Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole

I’ve been waiting for this film since first seeing the trailers for it. A beautiful CG film with a traditional old-fashioned epic storyline – revolving around owls! And while it was perhaps not everything that I hoped it would be, it was very enjoyable indeed, and certainly one I’d be happy to see again, even if it’s not the full 3D IMAX experience.

From Animal Logic, who animated Happy Feet, at the very least the beauty of this film must be acknowledged. Some of the settings are incredible, and if the CG models for the owls look impressive, seeing them talking, fighting and especially flying through the rain is breathtaking. Happy Feet was a feast for the eyes, but this film was just far more ambitious, more varied and more striking to look at.

And while the naïve, old-fashioned tone clearly hasn’t captured popular imagination
like tap-dancing penguins did, I found this plot to be more interesting and compelling, mostly because it didn’t have an annoying and preachy final act. Indeed, though there was a degree of formulaic Hollywood preaching (the plot revolves around the struggle against a group of barn owls who have decided they are ethnically superior to smaller species and begun to call themselves ‘the Pure Ones’), the issues raised in the simple good-against-evil story were quite interesting. Hero-worship of warriors is tempered with a grizzly old fighter spitting out the realities of battle, and while the plucky young hero told that he will be useless in a fight and that it takes many years to train as a guardian eventually holds his own against veteran warriors in a rather unlikely manner, it feels more like a relativistic complexity than the weak writing of…well, blatantly contradicting the lesson you had your protagonist learn. After all, a heroic story should end with a big fight.

Do the same film with live-action actors and admittedly it would be nothing special. It’s a very by-the-numbers story and it doesn’t even end properly, leaving things open for sequels. It suffers from Star Wars chronology syndrome, too, setting up the impression of an ages-old mythology and then revealing that all these stories about olden times and great heroes are actually from within living memory. But the fact is that this film is about owls, owls who can use tools and speak and harness mysterious magnetic powers. It doesn’t need to be that strong in story terms, because it is carried by its visuals, its spectacle and the sight of realistic owls interacting like people.

The only thing it needed was more original characters and a better story. Which is why I’m very interested by rumours that Animal Logic are going to produce a Watership Down remake.

That said, if they do adapt more of the Guardians of Ga’Hoole books, I’ll certainly be buying a ticket. I just hope… they don’t put in another Owl City song just for their name. It was alright for the credits, but for a montage? They could have chosen so many better options….