The Magician’s Elephant (2023)
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The Magician’s Elephant Movie Review
The Magician’s Elephant is a 2023 animated fantasy adventure film directed by Wendy Rogers and starring Noah Jupe. It’s one of Netflix’s weakest animated efforts so far.
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“Things are only impossible ’til they’re not“
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The orphan boy Peter sets out to find his missing sister. He asks a fortune teller if she is still alive. She advises him to find a magician with an elephant. Peter must then complete three difficult tasks. Based on the novel of the same name by Kate DiCamillo, this is yet another movie that begs the question whether her novels are not suited for adaptations or are not great to begin with. ‘Flora and Ulysses’ was pretty much in the same park as this film in that regard.
This movie is extremely old-fashioned, which I usually favor in my stories, but this time around they went overboard with it. The excessive sentimentality was ridiculous and frustrating to bear. This is your standard believe in yourself and you can do anything narrative that countless other animated flicks concern themselves with. It’s unoriginal and lazy.
The characters are also utterly uninteresting with the exception of the titular elephant as he received a couple of very endearing and magical sequences. The king and the neighbor characters are the only ones who got any development while the protagonist is your standard run-of-the-mill hero that was bland and very dull.
The Magician’s Elephant isn’t artistically inclined by any stretch of the imagination, but it does have solid animation overall. The backgrounds are very good, though the character designs are imaginative and typical for CGI animation. The movie is still quite polished, so ultimately the solid score and visuals spoke for themselves and they produced some solid cinematic results.
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But the movie was so thin in its plot and so forgettable that it made me wonder why they chose to adapt this story in the first place. Netflix is currently on a roll with their animated fare, but they just need to pick projects that are worthy of our time and not those to babysit children.
The Magician’s Elephant has solid animation, score and voice acting. It has a couple of endearing and/or magical sequences too. The problem here is that the plot is so bland that I don’t know why they even chose to adapt this source material. Its message is also typical of family fare and the characters are mostly uninteresting. It’s one of the weakest Netflix animated efforts to date.
My Rating – 3
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