To commemorate its 100th anniversary last year, Disney decided to showcase just how far its animated output had fallen with the release of Wish, a desperate, and commercially disastrous, remix of its princess movies. Developed in the shadow of the subgenre-restarting phenomenon that was Frozen, it was a soulless regurgitation that showed how a certain magic had become so hard to conjure in a kingdom that used to be so full of it. There's the overwhelming feeling of deja vu with the release of Spellbound – another princess musical about magic led by the voice of an actor from Spielberg's West Side Story with songs written by a once-esteemed award winner out on the exact same day – and while expectations are lower with a Netflix animation, the takeaway remains the same.
They just don't make 'em like they used to. In the case of Spellbound, that's distractingly clear from the outset. The film, announced back in 2017 with Paramount before changing titles twice, moving from multiple release dates and shifting to Apple and then Netflix, looks every bit the sold-down-the-pub knock-off, plagued with animation far cheaper than we're used to outside of low-rent kids TV.
It's not quite Cocomelon but it exists in an entirely other universe far, far away from the many Disney films it's trying to file itself next...
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/benjamin-lee-film.