![]() for a ride on a deer’s antlers, there’s an all-too-brief shot of the deer’s hoofs, seemingly miles below, that I could have watched for two or three times as long. When a young Leafman recruit named Nod (Josh Hutcherson) takes tiny M.K. Ranks of Leafmen archers advance on the Boggans with an agility exceeding even Peter Jackson’s elves. Among the best of these is Queen Tara walking across the surface of a pond strewn with tiny floating leaves that magically draw together under her feet, forming a temporary floating carpet, then drift apart after her passing. Of the three, Epic feels most like a satisfying mythos, with its anthropomorphized take on the vegetative processes of growth and decay.Īt its best, Epic produces images of poetic power, even grandeur. The source material, the oddball children’s book The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs by William Joyce (who collaborated on the adaptation), has been reimagined as a sweeping good-vs.-evil saga, borrowing liberally from The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars by way of FernGully: Jedi-like “Leafmen” in elvish armor, mounted on iridescent hummingbirds, as well as orc-like “Boggans” riding crows and bats like Warg-riders, etc.Īlong with Rise of the Guardians (also based on a Joyce story) and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, Epic is at least the third computer-animated family film in recent years with a mythopoeic tale of noble but hidden defenders whose existence is a matter of belief or doubt, not knowledge. Which is not to deny Epic its modest pleasures. After eight feature films, the studio has yet to show a flair for character development, plotting and theme to match their increasingly stunning visuals. It’s Blue Sky’s most ambitious, technically impressive film yet - but except for some snappy gag writing, the script remains squarely, solidly adequate. Visually, Epic towers over these films like Professor Bomba looming over M.K., magically shrunk to insect-like proportions. Such self-awareness eludes Epic, the third feature from Blue Sky Studios' co-founder Chris Wedge, director of Robots and Ice Age. doesn’t give, is that he should have chosen his wife and daughter over his obsession in the first place. “I thought if I could prove it, she’d come back,” Dad explains to M.K. It’s true that his attention is finally focused on his daughter, but the movie never confronts him with the fact that it doesn’t matter that he was right - he has wasted his life. The closest we get is a scene in which Bomba despairingly thinks for a moment that he has wasted his life on a delusion - only to realize a moment later that he was right all along. In a Pixar movie, there would be an acute moment of clarity for the father, Professor Bomba (Jason Sudeikis), whose obsessive quest for the tiny, hidden civilizations he believes are at work in the forest cost him his marriage and relationship with his daughter, Mary Katherine, or M.K. Epic is full of potent images a better written film would have made the emotional connections clearer. It’s a remarkable image of domestic dysfunction, of broken family relationships.
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