Strange Magic (2015)

George Lucas spent fifteen years assembling this thing, a jukebox fairy tale he pitched to his own daughters and to the world as Star Wars for girls. The resulting object, released in the dead of January 2015, was received as one of the more expensive mistakes in recent animation, grossing $13.6 million against a budget that could have funded several small principalities. Critics were not kind. The film survives as a curiosity, which is the kindest thing we can say about it.

The female-forward engineering is real and deliberate. Marianne, a warrior fairy princess, watches her fiancé kiss another fairy on her wedding day, swears off love, defies her father, and spends the final act punching Roland into a crevice. Lucas wanted a story for twelve-year-old girls and built the machinery to match. The voice cast is reasonably integrated, with Elijah Kelley voicing the elf Sunny as a genuine romantic lead, though the film never asks us to notice and never comments on it. That is ensemble casting, not a statement, and the distinction matters for the ledger. On matters of sexuality, race, class, and climate, the film is a void. Sunny's story carries no racial consciousness. Nobody organizes a union in the Dark Forest.

The thematic engine is inner beauty. Lucas described the moral as falling in love with a mind instead of a face, and the Beast here pointedly does not transform. Marianne chooses the scaly Bog King over the handsome one. It is a look-past-appearances gesture, framed as inner beauty rather than anything more explicit about bodies. The sermonizing is minimal, since the film prefers to make its points through song, which is at least a more tolerable delivery mechanism than a monologue. A fairy musical from 2015 has no obligation to every cause, and it meets almost none of them. We file it accordingly, without malice, and move on to the next specimen.