Review: LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA’HOOLE

Owls wearing gladiator helmets while battling with swords and fire seems like a strange concept for an animated family film but Zach Snyder mostly pulls it off in the emotionally heavy but visually stunning LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA’HOOLE, adapted from the first three tales in Kathryn Lasky’s 15-book children’s series. The posters and trailers are selling the film as a feel-good movie for the kiddie set. It’s not. The youngest audiences will be charmed by the opening scenes of the owl brothers Soren and Kluud arguing in their treetop home. Romantic Soren loves to tell intricate stories of the mythical owls known as the Guardians of Ga’Hoole to his younger siblings. This opening is cute but the movie quickly dives into the darkness as Soren and Kludd are soon attacked by an angry boar then captured by an army of evil owls called the Pure Ones who whisk them off to the prisonlike St. Aegolius Academy for Orphaned Owls run by the villainous Nyra and Metal Beak. Soren escapes, teams up with a scruffy band of sidekicks, then seeks out the fabled Guardians of Ga’Hoole, to help stop Nyra and Metal Beak’s evil plot to exterminate their owl friends.

LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA’HOOLE is a film tweens will eat up but may just terrify toddlers thanks to so much relentless brutality. It’s loaded with dramatic betrayals, violent battles, murders (hooticide?), stabbings, and characters dramatically falling into seas of fire. I guess the director of DAWN OF THE DEAD and 300 couldn’t help himself but it all seems more than a bit inappropriate for a film marketed to smaller children who may spend much of the film cowering in terror. When you’re not comforting your trembling toddler you’re likely to register that LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA’HOOLE is one of the most visually ravishing CGI films yet. Each feather and whisker has been rendered with the kind of incredible detail you’ve come to expect in these modern top-line animated films but the overall effect, especially in the many aerial fight sequences, is particularly breathtaking here and Snyder does a great job, just like George Miller did with HAPPY FEET, of delineating personalities from a species that all look more or less the same. Snyder is one of the most exciting, unpredictable filmmakers around and here he indulges his signature fondness for weapons, melodrama, and slow-motion battle sequences. LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA’HOOLE is a very good film, just far more intense than I was expecting so it’s recommended as long as you know what you and your children are in for.

3 1/2 of 5 Stars