Good guys and bad guys fight a tiny war in animated film epic
Epic sends environmental message
According to scientific estimates, there are more than two million living creatures inhabiting every square metre of temperate rainforest, and every time you take a single step, you’re affecting the survival of 16,000 invertebrates.
Most of the life that surrounds us is invisible. Yet, we depend on these microscopic processes and tiny life forms in order to exist: From the bugs that boldly digest our daily detritus to the worms that make the soil breathe, every single creature has a specific role and purpose in maintaining the delicate balance of planetary life. Our relationship to these life-sustaining organisms should be one of reverence and respect, but without a human voice — or for that matter cute, wide eyes and adorable expressions — we’re oblivious to their plight. We’re just too big. And they are far too small.
This large-small divide is the pit of children’s lit, and in Chris Wedge’s new movie Epic, the Ice Age director finds a way of animating all the slugs and worms and wee beasts that makes them accessible to the sugar-slurping masses.
Not only does he turn them into cartoons, he creates an alternate reality where these talking, walking, feeling invertebrates are part of a larger community — complete with teensy weensy humanoids called Leafmen.
The Leafmen are the defenders of the forest and they are dressed for the part, wearing suits of leafy armour and carrying swords. They ride hummingbirds and gallantly protect the forest from dreaded rot — the symptom of Boggan infestation.
The Boggans, conveniently, are the ugly enemies of the Leafmen — and they, too, are dressed for the part, sporting helmets crafted from bat skeletons and wearing cloaks made from rodent roadkill.
The war between the Leafmen and the Boggans has been raging since the beginning of time, but in the movie’s first breath, the Boggans appear to have the upper hand: They’ve kidnapped the heir to the forest throne, a tiny pod carrying the next princess of the forest.
If the pod blooms in darkness, it will give birth to a dark lord and heir to the Boggan kingdom. If it blooms in light, the forest will have a new protector and be able to regenerate itself, even after bouts of rot.
Wedge doesn’t need to get into the biological processes at work on a microscopic level because in this version of the biosphere, it all comes down to classic human motivation as the Boggan-versus-Leafmen conflict continues.
After all, it’s easier to relate to a tiny war between good guys and bad guys than a lethal pH imbalance, which is why these characters borrowed from William Joyce’s children’s books are so busy: They have to play out myriad invisible functions of the natural world. For a young audience weaned on action movies and tween romance, it will all feel very familiar as we watch a young human woman named Mary Katherine (Amanda Seyfried) magically shrink to the size of an insect, and soon fall for a cute Leafman looking to prove his burgeoning manhood to alpha Leaf dude Ronin (Colin Farrell).
This latter-day Alice in Wonderland is a modern gal, however.
Her parents are divorced and her mum recently passed away, leaving Mary Katherine to hang out with her oddball dad in the woods. Her dad never paid much attention to her because he’s been focused on the minutia, and trying to prove the existence of these little humanoids to the scientific world.
Big, small, good, bad: It’s all here in a completely digestible package and thanks to Wedge’s smaller touches in the script that keep these wee heroes and villains from being flattened by the epic scale of the drama.
After all, all life as we know it is at risk in this movie and it’s only the oddball professor who understands how dire the situation really is — and nobody pays any attention to that bug-eyed alarmist.
Indeed, Wedge captures all the giant forces shaping the world and brings them down to size — with Christoph Waltz playing the ultimate villain, a Boggan looking to secure the future of his oily progeny.
Because the fairy-tale template is so palpable, we kind of know how the story is going to end before it actually does, but that doesn’t mean the drama doesn’t serve up some straightforward entertainment in the meantime.
Thanks to some sweet vocal contributions from Seyfried and Farrell, as well as Chris O’Dowd, who alongside Pitbull brings magic to his slimy-but-noble character, the movie finds great comic touches that will keep the grown-ups amused and the kids rapt.
Another wonderful addition is the family dog: A threelegged pug with cataracts.
Come on: With this much fur-wrapped pathos, the whole kid-movie equation isn’t just complete, it hits an epic scale by making us see the largesse of the very small.