An interesting thing happened as I was watching Epic, the newest animated release from Blue Sky Studios (the house behind the Ice Age franchise): I kept knowing exactly what was going to happen long before it did! Sadly, this is less a testament to any newfound psychic powers I’ve developed than an indication of how much this film is a patchwork of themes, characters, and plots recycled from other, better movies. Off the top of my head, I spotted elements borrowed from Beauty and the Beast, FernGully: The Last Rainforest, Alice in Wonderland, and A Bug’s Life—though surely there must be others that I missed.
The convoluted plot is a lot to handle, so please try to keep up: Soon after the death of her mother, teenager Mary Katherine (or “M.K.” as she repeatedly tells us she prefers to be called), voiced by Amanda Seyfried, goes to live with her estranged father, who lives in a cottage at the edge of the forest. M.K.’s father is an eccentric scientist named Maurice Prof. Bomba (Jason Sudeikis), who has devoted his career to exploring the forest, searching for proof of a community of tiny forest-dwellers he is certain live amongst the trees. Alas, no one believes him, which explains why father and daughter are estranged.
Spoiler alert! They’re real. And one day M.K. finds herself shrunk down to insect size when Queen Tara (Beyoncé Knowles, attempting earth goddess mode) is struck and killed by an arrow during a battle between the Leafmen (the good guys) and the Boggans (the bad guys), whose arrows can kill any living thing. Queen Tara transfers her essence into a leafy pod, tasking M.K. to deliver it to a particular spot where it can bloom in the moonlight. Should M.K. fail, the whole forest will perish. And so off she goes in the company of grouchy head Leafman Ronin (Colin Farrell) and the good-looking younger Nod (the good-looking younger Josh Hutcherson), who of course will serve as M.K.’s love interest, despite the fact that this adventure lasts mere hours. Also part of this Fellowship of the Leafy Pod are a laidback slug named Mub (Aziz Ansari, still playing Tom Haverford) and a tightly wound snail named Grub (Chris O’Dowd), both of whom can talk with humans, provided that the humans have been shrunk. Along the way, this company must constantly evade capture by the Boggans, led by the dastardly Mandrake (Christoph Waltz), whose goal is the destruction of the forest.
Based on William Joyce’s children’s book The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs, Epic is pretty to look at, with lovely, colourful animation, but it lacks any kind of meaningful thematic depth. Sure, director Chris Wedge (Ice Age, Robots) makes some half-hearted attempts at imbuing his film with a message of environmentalism… but this message is underdeveloped at best and difficult to relate to—for, unlike FernGully, which overtly taught children about protecting the environment, Epic depicts a forest whose main threat is not human-led deforestation but rather a fantastical race of tiny, evil creatures. What’s the lesson there?
Wedge paces his film well, hitting all the beats you’d expect him to, with the rather jarring exception of one out-of-place sequence in which the Fellowship, en route to delivering the Leafy Pod, makes a pit stop in the tree-trunk home of the centipede-like Nim Galuu (Steven Tyler, at his most cray cray), who is simultaneously a spiritual leader, a flamboyant showman, and a keeper of magical scrolls. Despite the strict mandate to deliver the pod before the moon reaches its highest point, there remains plenty of time for Nim Galuu to lead the entire cast in a rousing musical number. Now, I realize that Amanda Seyfried has a lead role in this film, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that Epic is a musical. Well, it most certainly is not, and consequently Nim Galuu’s song feels like it belongs in a different movie altogether. It serves absolutely no purpose, aside perhaps from being the result of filmmakers desperately trying not to waste Steven Tyler while they had him in the studio.
Epic is by no means the worst animated film you could take the family to see, but—for a film that has so much story to work with—it squanders its great potential with lazy characterization and been-there storytelling. It’s a charming film that offers no shortage of visual pleasures, but it’s ultimately an insubstantial one, and you’ll be hard-pressed to recall many of its details upon your return home from the theatre.
