Rise of the Guardians (2012)

Dreamworks animation has long existed in the mighty shadow of Pixar, but as of late the studios might at a creative crossroads. After the excellent Kung Fu Panda films and How to Train Your Dragon, suddenly Dreamworks animated movies matured beyond feverish, pop-culture explosions and into character-driven, colorful, and genuinely heartfelt family films. I don't think we'll be getting something as dismal as Shark Tale again with the current path the studio is blazing. Rise of the Guardians looks like the pilot for a new lucrative Dreamworks family franchise. It's easy to see the appeal for a superhero assembly of fantasy figures, though is every region going to have working knowledge of the Tooth Fairy? The movie just looked too silly to function for me, but I was optimistic after raves from a few trusted friends. Perhaps my own childlike sense of wonder is permanently replaced with a heart of stone, but I found Rise of the Guardians to be a somewhat entertaining but mostly stilted, intellectual and emotional, journey.

The guardians are an ancient group of holiday-themed characters entrusted with keeping the sense of wonder alive in children. There's Santa Claus, a.k.a. North (voiced by Alec Baldwin), and his army of yetti workers, the tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher), and her own collection agency of tooth-gathering fairies, the Sandman, in charge of the sweet dreams of children, and the Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman), an Australian jack rabbit with a bit of a chip on his bunny shoulder. The world is threatened by Pitch (Jude Law), a bogeyman who desperately desires children to fear him again, because belief is what powers the Guardians. To stop Pitch and his array of nightmare creatures, the Guardians must add another member to their outlet, Jack Frost (Chris Pine). Except Jack has no interest in joining this fuddy-duddy group and would rather do his own thing, which usually involves wrecking havoc. Jack's desperate to find out his past and figure out why he was chosen for his immortal role and what it will take to make kids believe in him.

Ultimately, I just couldn't really get into this movie. It's set up like an Avengers team of children's fantasy figures, but I felt like the movie failed to make me emotionally connect with their plights. The Jack Frost protagonist was another tired variation on the selfish, plays-by-his-own-rules cowboy character that needs to learn a dash of personal responsibility and putting others first. But his goal is essentially to be... seen. He's worried kids will never see him because they won't ever believe in him. That's a fairly abstract existential crisis for your main character to have, and one that I found too odd to care about. The entire core of the movie revolves around children's sense of belief, and unless you're twisting this into some general statement about the purpose of faith (the Man in the Moon = God?), then I find it all to be silly considering we're talking about the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny. I mean, the main kid has to be eight or nine years old and still fervently believes in these mythical creatures, to the point that he is literally the only person on the planet who believes at one dour point (sheesh, talk about how easily disillusioned kids can get these days). We're celebrating a kid going into adolescence believing in these things. That just smacks me as a little weird if you stop and think about the film's implications. This kid is going to grow up socially warped. Then again his beliefs are proven right, so maybe it's just the rest of us cynical bastards out there who need to adapt. I guess I'm going to go accept my fate and be a crotchety old man now.

The plot feels too airy for my liking, too frenetic to get to the next set piece or chase sequence. It doesn't feel like it ever takes the time to settle down and develop its characters or story. As a result, we're left with a fairly middling backstory for Jack Frost that should be easy to figure out, but we're also stuck in a world that doesn't feel like the rules have been sufficiently explained. Case in point: the Tooth Fairy keeps all those baby teeth in one huge archive because, you see, the teeth hold memories. I guess. But then Jack's after his own teeth to retrieve his forgotten past (yes folks, we have an amnesiac protagonist). I'm okay with this so far though it's a tad forced, but when Jack does get those teeth, he's presented with memories at the age of 18. I know people suffered through poor dental hygiene hundreds of years ago, but you cannot expect me to believe that Jack is still losing baby teeth. This is just one example where the movie didn't come across as fully formed. The Guardians all seem to possess different super powers involving space-time travel, but then they don't seem to do anything with these abilities that matters by the final battle. Pitch has the ability to craft nightmare creatures and all he does is end up making wispy evil-looking horses. That seems like a waste. There are not enough payoffs here with all the imaginative possibilities.

Rise of the Guardians has some enjoyable moments but it practically relies upon you to supply all the work as far as character empathy. We're familiar with these magical figures, and so the movie gets by because we put in the emotional connection to Santa and the Easter Bunny, but the characters just don't register on the page, at least with this story. I don't know if David Lindsay-Abaire (Rabbithole, Inkheart) was the best candidate for the job, but he doesn't give me enough reasons to engage with the movie. The characters are lackluster, their conflicts feel too abstract, the conclusion feels superfluous, and the world feels poorly defined, developed, and unsatisfying.

I like Chris Pine (Unstoppable) as an actor, but the man brings absolutely nothing to the table when it comes to voice acting. Baldwin (Rock of Ages) and Jackman's (Real Steel) performances are defined by their respective accents. I feel like Hollywood needs some sort of seminal moment to go back to genuine voice artists rather than hiring whatever celebrity. Yes we all enjoyed Robin Williams as the Genie in Aladdin, but are you going to tell me that Pine's vocal work was so exceptional he had to be cast? It's like having celebrities provide the voices for the helium-sounding Chipmunks. The best voice actor in the film is clearly Law (Sherlock Holmes) who does such a good job I felt more sympathy for him than I did Jack Frost. I know it's commonplace in movies for the hero and the villain to have some duality, but I wasn't probably supposed to jump ship as far as loyalty. Maybe I just found the actual kids in the movie to be annoying so I didn't mind a magical creature preying upon their collective childhood fear. It reminded me of the space cloud villain from 2011's Green Lantern flop, where I wondered if this fear-sucking cloud sought out the delicacy of children's fears first.

To top it all off, I found myself left rather cold by the visual aesthetics of the movie. It has this overly androgynous, big-eyed anime feel, and I kept getting the sense that the whole movie looked like an extended video game cut scene. This movie even had Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy) and the brilliant cinematographer Roger Deakens (Skyfall) as producers or visual consultants, so I'm even more baffled at how visually poor I found the movie. The colors are so muddy and the visuals felt so limited for me, especially considering the imaginative parameters of the characters and their respective worlds. I thought Pitch seemed oddly similar in visual approach to Hades in Disney's underrated Hercules. The action sequences had some nice visual panache to them as far as choreography, but I couldn't stop thinking how cruddy and dreary everything looked.

Rise of the Guardians is based upon a series of yet-to-be published books by famed author William Joyce, who won an Oscar himself the previous year for the animated short, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. I feel like that short was a better representation of magic and imagination than this film. The humor, the life lessons, the character development, it all felt so stilted to me. I thought the conflicts were too abstract and hard to care about (oh no, people have stopped believing in the Tooth Fairy!) and the world and rules felt too amorphous, poorly explained and creatively handicapped. If you're going for a fantasy setting with larger-than-life figures, each with certain gifts and powers, hen I want the promise of that setup to be fulfilled. Rise of the Guardians isn't a bad movie by any means but it left me cold and indifferent. It's meant to strike at my childish sense of wonder, but I felt too often like a cynical adult, picking apart the frailties of its storytelling and muddy visual designs. It felt like it was missing the best magic of all: gifted storytelling. You'll probably have more fun than I did, but that's just because I probably have no soul.

Nate's Grade: B-