Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Spellbound’ on Netflix, a Disney-Lite Animated Musical Starring Rachel Zegler

You can’t say Spellbound (now on Netflix) doesn’t boast significant animated-musical cred: Shrek co-director Vicky Jensen directs, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King writer Linda Woolverton produces and Disney stalwart and multi-Oscar-winner Alan Menken wrote the songs (in the vein of ditties he wrote that many of us still regularly hum, from The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, Aladdin and many more). It also throws around some heavy celebrity-voice weight, casting soon-to-be-live-action-Snow-White Rachel Zegler, Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem in key roles, for a story that’s unfortunately not a family-friendly remake of Hitchcock classic Spellbound, but rather the saga of a princess whose parents were transformed into – humongous metaphor alert! – monsters. And it ain’t half bad, even when it’s a little too familiar.

SPELLBOUND: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Princess Ellian (Zegler) is 15 years old, and kinda secretly in charge of the kingdom of Lumbria. Only she and the palace staff know that her parents, King Solon and Queen Ellsmere, ventured into the Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness and emerged as massive nonhuman beasts, he a big scaly blue rubbery hedgehoggish fella and she a feathery and furry winged hippoesque thing. There’s little vestige of their sapien selves in their cute-but-also-scary monster form, since all they do is romp around and destroy stuff and roar and eat a lot, but you can’t read Kidman and Bardem’s names in the credits without believing the creatures will eventually return to some form of intelligence because those people are expensive. For now, though, it’s a problem with an inevitable solution, since movies like this rarely feature characters who just deal with problems for the rest of their lives until they die.

Anyway. What, exactly, is that solution? Damned if Ellian knows. She catches us up via a speaky-singy song detailing how she feels far too overburdened, and how she and Ministers Bolinar (John Lithgow) and Nazara (Jenifer Lewis) have been racking their brains and keeping the head of the military, known only as The General (Olga Merediz), out of the loop. Now, before we get on with the plot summarizin’, I should answer the question that’s on all your minds: Does Ellian have a pet? Something that you’d likely find a stuffie version of at your local Kmart this holiday season? Yes. Yes she does. It’s named Flink and it’s basically a purple gerbil with outsized eyeballs. It likes to stuff its cheeks with food and other things in a generally ridiculous manner. It doesn’t talk, though, at least not until it’s inflicted with its own curse. Curses around these here parts – they’re a dime a dozen, while totes-adorbs potential plushies are a dime a gross.

Ellian consults a pair of ambiguously gay oracles (Nathan Lane and Titus Burgess, so maybe they’re not so ambiguous) and ends up schlepping her beastly parentals back to the Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness (excellent black metal album title, BTW) to embark on a quest to cure them. And like all fantasy quests, she and Flink and the beasts Solon and Ellsmere must overcome a series of obstacles that prompt character development at the same time they’re visually nifty and/or action-packed. Making the journey more difficult is The General, who trails Ellian, and doesn’t want to listen to anyone and believes the monsters should just be shipped outta here and forgotten, like we Americans do when we sell our garbage to Canada. And it turns out that the Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness is the kind of place full of the most dangerous thing ever that Yoda warned us about: only what you take with you.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Spellbound is better than Wish but definitely sub-Frozen and occasionally Shrekish and Encantoesque, with a visual aesthetic like another Netflix animation, The Sea Beast.

Performance Worth Watching Hearing: I know Zegler can capital-S Sing (note: Bardem and Kidman, not so much), but Nathan effing Lane can capital-S Sing and be funny as hell at the same time.

Memorable Dialogue: Best decontextualized line: “We’ve been out-Flinked!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Spellbound tends to draft on the high-pedigree work of its creators’ filmographies, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – the film has high standards for writing and visual design, and is therefore chock-full of inspired eye candy and reasonably sticky songs. But you know this formula very well by now, and savvy moviegoers’ sixth sense for the rhythms of this type of story will buzz moments before a character is about to belt one out, and you can’t help but step on some of the more obvious jokes. So you take the good with the bad: yawnworthy body-swap subplots and overly plaintive singing are balanced out by the frequently lovely and creatively rendered animation, and a message about family dysfunction that lightly challenges traditional notions of what “family togetherness” means. 

Speaking of messages, less reputable critics will reveal what this movie is essentially “about” even though it’s a third-act spoiler. I will hereby dance around it by saying it’s somewhat progressive without being particularly revelatory. My snarky commentary about problems and solutions above is, upon further review, only partly true; one major problem Ellian and her family faces has a solution and another one really doesn’t, and the movie is heavily engineered to assert that that’s perfectly OK. 

I sometimes struggled with Spellbound’s tendency to make straight text out of subtext, and to hammer us with ballpeen-to-the-skull symbolism: There’s a sequence where Ellian and her monster-parents venture through a Cavern o’ Visual Metaphors where positive thoughts manifest as iridescent blue blobs and negative thoughts are red zappy bolts, and where too many of the latter attract what seems to be a physical manifestation of Eternal Darkness, a perpetually whirling tornado of black circles that can envelop a person in its depressive dervish. (There’s even a scene where one of the characters exclaims, “I thought it was a metaphor!” when first witnessing the literal monsters the king and queen have become.) Everybody watching will absolutely Get It whether they want to or not – but they’re also just as likely to be entertained by this smartly above-average family-friendly endeavor.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Spellbound is more enchantment than curse.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.