People often complain that their lives are repetitious, that they do the same thing day in and day out. Of course, the reality is that there are always changes, however minute or maybe even barely perceptible, in the existence of such self-defined automatons.
The real personas who are forever stuck in a rut, however, are fictitious ones. Sure, there are the lucky ones who appear on long-running TV shows or are movie characters in series that keep being reimagined or at least revisited with enough changes that stagnation doesn't set in.
Yet, even they -- and to a greater extent, those who appear in one-run novels, stories, fable or even fairy tales -- are doomed to forever repeat what previously occurred, all at the whim of the reader or viewer who decides to read or watch their offering for the first or repeated time.
Thus, the question arises about whether they know they're stuck in a repetitive storytelling scheme. Are they blindly following the same routine, unaware of whatever storytelling puppet master is manipulating their and others' strings? Or are they like Bill Murray's character in "Groundhog Day" where he becomes aware of being stuck in such repetition and tries to make a difference only to end up at square one the next time the story starts anew?
That would have been a fun approach to take in "Happily N'Ever After," a computer-animated comedy that follows in the footsteps of the old "Fractured Fairy Tales," "Shrek" and the more recent "Hoodwinked" in doing a revisionist riff on well-known fairy tale stories and their characters.
Unfortunately, the filmmakers -- director Paul J. Bolger and screenwriter Rob Moreland -- have taken a more simplistic and decidedly slapdash approach at messing with our collective childhood favorites. While the film may be touted as coming from one of the producers of "Shrek" (John H. Williams), it has far more in common with the far less satisfactory "Hoodwinked."
The most obvious shared fault is the sub-par computer animation. While I understand filmmakers and production companies don't always have the talent, money and/or computer horsepower to equal the visual splendor of Pixar's or their high end competitors' offerings, one can't help but note and be turned off by the lower-grade visuals.
Unlike low-budget, live-action films that can still look decent without the high-gloss sheen of big budget flicks, these computer animated ones simply look bad, especially when corners have obviously been cut and certain characters, other objects and/or background elements look unfinished.
Had the story been better, it might have been easier to accept such visual shortcomings. Alas, that's not the case, and the plot here makes the same in "Hoodwinked" seem like Tolstoy in comparison. As faulty as that predecessor might have been in terms of delivering the jokes, at least its premise was more interesting and certainly better constructed.
Its degree of cleverness is limited to breaking the "fourth wall," specifically by stopping the film just as it's started (the kind where we see the image slow and then freeze with the frames and sprocket holes visible) and having the narrator (Freddie Prinze Jr. strangely trying to sound like Bruce Willis) fill us in on what's happening. The most telling aspect of that is when the film then starts again, rewinding before that beginning, and then proceeds back to that starting point. That's when the narrator informs of us where we are, and that he hates to tell us, but things only get worse.
Of course, he's referring to the status of the evildoers, but he's certainly dead on for prognosticating how the film's going to proceed from an artistic standpoint. Boiled down to its basics (which aren't that much different from the fully fleshed-out events), Cinderella's evil stepmother gains control of the balance of power over good and evil in fairy tale stories, and tips it toward the latter.
Accordingly, things deviate from the norm, but the filmmakers don't have enough fun and certainly don't use enough imagination in such regards. Instead, we simply have Rick our narrator stepping in to save the day, simply by dealing with various fairy tale villains while trying to rescue Ella from her mean pseudo parent.
Sporting a serious lack of continuity between scenes in terms of tone, pacing and more, the film looks and feels like a haphazard mess. While younger, less discerning kids might enjoy all of the action, bright colors, and goofy characters, the film quickly becomes a chore to sit through for anyone else. The only happy ending "Happily N'Ever After" will have is that if it doesn't spawn an equally bad sequel. The film rates as a 2 out of 10.
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