SPELLBOUND – Skydance Animation/Netflix © 2024
Every kid has trouble getting along with their parents sometimes, but this is ridiculous. In the new animated adventure Spellbound, Ellian (voiced by Rachel Zegler) squares off with her mother and father, the king and queen of Lumbria. This isn’t your typical family drama — a mysterious spell has transformed Ellian’s parents into massive, rampaging, well, monsters. You can check out a new trailer for the upcoming film above.
Beneath the magic and mayhem, Spellbound is a human story, a brand-new one that uses fantastical elements to tell an all too relatable tale, according to director Vicky Jenson (Shrek): “If we start with the familiar — the kingdom, a princess, a king, a queen, and a spell — we could use that to express the story of this family,” she told Netflix.
Jenson said, “For me, the story is even more universal than the specifics of this family dynamic. For me, it speaks to kids and their parents, to the kind of alienation that can happen as we grow up, and the steps we have to make toward each other to weather it together and come through the other side with better understanding.”
As Ellian hits the road to try to break the spell on her parents, don’t be too surprised if you see a few things in Lumbria that you find recognizable along the way. The film’s new trailer showcases a few of those similarities to our world, from a rideshare, uh, frog (who receives five literal stars) to a “wand” that functions like a car-key fob. “Finding the allegory, finding the fairy-tale paradigm, the shape of it, I think is what was a real breakthrough for us,” Jenson said.
Of course, you can’t create a fairy tale without a royal cast. “Taking on this job was so cool for my inner child,” Zegler (West Side Story) tells Tudum. “I was obsessed with so many animated films as a child, including Beauty and the Beast, which had such a gorgeous, sweeping score by Alan Menken, who did the music for our film … Films like these made me fall in love with musical theater, which ended up changing my life entirely.”
“She can belt with the best of them, but really there’s that same vulnerability, and groundedness, and humanity to her voice as well,” Jenson said. “She’s just amazing.”
At first, Ellian’s parents don’t talk much at first in their monstrous forms, but when they do, they’re voiced by Oscar winners: Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem. “Nicole’s the biggest actress there is. She’s super in demand,” Jenson said. “But then, when she saw it, even [on a] laptop, she goes, ‘Oh, I love it. I want to be a part of this.’ ”
Bardem had his own journey to Spellbound. “He just would come straight from the set of Dune: Part Two,” Jenson said. “He’s like, ‘I apologize, I’ve been wearing a rubber suit all day.’ ” Bardem channeled his hot days into a not-so-kingly sound: “A lot of the animal noises, some of the monster dad sounds, he definitely created,” Jenson added. “He played around with wolf growls and stuff and incorporated that into his laugh.”
For Zegler, it was “a dream come true” to appear in an animated film. “It’s really different to perform an entire movie from a recording booth — you have to capture every aspect of an emotional performance from behind a mic, and no one will be able to see your face at the end of the day,” she said. “You place your performance into the hands of many talented animators who totally take it to the next level.”
Together, Zegler, Bardem, and Kidman make up the central trio of Spellbound, a fairy-tale family with very modern problems. They’re joined by John Lithgow, Jenifer Lewis, Nathan Lane, and Tituss Burgess. “And Flink is our constant flash of purple throughout,” Jenson added. (Flink is a tiny little furry sidekick who follows Ellian everywhere.)
And that’s not all: The film also features music and lyrics from luminaries Menken (Beauty and the Beast) and Glenn Slater (Tangled). “We did a music retreat very early on when we hit on our initial fairy-tale idea,” Jenson said. “And we had a keyboard there for Alan, and we were just weeping with the first melody.”
Zegler hopes that “audiences will see how incredible the art of animation is when it comes to teaching tough lessons to the next generation.”
Spellbound, explained Zegler, “handles delicate subjects with a lot of beautiful imagery, music, and an allegorical approach to real-life issues that kids sometimes face.”
Spellbound is coming to Netflix on Nov. 22.
