The magic oyster is a fascinating creature found deep in the ocean. It is known for its enchanting powers to grant wishes to those who find it. The oyster is quite small in size, about the size of a palm, and is often covered in an iridescent shell. Its vibrant colors make it stand out among other sea creatures. Legend has it that anyone who is lucky enough to stumble upon the magic oyster can have their deepest desires fulfilled. But finding such a rare creature is not an easy task.
Strange Magic
Not every animated movie ever made has been good, but the thing about animated movies is…well, they involve a process that can lead, literally, to a decision to go “back to the drawing board.” Or the animation software, or what have you. The problems with “Strange Magic,” directed by Gary Rydstrom and executive produced by George Lucas (who also came up with the concept and developed the story), have little to do with its computer-animated visuals. Although the fact that a couple of the main male characters’ faces appear to have been patterned after those of Hayden Christensen and Adam Duritz (yeah, the Counting Crows guy) did throw me off a little. What makes the movie a squirmingly awkward sit is, I suppose, an issue of dramaturgy, maybe?
AdvertisementTo wit, “Strange Magic” is essentially a jukebox musical so song-laden as to practically be an operetta, and the songs are so eclectic that they never quite fit into the movie’s flying-insect world, which is divided into dark and light forests. (While reputed to be inspired by Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the movie’s storyline merely lifts the play's love-potion mix-up plot device.) The movie opens with relative confidence, as butterfly princess Marianne (voiced by Evan Rachel Wood) sweetly duets “I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You” with ambitious groom-to-be Roland (Sam Palladio). Once Roland is revealed as a bit of a rat, Marianne voices “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again,” with lyrics adjusted around the line “he’ll never phone ya,” because, you know, they don’t have phones in magical insect elf forests.
Soon enough there’s a lovesick Munchkin-type elf (this is the Adam Duritz-looking one) who sings Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” (also known as “Every Little Thing”) to Marianne’s sister Dawn, and there’s a flying swordfight set to Heart’s “Barracuda” (which is not sung, thankfully), and the whole thing is making me squirm in a way that has me thinking “This could be high-tech computer animation’s answer to ‘The Room.’”
As it happens, this aspect of the move is directly attributable to Lucas, who’d built the scenario (which happens to include, among some incidental bits, a direct reprise of the light-saber-practice-while-blindfolded scene from what I will never stop calling “Star Wars”) around the various lyrics of favorite songs from every era, ranging from “Love Is Strange” to “Crazy In Love.” Around mid-film the Munchkin-type elf enters the dark forest to seek a love potion from the Sugar Plum Fairy (it’s complicated, as they say) and is given a semi-runaround by an albino rat referred to as an “imp.” I was thinking “It’s not every movie about which one can say ‘the best thing in it was the albino rat’” when, almost an hour in, something odd happened: as spunky Marianne found herself somehow drawn to the dark forest’s heretofore appalling Bog King (who introduces himself by singing Elvis’ “Trouble,” oy vey; not really a song that its multi-talented voicer Alan Cumming has the qualities to really sell).
At this point, movie settles into gear, and the scene in which the two characters fly around the newly-illuminated dark forest singing the title song (yes, the ELO number) is spectacularly engaging. It is not quite enough to pull the movie into anything like fully recommendable territory, alas. If you’re a hardcore animation person with not-very-demanding children you might take a chance.
Glenn Kenny
Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here.
Rachel's Reviews
But finding such a rare creature is not an easy task. The oyster resides in the depths of the ocean, hidden among coral reefs and rocky caves. Those who are determined enough to search for it must dive deep into the waters, braving dangerous currents and unpredictable sea creatures.
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Strange Magic Review
Sometimes I feel sorry for George Lucas. Then I remember what he did to Star Wars and I don’t feel so sorry but still what must it be like for one human being to be so high and then so low? I can’t even imagine. Well, he certainly hasn’t let failure get to his head because last week he released an animated film, Strange Magic, emblazoned with “from the mind of George Lucas” right on the poster for all to see. I’m still baffled by that choice. I can’t think of a single person who would see that tagline and think “George Lucas? I want to go to that”.
But I promised you I’d see every animated film in 2015 and I intend do so. And no matter all the bad reviews I always try to go into every movie with an open mind and have been willing to go against popular opinion on more than one occasion (Atlantis: The Lost Emipre and Wreck-It Ralph anyone?).
The only theater I could find showing it (and just opened on Friday I will remind you) is this strange theater about 13 minutes from my house. Everytime I’ve been there it is like a ghosttown and tonight was no exception. Had the whole theater to myself which allowed me to take notes on my phone and not bother anyone.
So here’s the deal on Strange Magic. It is bad but mainly because of the writing, annoying music and obvious story. The animation is not half bad. It is for that reason I would put it above last year’s stinkers Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return which didn’t look finished and the garish and unfunny Nut Job. If it was just a predictable fairy movie I might be able to place it with The Tinker Bell movies in animation quality but those movies are more clear, vibrant, better vocal performances and stories.
Evidently George Lucas made this movie “because nothing is made for girls any more”. That was definitely true in the 70’s George but since Little Mermaid I think you’d have a hard time proving that at least with Disney (Pixar yes but plenty of movies made for girls). I mean Frozen made over 1 billion!
The strangest thing about him making this for girls is a good chunk of the movie is about Sonny the elf finding the fairy Dawn (Meredith Anne Bull) with little scenes of Dawn and Marianne(Evan Rachel Wood) fairies usually thrown in to sing about love or how tough they are.
I think Lucas also thinks it will appeal to girls because there is lots of talk about love (it is Midsummer’s Night Dream in the same way Gnomeo and Juliet was about Romeo and Juliet). And of course you have to throw in a wedding, a Spring Ball and an Elf Festival because girls love parties! (Groan…).
The two faeries are sisters (of course) and one is free spirited and the other is bitter about love. There is also a Sugar Plum Fairy (Kristin Chenoweth) who is taken captive by the evil Bog King (Alan Cumming) who is known simply as Bog by his mother and followers.
All of this could be good in a corny kind of way but the music puts it over the top with each choice being so on the nose it is like playing a game of Name that Tune. We know the moment we here the character is named Marianne we are going to hear “C’mon Marianne” by Frankie Valli. As soon as a character is at the dance we hear “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” by Whitney Houston. It’s like Moulin Rouge but a decade too late and with an even more predictable plot.
The worst was at the end when a character breaks into Wild Thing by The Troggs. Couldn’t they have been a little more creative? It’s like George Lucas downloaded his ipod, threw in a few modern songs like Kill You Makes You Stronger and Say Hey.
Even the songs would be passable if the script was better. We get lines like
“Looking for trouble? Well, you’ve come to the right place” says the Bog King and then we get Trouble by Elvis which has lines “Well, I’m evil so don’t you mess around withe me”. Groan. It’s like these guys learned to write scripts in kindergarten.
Another line “You’re one to talk with your magic recipe. A recipe for failure”.
“See what happens when love is unleashed on the world”
“Even with a love potion I’m too hideous to love”
“Why would you think a beast like you could get a beauty like Marianne” (surprised Disney allowed that one. Gaston should be offended!
“My life flashed before my eyes. I was hot…”
“I’ve learned something. Never judge someone or it by the way he, she or it looks” Thank George for explaining the most obvious moral in the world to us in case we didn’t catch on…
And my favorite “Pull your head out of the clouds. Clouds of boys…”. Oh boy. Now I’m thinking the writers have never met a little girl. Do they think this is how they really talk?
Basically the story is a girl fairy is jilted on her wedding day by a jerk fairy. She turns against love but her sister is still a believer. The elf Sonny is in love with fairy Dawn and wants to get the potion for her from the Sugar Plum Fairy. The jilted beau also wants the potion to force Marianne to love him (the antidote is so groan inducing).
Then they meet various obstacles but get the potion fairly easily which is not guarded well by the Bog King who wants to keep the fairy because the potion didn’t work on the girl he loved. (that darn antidote again!).
They all end up meeting in the forest and battling over the love potion and it is so predictable and full of terrible puns and one liners.
I can’t figure out why they wouldn’t have made Kristin Chenoweth Dawn? The Sugar Plum Fairy isn’t in the movie that much and has only 1 song.
Lucas did get some decent singers in Alan Cumming, Chenoweth and Wood but it is all like a karaoke theme night on romantic songs.
Like I said the animation is tolerable and it isn’t going to harm your kids like something such as The Smurfs with all its obnoxious product placement. This is just a predictable bland movie with a lot of music kids won’t have heard of like People are Strange by the Doors or Mistreated by Deep Purple. What little kid knows those?
As far as content goes there is a scene where two male characters kiss for laughs which has gotten so tired a joke. Get over it! The Bog King might be scary to little children but it is tempered pretty quickly with songs and jokes (and the Bog King’s mother trying to set him up).
So it is not as bad as Nut Job or Legends of Oz but that’s really damning with faint praise. A definite skip. (The things I do for you guys!).
Film Review: ‘Strange Magic’
'From the mind of George Lucas' comes this mirthless and derivative animated tale of two fairy princesses.
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If you’ve ever longed for a movie with all the insistent life lessons of a Disney fairy tale, the tacky visual excesses of digital-era George Lucas, and enough glorified karaoke covers to fill half a season of “Glee,” then you may want to treat yourself to the altogether perplexing animated brew that is “Strange Magic.” Everyone else can just imagine a CG cartoon mash-up of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Arthur and the Invisibles” and “American Idol” populated by extras from the Mos Eisley Cantina, and they’ll pretty much get the idea. An insipid byproduct of the Disney-Lucasfilm merger that looks to attract a fraction (if that) of the audience for this year’s “Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens,” this noisy, unappealing children’s fantasy fails to distinguish itself among January’s many, many reasons to steer clear of the multiplex.
Lucas is credited here as an exec producer and as the writer of the film’s story, which follows the romantic misadventures of two tiny, spirited princesses in the magical Fairy Kingdom: pointy-eared, purple-winged Marianne (voiced by Evan Rachel Wood) and her younger sister, Dawn (Meredith Anne Bull). Life is sweet and idyllic in this bright-colored, flower-strewn paradise, as Marianne celebrates her upcoming marriage to the dashing, Gaston-like Roland (Sam Palladio) with an airborne performance of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” — the first of some 20-plus pop-rock chart toppers, by artists ranging from the Doors to Lady Gaga, crudely repurposed here into a soundtrack that’s as obvious as it was undoubtedly expensive.
When she catches Roland two-timing her with some woodland strumpet, Marianne finds herself singing a different tune (specifically, Burt Bacharach’s “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”), donning gobs of goth-girl eyeshadow and an aggressively punk attitude as she transforms herself into a sword-wielding, independent-minded feminist heroine. (The ditzier Dawn, conceived in line with the usual dumb-blonde stereotypes, remains an irrepressible flirt.) Given that wised-up gender politics have largely become the princess-pic norm (as demonstrated by superior recent Disney releases like “Frozen” and “Maleficent”), Marianne’s bratty makeover feels more like a sop to convention than anything else, which could also be said of just about every aspect of this thoroughly derivative and unengaging fantasy.
In a twist that nods in the direction of “Midsummer” (apparently a key influence on the script by David Berenbaum, Irene Mecchi and first-time feature director Gary Rydstrom), Roland, still bent on winning Marianne’s hand and the crown that comes with it, decides to exploit the good-natured Sunny (Elijah Kelley), a diminutive, ebony-skinned elf who has unrequited feelings for Dawn. Injecting a self-conscious note of ethnic diversity into this cartoon universe, Sunny also happens to be the movie’s most likable character, not least when Kelley’s crooning his way through a cover of Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds.”
Roland’s plot involves sending Sunny into the dangerous Dark Forest to secure a powerful love potion from the Sugar Plum Fairy (Kristin Chenoweth, her helium-happy tones recognizable anywhere), who was imprisoned there ages ago by the wicked Bog King (Alan Cumming). A foul-tempered frowner who’s determined to stamp out love wherever he finds it, this malevolent human-grasshopper hybrid is no one’s idea of a romantic lead — which gives the movie its one remotely clever, “Beauty and the Beast”-esque twist, as the Bog King learns that, with a major self-esteem boost and a sprinkling of pixie dust, even the meanest, ugliest dude can become a deserving object of affection.
A worthy and unobjectionable lesson, to be sure. But at the risk of contradicting the notion that beauty is only skin-deep, it must be said that “Strange Magic” is a weirdly unattractive and frequently off-putting piece of animation, filled with characters whose faces, even the vaguely human ones, provide no point of emotional entry. Although rendered with predictable polish by the digital artists at Lucasfilm Animation Singapore and Industrial Light & Magic, the picture seems to unfold not in a coherently realized fantasy world, but rather at some sort of grotesque interspecies convention where Lucas and his collaborators have taken every conceivable character type that came to mind — goblins, imps, talking mushrooms, etc. — and plopped them down in front of the same meticulously detailed forest backdrop.
By and large, however, it’s not the look of the thing that grates so much as the thing itself. “Strange Magic” is the sort of picture often charitably dismissed as harmless fun for kids, never mind that it stems from an all-too-familiar corporate sensibility that insists on treating its target audience like pint-sized dummies, to be ribbed and lectured into submission rather than honestly engaged or entertained. Devoid of charm, mirth or inspiration, the movie is quick to distract you with the nearest weapon at hand — a frenetic action scene, an unfunny one-liner or, worse yet, another ear-clogging rendition of a hit single, in what the press notes have characterized as a deliberate tip of the hat to “American Graffiti.” That’s a stretch: The Lucas who made that 1973 classic might well have included the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch),” but he’d have drawn the line at a fourth reprise.
Once a person finds the magic oyster, they must gently open its shell, being careful not to harm the precious creature inside. The inside of the shell is said to emit a soft, glowing light, captivating anyone who glances upon it. It is at this moment that the magic oyster grants its power. The person who found it can make a wish, and if their intentions are pure, the oyster will grant it. However, the magic oyster is not to be taken lightly. It is said to have a mind of its own and can choose not to grant a wish if it deems it unworthy or harmful. It is believed that the oyster can sense a person's true intentions and will only fulfill a wish if it brings about positive change or happiness. Throughout history, tales of the magic oyster have captured the imagination of people from all walks of life. Many brave explorers, desperate souls, and dreamers have embarked on perilous journeys in search of this mystical creature in the hopes of having their wishes granted. The power of the magic oyster has even become the subject of books, movies, and folklore, further fueling the desire to find it. In conclusion, the magic oyster is a legendary creature known for its ability to grant wishes. Although finding this elusive creature is no easy feat, those who do have the chance to make their desires come true. The magic oyster holds a special place in the hearts and minds of those who believe in its powers, forever etching its name in the folklore of the sea..
Reviews for "the magoc oysrer"
1. Sarah - 2 stars - I was really disappointed with "The Magic Oyster". The concept of a magical oyster that grants wishes sounded intriguing, but the execution fell flat. The pacing was slow, and the characters lacked depth. The plot meandered without a clear direction, and I found myself losing interest halfway through. Overall, it felt like a missed opportunity for a truly engaging and immersive story.
2. John - 1 star - I couldn't wait to finish reading "The Magic Oyster" because it was simply not my cup of tea. The writing style felt disjointed and confusing, making it difficult to follow the story. The main characters were clichéd and lacked any real development, and I found it hard to connect with them on any level. The plot was predictable and lacked any real surprises. Overall, I found the book to be a major letdown and would not recommend it to others.
3. Emily - 2 stars - "The Magic Oyster" had an interesting premise, but it failed to live up to my expectations. The pacing of the story was incredibly slow, and I struggled to stay engaged from start to finish. The writing style was lackluster and lacked the necessary depth to bring the magical elements to life. The characters were one-dimensional and lacked any significant growth or complexity. Overall, I found the book to be a disappointment and would not recommend it to anyone looking for a captivating read.
4. Michael - 1 star - I regret picking up "The Magic Oyster". The story was poorly executed and felt incredibly disjointed. The plot lacked coherence, and the characters were flat-out uninteresting. The dialogue was stilted and lacked any real emotion. I found myself constantly flipping ahead to see if things would improve, but unfortunately, they did not. This book was a complete waste of time, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.