Strange Magic, a new animated jukebox musical fantasy from George Lucas, follows in the footsteps of Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. All are musicals, all are for kids and all feature a villain geared to make young pulses race.
“I do think we underestimate how much darkness kids can deal with,” says Alan Cumming, who plays the film’s chief baddie, the Bog King,
Inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Strange Magic is set in a fairy world where you can never judge a book by its cover.
Cumming’s character, with his glowing eyes and a skeleton that is more exo than endo, certainly embodies the movie’s message that beauty is only skin deep.
“All these kinds of films are based on a tradition that goes way, way back to the Grimm Brothers,” says Cumming.
“In a way, the reason these stories are told is to teach kids some sort of moral lesson. You have to scare people but ultimately show that he has a nicer side to him.”
Lucas, who has a ‘story by’ and producer credit on the film says, “with the Bog King we did tone him down a bit because it is a delicate balance. We’ve shown it to a lot of kids and most of them aren’t affected by it at all. My daughter, who is only 18 months, saw the trailer with the Bog King in it on a screen, not on a TV and she wasn’t moved by it at all. But of course 18-month-olds aren’t afraid of anything yet.
“Kids are not as fragile as you think they are. All the stuff, that it warps their brains, I’m not sure about that,” he said.
“There is a certain reality to imitative violence, which is monkey see, monkey do, and that is dangerous, but at the same time a well brought up kid doesn’t fall into that.”
Lucas, who has been working on this project on and off for 15 years — “I liked to do it in between working on Star Wars and writing scripts and things”— says there are only three moments in the movie that are “bothersome.”
“It has been my experience with my kids that if you sense something coming up you just put your hand over their eyes and usually they’re faster at doing it than you are.”
Everyone knows the children of George Lucas, Han, Luke and Leia, will be closing out the year with the December release of “Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens.” What is perhaps less well known is that another Lucas fantasy kicks off 2015.
Lucas was inspired by “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to create the story for “Strange Magic,” an animated jukebox musical set in a fairy world where you can never judge a book by its cover.
Evan Rachel Wood stars as the voice of Marianne, a tough Pat Benatar-type fairy with colourful wings, leather lungs and an attitude. She wasn’t always like that, once she was a gentle fairy princess engaged to the handsome Roland (Sam Palladio) but his unfaithfulness broke her belief in love and now she is alone.
Over in the Dark Forest the Bog King (Alan Cumming), a bad-tempered cockroach looking creatures whose skeleton is more exo than endo, has also lost faith in love. “Love destroys order,” he says, “and without order there is chaos.” To make sure love does not taint his kingdom he imprisons the Sugar Plum Fairy (Kristin Chenoweth), maker of love potions.
The fairy and dark forests collide when a bootleg batch of Sugar Plum’s potion leads to kidnapping and a showdown—and sing-off—between Marianne, the Bog King and their followers.
“Strange Magic’s” story is old fashioned. It’s “Beauty and the Beast” banged together with some Shakespearean farce and even a hint of “The Dark Crystal,” but there is nothing old fashioned about the presentation. The lush animation will blow the retinas off your eyeballs. The creature design owes a debt to Jim Henson and movies like “Labyrinth,” but they are marvelously realized with state of the art CGI and inventive voice work.
Director Gary Rydstrom fills the screen with memorable images, from Marianne splayed across a bed made of a rose bud to the wild kaleidoscope psychedelia of the film’s finale.
Your eyeballs will dance, and with a wall-to-wall musical score made of pop hits from the past fifty years, you might expect your feet to follow, but it’s here the movie doesn’t always deliver. It’s all well and good to transform “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” into a Broadway style belter but the abominable Muzak version of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” would have been better left in the vault. The soundtrack plays like a K-Tel album of love songs—everyone from Elvis and Bob Marley to Heart and Lady Gaga are represented—has a Moulin Rouge-ish feel but isn’t quite as effective as Baz Luhrmann’s megamix.
“Strange Magic” takes some simple ideas—beauty is only skin deep and love conquers all—and sprinkles them with fairy dust to create a musical that plays like “Moulin Rouge” for kids.
Alan Cumming’s new character was years in the making. In Strange Magic, a new musical fantasy from the mind of George Lucas, he plays the villainous leader of The Dark Forest, the Bog King.
“Some years you only do three days on it,” he said. “The gaps between when you perform it are so huge. You’re coming back to it with some familiarity but not that much because you might have recorded a song in a couple of hours that you’ve never known before and never hear again and six months go by and you have to go back and sing it again. It is a very interesting, drastic process doing a film like this.”
The toughest part, however, was not spilling the beans on what he was up to.
“You have to sign a confidentiality clause and it was very hush hush. I’d suddenly be going to LA and I’d see friends who’d ask, ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘I’m working on a top secret George Lucas project.’ ‘What is it?’ “I can’t say. It’s top secret.’ Early on I didn’t even know the proper story so I couldn’t have told it. It was quite nice having a secret.”
Inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Strange Magic is an animated jukebox musical set in a fairy world where you can never judge a book by its cover. Cumming’s character, with his glowing eyes and a skeleton that is more exo than endo, certainly embodies the movie’s message that beauty is only skin deep.
“You have to scare people but ultimately show that he has a nicer side to him.”
The release of the movie caps a busy period for the Scottish born actor. He’s currently on Broadway starring in the revival of Cabaret and can be seen on television in the Golden Globe nominated role of crisis manager Eli Gold on The Good Wife. Off stage, his memoir, Not My Father’s Son, was a recent New York Times bestseller.
“I don’t have many moments right now,” he says. “It’s been a very hectic time but I’m really enjoying stuff. I still am able to have fun. I have Club Cumming in my dressing room. I actually relax and have fun with friends there. It’s not ideal. I would love to have more days to do nothing but I think it is really important when you are really busy in your day to put some hours aside for revelry and relaxation.”
George Lucas said it brought a tear to his eye, describing it as “one of those moments in history, like the invention of the light bulb or the first telephone call.” Weepy George isn’t talking about the cure for cancer or the map of the human genome. No, the waterworks tuned on at the sight of the test footage of the computer generated dinosaurs created for Jurassic Park, the film that for better and for worse ushered in an era of reliance on computer generated images.
Of course filmmakers have been using computers to manipulate film imagery at least as far back as 1973’s Westworld, the Yul Brenner movie which exposed audiences to the first 2D computerized images, but this photo realistic dinosaur was unlike anything anyone had seen before.
It was exciting, a giant leap forward, and I think, one of the worst things to happen to the film industry since Odor-Rama. It ushered in an anything-is-possible epoch, which gave us The Matrix’s uber-cool bullet time effects, the Toy Story movies and Alien Resurrection’s unsettling accelerated aging of Ripley’s clone.
Striking images every one, but I couldn’t help but think, as I ho-hummed my way through this weekend’s Green Lantern, a movie painted head to toe by unnecessary computer technology—did Ryan Reynolds’s silly little green mask REALLY need to be computer generated?—that the “wow” phase of computer manipulation is over.
We’ve become so used to seeing the impossible on screen that our collective sense of wonder has been eroded away. Look Ryan Reynolds can fly. Who cares? Look Jim Carrey is dancing with penguins. Yawn. Those scenes are simply a collection of binary codes banged together, and because we know there’s nothing real about the action it fails to amaze us.
The main perpetrators of CGI overkill are blockbusters, the silly season movies like the upcoming Transformers: Dark of the Moon. But even director Michael Bay, no stranger to digital trickery, seems to realize that less is more. For sure the movie will be a CGI-fest, but one spectacular set piece features people base jumping off the Sears Tower and gliding through the streets of Chicago for real.
The most exciting images I’ve seen on screen in recent years haven’t been generated via computer algorithms.
The car chase from Death Proof worked because stunt woman Zoë Bell actually hung on for dear life to the hood of a 1970 Dodge Challenger as it careened around the back roads of Lebanon, Tennessee. The real danger translated into excitement.
Christopher Nolan, director of the Batman series, doesn’t like CGI and avoids it whenever possible. His Inception has a fair amount of computer work but the most memorable scene is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s MC Eischeresque gravity defying fight scene. It was shot on a rotating stage without enhancement and it is a mind blower.
In July Attack the Block, a low budget English stunner of an aliens attack film, opens complete with old school ETs—actors in furry suits resembling the lovechild of a gorilla and a bear with glowing green teeth—which really deliver thrills and chills.
So here! here! to filmmakers who understand audiences recognize when something authentic and organic is happening in front of them. Mazel tov to those trying to bring back the human touch to the big screen.
Dry your eyes George, we shouldn’t shed any tears at the end of overwhelming CGI in movies.
“Red Tails” feels like a 1940s war movie. It has soldiers who utter liens like, “Take that Mr. Hitler!” as they blow up ammunition ship and amazing aerial photography. The only difference is the color of the soldier’s skin. A study of the classic war films shows no indication of the contribution of African-American soldiers. By telling the heroic story of the Tuskegee airmen “Red Tails” hopes to right that wrong.
Based on true events (though dramatized for film) the movie focuses on a group African American WWII pilots, the top guns of the 332nd Fighter Group, the Tuskegee Airmen. Fighting the racial discrimination of the US military they prove their mettle by taking on dangerous assignments in active combat.
You can’t accuse Red Tails of being subtle. It plays like a Saturday morning matinee with a social conscious; unabashedly patriotic, unapologetically melodramatic and an unashamed throwback to the propaganda movies of yesteryear. The mix and match of those elements works for the first hour, but the time one of the pilots whoops, “Let’s give those newspapers something to write about!” the once charming tone of the movie starts to wear thin.
George Lucas produced this—although “Treme’s” Anthony Hemingway directed—and it is a Lucas movie with all the good and bad that implies. It’s corny, over-the-top, wildly uneven and episodic but when it takes flight, literally, it soars.
The aerial scenes (aided by Lucas’s computer tweaking) are breathtaking. I do wish, however, there was less dialogue during the dogfights. I think fighter pilots in attack mode have better things to concentrate on than making wisecracks or talking about girls.
“Red Tails” mostly suffers from a poorly told story. Just as it seems to be working up to an important point or climatic moment, it shies away, instead focusing on a superfluous love story or melodramatic moment (“My head, it hurts… I must have passed out”).
The actors do what they can with what they’re given—Nate Parker as Martin “Easy” Julian and David Oyelowo as Joe “Lightning” Little are the standouts—but the stars here are the planes and the historical context, not the actors.
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
