25
Metascore
20 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 67The PlaylistDrew TaylorThe PlaylistDrew TaylorStrange Magic is messy and uneven and occasionally annoying, but it also dares to be different.
- 67The A.V. ClubJesse HassengerThe A.V. ClubJesse HassengerStrange Magic, an animated film from Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic, borrows its sensibility from another movie from the summer of 2001: "Moulin Rouge." The new film’s composer and music director, Marius De Vries, even arranged songs for Baz Luhrmann’s phantasmagorical musical.
- 50USA TodayClaudia PuigUSA TodayClaudia PuigStrange Magic is strange all right, but hardly magical.
- 25New York PostLou LumenickNew York PostLou LumenickA jaw-droppingly terrible animated musical that mismatches George Lucas’ inane story about a pair of fairy princesses to an oddball selection of the “Star Wars’’ creator’s favorite pop tunes.
- 25San Francisco ChronicleSan Francisco ChronicleThe plot movement feels very much like an unpleasant formality, shoved forward by tiresome devices.
- 20VarietyJustin ChangVarietyJustin ChangA thoroughly derivative and unengaging fantasy.
- The eerie wood was exquisitely designed. Disastrously, what goes on there suggests a Californian mall during spring break.
- 12Slant MagazineEd GonzalezSlant MagazineEd GonzalezAs juvenile and frivolous a wish-fulfillment fantasy as one might expect from the visionary behind the lightsaber and Princess Leia hogtied to Jabba the Hut, Strange Magic depicts war as a series of scarcely muddied binary oppositions: between good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, and singing and death by karaoke.
- 10The Hollywood ReporterMichael RechtshaffenThe Hollywood ReporterMichael RechtshaffenA shrill, garish hodgepodge of familiar elements from other animated vehicles (most evidently 2013’s Epic), there’s virtually nothing about this forced, fractured fairy tale that feels remotely fresh or involving.
- 5TheWrapAlonso DuraldeTheWrapAlonso DuraldeTerrible character design, combined with a painful lack of laughs and a crushing plethora of ghastly songs, makes Strange Magic perhaps the worst animated feature ever to come out of Disney (which might explain why the studio is releasing the film under its now-rarely-used Touchstone label). Compared to other Lucas missteps of recent years, it’ll make you nostalgic for Jar Jar Binks.