The filmmakers on a quest to plumb the outer corners of young-adult fantasy for a Harry Potter-style franchise stumble with the initial outing in Kathryn Lasky’s Owls of Ga’Hoole series. The CGI animation provides Legend of the Guardians with a visually lush story about young owls who are kidnapped and take opposing sides in a scheme hatched by a megalomaniacal warlord owl to conquer primordial Australia. The setup makes the movie sound cheesier than it is. In fact, the dignified, quasi-Arthurian script never talks down to its young audience. There are no hip-hop wombats voiced by Wanda Sykes here, only one ill-placed pop song on the soundtrack. But verbose Tolkien-meets-Lucasfilm dialogue weighs heavily on the semi-predictable, sequel-pregnant plot. Even the birds occasionally tell each other to stop talking so much. But the digital design is excellent and worth seeing on the big screen. –Charles Cassady Jr.
This article appears in Sep 22-28, 2010.