria as her parents, the otherwise kindly King (Javier Bardem) and Queen (Nicole Kidman), are not quite themselves. Specifically, they’ve become rather monstrous. This is literal as they have been transformed into enormous creatures by a mysterious spell after wandering into the dark forest. Ellian has been attempting to keep this all a secret while struggling to find a way to return them to their normal selves, though people in Lumbria are starting to ask questions about what has befallen them. 

When she hears back from a pair of bumbling oracles about a potential solution, she sets off into the lands outside the castle with her monster parents while being pursued by the kingdom’s soldiers who intend to lock them away forever. Oh, and while the trailers don’t reveal this, it’s a musical. This subterfuge, increasingly a common tactic that has befallen Hollywood, is a shame, as the tunes are the best part of a middling movie and could even be enjoyable for younger, less-discerning viewers to sing along with when it hits the high notes. 

With that in mind, while Zegler has more than proven her singing chops in films like “West Side Story” and “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” “Spellbound” rarely gives her real moments to shine. Though they couldn’t be more different in their presentations, it ends up becoming similar to her upcoming film “Y2K,” both in how directionless and meandering they manage to be as well as how each ultimately wastes Zegler’s talents. For far too many large stretches of “Spellbound,” it feels like we are being bogged down in expository setup for the energetic and fun adventure film it wants to be. It reaches a point that feels like it is at risk of never getting there, leaving the bits that should be the focus feeling rushed and shallow. The central emotional relationship with her parents feels lifted from something like the spectacular “Spirited Away,” though with none of the more earned enduring emotion that film gave life to. 

This isn’t for lack of trying. You can feel the film increasingly straining for profundity that it can’t fully grasp. Director and co-writer Vicky Jenson, who previously co-directed the original “Shrek” and 2015’s “Shark Tale,” is no stranger to exploring more playful yet thoughtful themes about familial relationships, though they arrive too near the end of “Spellbound” for it to have any impact. The trouble is that Ellian’s relationship with her parents is mostly confined to the occasional ghostly flashback before the film proceeds to spell out exactly what you should be feeling. It goes from providing exposition about the mechanics of the plot to doing the same for the thematic and emotional components, reducing this to being just as mechanical as a result. 

There’s a heartfelt core to this, but it never becomes well-drawn enough to come out into the light. All of the supposedly central conflicts rely on contrivances that mostly just take away from the internal emotional struggles “Spellbound” gives short shrift. By the time the film requires us to know what it is that Ellian and her parents are like as characters, you realize how little you know about them beyond the largely broad archetypes the film halfheartedly gave them. When we then get something like a forced joke about rideshare app ratings, it only distracts from what were already underdeveloped characters that are now made even more so. When we then get taken on their search for some sort of potent meaning, it’s hard to feel invested in the journey. 

All of this could be overlooked if the animation were striking and memorable in some way. Unfortunately, much like Skydance’s previous feature “Luck,” the various designs from the landscapes to the characters just never pop off the screen. It continually looks like any other generic computer-animated movie from the last decade and doesn’t do anything to distinguish itself. Expressions don’t hit home when characters are flatly emoting, and the world they are in just seems like it’s a stagnant series of backdrops rather than something truly alive. For all the ground the film supposedly covers, it all remains destined to completely fade from the mind.  

The use of computer animation is not the issue as, again, “The Wild Robot” shows you can create something visually amazing with this technique. What is the problem is that this is all in service of something that rarely takes flight or feels remotely magical. Even as some fun enough pieces are scattered about the film, they don’t get assembled into what could be a compelling whole. The image that sticks in the mind is again the butterflies: not because “Spellbound” makes them stand out, but because you wish you could fly away with them to a better film.