Critics got their first look at Netflix’s new 2024 movie, Spellbound, which yielded impressively positive results ahead of its debut.

Marking the first of a trio of upcoming movies for Rachel Zegler, Spellbound is Netflix’s latest animated movie coming in late November.

The story centers on a young girl named Ellian who lives in a world of magic called Lumbria. This is where she has to break a spell that splits her kingdom in two and turns her parents into monsters.

Critics’ First Reviews for Spellbound 2024 Movie

Following press screenings for Netflix’s Spellbound, critics offered their first reactions to the upcoming animated movie.

Variety’s Katcy Stephan described the film as “magical,” praising Rachel Zegler for “[nailing] the princess role” and highlighting Alan Menken and Glenn Slater for the film’s music:

“Netflix’s ‘Spellbound’ is magical! Rachel Zegler nails the princess role as the headstrong and optimistic Ellian, while Alan Menken and Glenn Slater deliver the kind of soaring emotional ballad we’ve come to expect from them with standout song ‘The Way It Was Before.’”

Rama’s Screen did not view Spellbound as highly despite describing the film’s central themes as “admirable.” He felt it had a “preachy message” built around a “lackluster adventure:”

“‘Spellbound’ theme of assuring children of divorced parents that life would get better was admirable. But therein also lies the problem. They built the story around the preachy message, so the result was a lackluster adventure with mid songs, mid humor & mid characters”

The Direct’s own Russ Milheim saw Spellbound as a fun film “that boasts a surprisingly mature message” while praising Rachel Zegler for her musical musings:

“‘Spellbound’ is a fun adventure that boasts a surprisingly mature message. Its unique world is vibrant and fully realized, with lots of songs to enjoy as the story plays out. Rachel Zegler’s musical talent shines bright, as one would expect.

“Spellbound on Netflix is a true delight,” exclaimed critic Amanda Taylor, who complimented the way it “captivates with its heartwarming story and stunning animation:”

“‘Spellbound’ on Netflix is a true delight! This magical film captivates with its heartwarming story and stunning animation. Alan Menken’s beautiful score elevates every scene, while Rachel Zegler shines with soulful brilliance. Don’t miss it!”

Freelance journalist Jamie Jirak loved the film, particularly “the pairing of Nathan Lane and Tituss Burgess,” telling fans it is “worth checking out on Netflix:”

“‘Spellbound’ is so sweet! An animated princess musical with songs by Alan Menken… from Skydance?! I’m always happy when Rachel Zegler sings, and I loved the pairing of Nathan Lane & Tituss Burgess. The film has a nice message and is worth checking out on Netflix next week!”

Screen Rant’s Joe Deckelmeier described how the film “weaves heartfelt storytelling with breathtaking animation” and “strikes a perfect chord:”

“‘Spellbound’ on Netflix is fantastic! The way this film weaves heartfelt storytelling with breathtaking animation is just magical. It strikes a perfect chord, exploring family dynamics and connection in such a relatable and profound way. Kudos to the brilliant team behind it, especially Alan Menken and Glenn Slater, for injecting so much soul into the music!

CBR’s Ashley Saunders heaped heavy praise on Spellbound, telling fans that it was “beautifully animated” and “brimming with heart and humor:”

“‘SPELLBOUND’ is beautifully animated, brimming with heart and humor. Alan Menken’s score hits all the right nostalgic notes for this millennial. Pure magic. Rachel Zegler once again wows & John Lithgow is a scene-stealer! Perfect watch for the whole family”

Nerdtropolis founder Sean Tajipour called Spellbound “a beautiful yet powerful story with fantastic visuals,” highlighting the way it “tackles tough themes…through a child’s eyes:”

“Netflix’s ‘Spellbound’ is a beautiful yet powerful story with fantastic visuals that tackles tough themes like parental separation through a child’s eyes. It explores the journey of kids who blame themselves and try to ‘fix’ their parents’ relationship, all wrapped in a magical and adventurous fairy tale filled with song and dance.”

These critic responses appear to indicate that another hit animated Netflix movie may be on the way, even though some noted an occasional flaw or two. The cast seems to have put forth their best efforts, and Alan Menken continues his trend of excellence after projects like The Lion King (which continues to expand in live-action).

Featuring major stars like Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem next to Zegler, Spellbound looks to become the next great animated musical in an era somewhat lacking in that genre at times.

Whether this film leads to more stories from this universe is a mystery, but for now, plenty of hype is building for a fun new film fans can enjoy for the holiday season before the year ends.

Spellbound will debut on Netflix on Friday, November 22.

Modern folklore-focused anime and manga owe a huge debt to the work of 1960s manga Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro‘s artist and writer Shigeru Mizuki. A second world war veteran, the traumatic amputation of his left arm, due to an air raid explosion, never held back his pre-existing artistic ambitions. An avid researcher of international folklore, he poured his encyclopedic knowledge of the supernatural not only into his wildly influential manga, but also into countless factual tomes – some of which are available in English. Mizuki made his journey to the otherworld in 2015, at the age of 93, leaving an unparalleled legacy that this movie attempts to do justice to, acting as a prequel to the most recent anime adaptation and as an entry point for newcomers.

I’ll admit it now – before watching this, I was only familiar with Kitaro, and Mizuki’s work in general. Mainly on the strength of Scotland Loves Anime’s presenter Jonathan Clements‘ urgings, in preparation for this review I sought out several volumes of the original manga and episodes of the 2018 TV anime. It appears I am now very much a Mizuki fan, though not necessarily due to this movie.

Oddly, while Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro‘s TV incarnation is aimed primarily at children (with a theme song that claims it’s more fun to be a ghost because school attendance isn’t required), Birth of Kitaro is a grim and gritty horror film targeted at an adult audience. It loosely adapts a short manga chapter from 1966, however only uses the most basic of elements from it, crafting a mostly original story, tonally removed from the progenitor TV show. There’s even an “uncut” version, released only very recently in Japan, that dials up the already bloody violence even further. Birth of Kitaro has an unusual pedigree: it’s written by Hiroyuki Yoshino of Macross Frontier and Dance in the Vampire Bund, while directed by Gō Koga, best known for Precure and Digimon.

We’re first subjected to a baffling non-sequitur of a prologue that clumsily attempts to tie into TV show continuity with an appearance from Kitaro and pals in the “modern” day before jarringly segueing into the film’s primarily historical setting – it’s not a promising start. Most of the action transpires in 1956, during Japan’s post-war Showa-era economic recovery. Protagonist Mizuki (who is apparently a stand-in for author Mizuki himself) is an ambitious middle-management businessman who works for the “Imperial Blood Bank,” a company run by the mysterious Ryuga family. When the family head dies, Mizuki is summoned by his boss to the Ryuga’s remote mountain village estate to observe the transfer of power to the deceased head’s nominated heir. As expected from this genre, events don’t exactly proceed according to plan.

It’s immediately obvious this village is a strange place – accessible only by dangerous, unmaintained mountain roads, even locals from nearby areas avoid it entirely. Mizuki’s arrival is viewed with either novelty (from a village child), interest (from the main female character), or outright hostility (from most of the rest of the cast). His status as an unwelcome outsider is constantly reinforced by various senior Ryuga family members. Once poor Mizuki realizes he’s now trapped in a Hinamizawa/Twin Peaks/Royston Vasey-esque situation, it’s too late. This section of the film is slow-moving, perhaps as an attempt to build dread, but so many characters involved in random mafia/yakuza movie-style politicking are introduced that it’s extremely hard to follow. Eventually, this doesn’t matter, as most of the extended cast are murdered horribly anyway. There’s a lot of death in Birth of Kitaro, probably unsurprising for a character that fans already know will be born from the corpse of his mother, as the last of his kind. (So, spoilers for the uninitiated… I guess?)

Kitaro himself only barely appears in this prequel – instead, the focus is on the horribly-out-of-his depth Mizuki who finds an ally in the mysterious, white-haired, googly-eyed interloper he named “Gegero”. (The Japanese sound “ge” typically means “creepy” or “icky”, and when repeated like “gegege” it adds emphasis.) Gegero is really Kitaro‘s father, Medama-oyaji, who is destined to become a talking, disembodied eyeball who resides in Kitaro‘s empty left eye socket.

Mizuki and Gegero investigate the creepy Ryuga family’s secrets to discover the truth of “Substance M,” an experimental blood product marketed by Mizuki’s employers. It doesn’t take a doctorate in hematology to intuit that the Ryuga are up to no good. Once all of the narrative pieces are in place (and various Ryuga family members are either impaled by trees or otherwise mutilated horrifically), the plot finally rushes headlong into batshit insanity. The final forty minutes or so are a relentless descent into stunningly animated violent hell, with some truly breathtaking action sequences. A particular highlight is Gegero’s battle with an army of armored ninja dudes atop a multi-leveled tower, depicted with stylish, fluid, incredibly kinetic animation. A final confrontation centered around a demonic underground tree almost reaches Evangelion-esque levels of surreal metaphysical nonsense.

Birth of Kitaro‘s ultimate antagonist is somewhat difficult to take seriously (the audience audibly laughed when they revealed themselves), but really isn’t that incongruous when viewed in the context of the often goofy manga. I do wonder that if there had been a bit more of that unselfconscious goofiness added to this film, it might have been more entertaining. Without author Mizuki’s more whimsical influence, at times Birth of Kitaro feels disappointingly like a more by-the-numbers anime horror without much personality of its own. Its overall seriousness meshes uncomfortably with its more outlandish character designs (such as the Mizuki-accurate cartoony undead, who appear later on), and its overly complex story really doesn’t amount to anything by the end, considering the literal mountain of corpses left in the film’s wake.

Japanese folklore fans will enjoy the glimpses of yokai, like the water-borne Kappa who briefly appear, while there are plenty of rich cultural references likely to fly over the heads of most Westerners. By the time Kitaro himself arrives, we’ve seen so much death and destruction that we’re almost numb to it, so his birth scene plays as more silly than tragic. That part is adapted more or less panel-for-panel from the original manga, even if the circumstances leading up to his birth are completely different. A bookending flash-forward epilogue re-contextualizes the odd prologue in a genuinely emotionally affecting way – but doesn’t make up for the tonal disconnect that makes the opening so off-putting. It would have been better to move the prologue to the end, uniting it with the epilogue.

While I enjoyed the action aspects of Birth of Kitaro, I can’t say it works that well as an entry point for new fans. Tonally, it’s completely different from both manga and TV shows, plus it’s also quite dull and plodding in its first half. Existing fans might get a kick out of this darker, more violent incarnation of the franchise, but I’d recommend newcomers start with the manga or 2018 TV series, which a lot more fun.

Gladiator II

Directed by Ridley Scott

Written by David Scarpa

Starring Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger, Lior Raz, Derek Jacobi, with Connie Nielsen and Denzel Washington

Classification 14A; 148 minutes

Opens in theatres November 22

Hail Denzel Washington. He understood the assignment, as they say.

Washington, decked out in flowing gold lined robes and oversized jewels, brings his swagger and more to Ridley Scott’s gleefully inaccurate ancient Rome in Gladiator II, a creaky and bloated sequel that mostly falls flat whenever it strays from the Training Day star’s orbit.

Like Oliver Reed in the original, Washington is playing a calculated slave trader with a shady past. As Macrinus, he scans for talent among ravaged bodies, those who can hack each other to bits in the Colosseum but also be his “instrument.” The man’s hiding ulterior motives. Washington has a field day teasing them out.

He dances between lounging and lurching forward, his every posture, movement and gesture filled with intention. While so many of his peers in the cast feel like pawns reciting monologues, and often bellowing them out amidst the movie’s noise as if that would add impact, Washington negotiates with each line, like he’s searching for the music and the surprising notes of meaning in each word. He’s putting on a show. And the audience is going to love him for it.

Showmanship is of course a core tenet to the original Gladiator. Scott’s swords-and-sandals Spartacus-lite throwback, which won best picture at the 2001 Oscars, was all about playing up the theatricality in violence and even politics. Those thrilling battle sequences in the arena, with Russell Crowe’s Maximus leading diamond formations against chariots and swinging swords around with a grandiosity, looked incredible. The movie built its whole narrative around what can be achieved not just by feeding an audience’s bloodlust, but indulging it with artistry, while resoundingly asking, “Are you not entertained?”

This time around, Scott throws a lot more in the arena. CGI rhinos, apes, sharks and warships take up space in his digitally re-rendered Colosseum, but he’s at a loss with what to do with them. It’s just a bunch of pixels at war with each other, with human stakes left to bleed out.

Finding an anchor in Gladiator II’s stakes is also kind of hard since the movie undoes so much of what we were invested in as far as Maximus’s achievements in the first film, which ended with him killing Joaquin Phoenix’s prophetically Trump-like Caesar and handing control of Rome to the senate so the people can rule.

And yet here we are, finding Rome under the control of two new emperors, twins played by Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger, who basically split Phoenix’s incredible performance in two. How they came into power despite Maximus’s best efforts is barely addressed. It’s especially baffling because the two come off as a pair of clownish puppets. One of them holds conversations with a monkey.

Never mind the way Scott flouts historical accuracy – like a newspaper appearing in 200 A.D. before the invention of the printing press. Gladiator II’s betrayal of the original movie’s satisfying conclusion is even more egregious. The sequel even contradicts Maximus’s final words, which I’ll leave you to revisit.

At this point I should warn you, if you want to see Gladiator II completely unspoiled, don’t continue reading. Though if you’ve seen recent trailers, or even googled who Normal People star Paul Mescal is playing, you already know what I’m about to write.

The actor, so tender and affecting in smaller films like Charlotte Wells’s sublime Aftersun and Andrew Haigh’s All Of Us Strangers, is in his beefcake-era playing a grown up Lucius, the young child of Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla. His life was in peril in the earlier movie because he was heir to his murderous uncle Commodus’s throne.

In Gladiator II, we meet Lucius in Numidia, a warrior battling the Roman empire, living under an assumed identity after he had been squirreled away in hiding from his family and lineage. His return to Rome, as a vengeful gladiator seeking retribution for his dead wife, rejigs the plot from the first movie, with the Maximus role now shared between Mescal’s Lucius and Pedro Pascal’s war-weary general Marcus.

Mescal and Pascal are both fine; though they often seem too overwhelmed by the tired plot machinations to really make an impression beyond how fine they both look in Roman garb. Mescal is especially distracting, his blue eyes piercing through all the dirt mingling with sweat on his face. And yes, it’s easy to be distracted by these details in a movie that never finds its footing as a spectacle or any conviction in the emotions its storytelling is supposed to conjure; except of course, when Denzel is in the room.

In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)