The compositions are attractive but not striking, the action sequences engaging but rarely thrilling. There's nothing special about Queen Tara, who's voiced by singer-actress Beyonce Knowles, or about Knowles' post-credits song, which will get an Oscar nomination anyway because the original song pickings are always slim. There's nothing special about him, or Mary Katherine, or Ronin, the older warrior voiced by Colin Farrell, or Mandrake, the funny-vicious bad guy voiced by Christoph Waltz, or Mug and Grub, the sidekick slugs voiced by Aziz Ansari and Chris O'Dowd. Josh Hutcherson of " The Hunger Games" provides the voice of the young warrior, Nod, who's physically gifted but immature like Seyfried's Mary Katherine, he speaks with the circa-2013 colloquialisms and inflections of pretty much any teenager you'd run into at any mall anywhere in America. The sidekicks are two snails that worship the Leafmen and desperately want to be like them, but can't be, because they're snails. The bad guys are the Boggans, who look like storybook drawings of goblins or trolls. The good guys are the Leafmen, tiny forest sprites that look like humans. There are comic sidekicks, and a beautiful forest queen who utters platitudes about the cycles of life and then dies. There's a tough older warrior who mentors the younger warrior. There's a young warrior with whom the heroine forms a flirtatious friendship. There's a mythology that will be fulfilled when good guys take a fragile pod on a journey toward a prophesied end. There are beleaguered good guys that she joins in a war against bad guys that represent chaos and decay their leader is a funny despot with a European accent. There's a hidden world akin to Alice's Wonderland that the inquisitive heroine explores. There's a protagonist grieving over her mother's recent death, and a brilliant but scatterbrained father who loves his child but isn't the strong parental figure she desperately needs.
The latest from Blue Sky Studio (" Ice Age," "Rio") is different from whatever Pixar, Disney or any other big animation outfit happens to be offering this year, but not so different that you should kick yourself for skipping it. But they offer hints of what "Epic" could have been, were it not such a slave to clichés of modern American cartoon-making. They're afterthoughts, designed to keep older children amused while parents help little ones don their shoes and backpacks before tromping our for pizza. What I've just described are the movie's end credits. Before you get excited about "Epic," I should warn you that this sequence isn't representative of the film - not at all.
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