Review: EPIC

EPIC  (FAMILY/ANIMATED/ADVENTURE)
Two and a Half Stars out of Four
Directed by Chris Wedge
Featuring the voices of:  Amanda Seyfried, Colin Farrell,  Josh Hutcherson, Christoph Waltz, Steven Tyler, Aziz Ansari
PG for mild action, some scary images and brief rude language. 
Verdict:  Blue Sky Animation's newest feature is less like AVATAR (the vibe given off by much of the advertising) and more reminiscent of the animated features of the 1990s, although it doesn't rank alongside those you'd remember.  Regardless, it's entertainment value is strong for its target demographic of families with children and exceeds previous Blue Sky features, which were mediocre at best, with greater ambitions and a more serious tone.

Blue Sky Studios is best known for their lucrative ICE AGE franchise, which subjected audiences to the mind-numbingly dumb horror of ICE AGE 4: CONTINENTAL DRIFT last year.  Although family audiences will still shell out the dollars for whatever rare family film comes along, Blue Sky's films have mostly been on the mediocre end of the spectrum.  Even while their feature debut, ICE AGE, is usually well thought of, it's an unremarkable note-for-note transfer of SHREK into a prehistoric context, which it obviously can't be, given the length of production on computer animated features and that SHREK was released a mere year before, but the comparisons to a much superior movie don't help.  Outside of ICE AGE, which only went downhill with sequels (although DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS was a slight improvement), Blue Sky also made ROBOTS, which was weird and unremarkable if decent; HORTON HEARS A WHO, which, while better than live-action Seuss adaptations, was surprisingly bland and formulaic; and RIO, a cheesy musical that harkened back to some of Don Bluth's lesser works but got by on bright colors and thumping energy.
Now comes EPIC, a film which seems intent on broadening the studio's horizons, while never moving them as far as they may have hoped.
I feel like I've seen this movie before in some sense, and although the instant the first previews were released, it was accused of ripping off AVATAR, that's not at all what it felt like.  It felt very much like I was watching animated film from the 1990s, but not like the pearls that Disney was churning out during the "Disney Renaissance"; more like the animated films that Disney's competitors were churning out in an attempt to get a piece of what was clearly a strong market for animation.  Those films were generally alright fare, but mainly an unsatisfactory substitute in place of something better and then easily forgotten.  Like those films, EPIC is energetically animated, while oddly bland and ticking off boxes in a formula of cliches like clockwork.
The story involves young Mary Katherine, or M.K. (voice of Amanda Seyfried), whose mother has recently passed so she is now going to live with her estranged father, a scientist whose obsessive and eccentric work has kept him from committing to relationships.  He believes the forest, in the middle of which he lives, is inhabited by a civilization of microscopic people, and when M.K. is out in the woods, she's magically shrunk down to the size of these tiny "Leafmen" and pulled into the midst of a war between the good and noble Leafmen who bring life to the forest, and the gruesome "Boggans", led by Mandrake (voice of Christoph Waltz), who bring rot.
Clearly, director/co-writer Chris Wedge (directing his first since ROBOTS eight years ago) is much more interested in the themes and visuals of his story, and the visuals are generally on the strong side, although a lot of the forest character designs look like minimally-modified FANTASIA and ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1951) characters, and some elements seem padded, as if trying to draw the film out to a decent feature length or to provide more characters for merchandising potential (such as a gambling frog voiced by rapper Pitbull).

What joker approved this as a publicity still?

Not one of the characters approaches originality, from the Colin Farrell-voiced stoic general who doesn't smile, to the reckless young rogue voiced by Josh Hutcherson, as well as a textbook comic relief duo between Aziz Ansari and Jason Sudeikis as a slug and a snail, respectively.  Overall, the characters are the weakest aspect of the film as they are not merely unoriginal, but the filmmakers seem to take a minimum of interest in them, leaving the most of the characters bland and uninteresting.  While this would easily be the death knell for a film aimed at an older audience, it's only a major inconvenience at worst in the realm of family entertainment.  That's not to say that family films have an actually lower standard (and studios like Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks have possibly resulted in a higher standard, even), but that it's target demographic of families will be satisfied with great entertainment value for kids and tolerable (or even mildly pleasurable) for their escorts, even if most teens and adults would be uninterested otherwise.  There's plenty of eye-grabbing colors, imaginative visuals and goofy humor that children will be entertained by.
It's not epic, it's not original and it's unmemorable, but it serves the interests of its target audience and is still a lot better than much of the crap that families often must settle for.