Epic (on DVD)

Epic
[j DVD Epic]

Epic, from the same production group that did the Ice Age movies, is a marvelous, family-friendly adventure movie, with a nice message about family. When young Mary Katherine (M.K.) visits her estranged and eccentric scientist father's home/laborator deep in a mysterious forest, she merely wants to reconnect with the man who's mainly been absent from her life for many years. Following the recent death of her mother -- his ex-wife -- M.K. wants to make a family connection. But, despite being happy to see her, Professor Bomba is still obsessed with monitoring his equipment, scattered throughout the forest, for evidence of a race of tiny people, which he believes lives in the woods. The tiny people are real, and make up forces of "good" (the Leaf-Men) and "bad" (the Boggans), who fight a constant battle to maintain their equilibrium of power. The time for the Leaf-Men's queen to pick a successor has come, and the Boggans wish to use this opportunity to tilt the balance of power and use their powers of decay to despoil the forest. Despite initially disbelieving in her father's fantasies of "little people", M.K. gets magically shrunk to the size of the forest race, and is pulled into their war by being chose as guardian for the powers of the dying queen. The rest of the film is a terrific action film as the animated war plays out, and M.K. worries about how to return to normal size and reunite with her father. The voice work by the actors is marvelous, and the animation veers from photo-realistic in any of the scenes without characters in them, to painfully cartoonish with some of the animated characters. I really enjoyed this film, and recommend it quite highly. -- recommended by Scott C. - Bennett Martin Public Library [Inspired by the book The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs.]

[ Internet Movie Database entry for this film ] | [ official Epic: The Movie web site ]

Have you seen this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewers recommendations!