Gire: No magic in Lucas' charmless 'Strange'

It's tough to say which part of the "Strange Magic" budget cost more, the charmless and slightly off-putting character animation or the massive music licensing rights.

I didn't count the pop songs sung in "Strange Magic," but the whole experience feels like a "Glee" reunion with fairies, elves and every critter in Jim Henson's workshop warbling through the works of Elvis Presley, Lady Gaga, the Doors, Burt Bacharach and others in an incredibly cheap-feeling jukebox musical.

The company behind "Strange Magic," Lucasfilm (under Disney now), obviously could afford the best composers and lyricists to whip up an entirely original score, as Disney did with "Frozen."

But the filmmakers (executive producer George Lucas, who supplied the story, and first-time director Gary Rydstrom, a former Elmhurst resident and Oscar-winning sound designer) opted to give "Strange Magic" a contemporary karaoke twist that turns their movie into an animated bookend to Heath Ledger's 2001 clinker "A Knight's Tale."

"Strange Magic" can't help falling in trouble when a winged fairy princess named Marianne (Evan Rachel Wood) opens the show with a flying rendition of Elvis' hit "Can't Help Falling in Love."

We have no setup, no introductions, so we don't know she's singing about her romance and upcoming marriage to standard-issue superficial handsome Prince Roland (Sam Palladio). Think Chris Pine's prince from "Into the Woods" with better hair.

Marianne calls it off when she catches Roland smooching with another fairy.

Meanwhile, Marianne's younger sister Dawn (Meredith Anne Bull) can't help falling for every guy she meets, prompting their dad the King to lament, "I wish I had boys!"

These princesses are no sissies. Marianne can handle a sword and execute martial arts moves with the best of the stock, stereotypical 21st-century action movie heroines.

These qualities come in handy when battling the insectlike Bog King (Alan Cumming), who has imprisoned the Sugar Plum Fairy ("Boy Next Door" star Kristin Chenoweth in her second bad movie this week).

Sunny (Elijah Kelley) a lovable elf, needs Sugar Plum to whip up a love potion so he can use it on his unrequited love, Dawn.

Supposedly inspired by Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Strange Magic" is such a mishmash of other better movies - mostly "Beauty and the Beast" and "Epic" - that it fails to develop its own personality, consequently coming off as a corporate product engineered to be a can't-miss blockbuster that still misses.

But give the movie a little credit, if for nothing else but sparing us from Sunny actually singing, "Dawn, go away I'm no good for you."