Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Saturday, May 18
The Indiana Daily Student

Fairy tale worth forgetting

If you have seen either "Shrek" movie, you can skip "Happily N'Ever After." There we go, a full movie review in 13 words.\nThe movie isn't bad, but it isn't really that good either. There is nothing new in the movie that we haven't seen before, heard before or possibly thought before. If I want to watch a movie about fairy tale characters gone awry, I want to be falling out of my chair at the silliness and the impossibilities (because I truly believe that talking pigs and houses made of gingerbread are possibilities, if not necessities).\nThe plot involves Cinder-Ella's evil stepmother taking over control of the Scales of Good and Evil in Fairy Tale Land while the Wizard, the underused George Carlin, is away hitting the links. The bad fairy tale characters join together to capture Cinder-Ella and the kitchen boy before they can screw everything up and return all of the story endings back to happy ones. And you can guess how it ends.\nThere are some humorous moments in the movie, but they seemed to be lost on the children in the theater and the adults merely chuckled. No outright guffaws or chortles. I think my favorite joke was when Cinder-Ella's fairy godmother mistakenly called her Mozzar-Ella and Salmon-Ella. Yeah, that might have been the funniest part. So like I said, you can skip this one.\nFrom a photographer's point of view, there were some interesting animation techniques involved; rather than having everything in focus, there was an effort to purposely limit the depth of field (some stuff was blurry while other stuff was in focus).\nOnce I left the theater, I honestly couldn't recall much of the movie, couldn't remember the funny lines other than Mozzar-Ella and couldn't even recall what it was that seemed so appealing going in. The only impression the movie made was that it was not the worst movie I have ever seen, but this is one of the few animated movies I will not be buying on DVD.

Get stories like this in your inbox
Subscribe