People talk about guilty pleasures all
the time, but I've never really understood this concept. If you like
something, even if the majority of people don't or think its silly,
why would you be ashamed of it? Doesn't the fact that you like it
indicate that there is something worth liking, thus making all the
opinions to the contrary immediately suspect? I don't know. All I
know is, I just watched a movie called Epic, a kids' film
intersecting two of my greatest passions, fairy tales and animated
cinema, that as a man in my now late twenties I gather I should feel
bad for liking. I'm not really sure why, so I'm just going to go
ahead and not do that.
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Epic is the story of a teenage girl
coping with the recent loss of her mother who finds herself on an
adventure in the woods when she is shrunk down to the size of a
hidden race of fairies in the middle of a war against an army of
monsters with the fate of the forest at stake. It's basically a
reverse gender Ferngully minus the overt environmentalism and with
the scope and whimsy of something like Rise of the Guardians. If you
followed the link just then, you'll find that I praised Rise of the
Guardians quite a bit upon its release and still do. Frankly, Epic is
not quite as, well, epic, but what it lacks in an immediate visceral
impact upon the child inside me, it makes up for with a consistently
fun and frenetic tone, a pace that never lets up once it gets
started, and a visual style that accomplishes the arduous task of
bringing some much needed badassery to the fae folk.
I sense in this film a struggle between
the competing impulses of modern mainstream animated cinema, between
the better angels that brought us the best of Pixar and Dreamworks
under the ethos that kids are smarter than most people think, and the
temptation to revert back to the shallow Happy Meal friendly pablum
of the 90's. Both the message of the movie and the light hearted
humorous way in which it is presented often seem to pull in the
direction of just a little too jokey and hackneyed, then at the last
second it pulls back. We get comic relief slugs and caterpillars, but
just as they might be getting annoying, they stop emphasizing them.
We get a wise cracking bad guy in the first half, who then morphs
into a grieving father motivated by legitimate pain in the second.
This movie feels like a relic of a
bygone age of terrible animated movies, resurrected in a time where
the standards are much higher, remade with the skill and detail to
meet them. I can easily see this movie being made in the
environmentally conscious “Save The Rainforest” extreme! 90's,
and I can totally imagine it sucking as a result, despite it likely
being done with traditional animation, possibly by Don Bluth in his
post Rockadoodle decline. Thankfully, we get it now, and while I
wouldn't go so far as to call it a classic, I would easily say that
if not for The Croods it would be by default the best animated movie
of 2013 so far, beating Escape From Planet Earth by a mile.
Unless you're even more into this
subject matter than I am, which would be kinda hard, Epic most likely
won't inspire you into any great fits of childlike wonderment. Its
ideas are simple, though not necessarily simplistic, and at the end
of the day the point is to let go and let the fanciful setting wash
over you as you watch tiny dudes with leaf armor shoot rotting bog
monsters in the face with arrows. If you can't get behind that, then
this isn't for you, but I for one appreciated the excursion. What it
does, it does well enough to justify the expense of watching it, and
over a Memorial Day weekend chock full of soul numbing wastes of my
time like the sixth Fast & Furious movie and the third Hangover movie, Epic was at the very
least a welcome respite.
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