Jack Byrne

Never left a movie review but felt compelled to after seeing it with my three-year old daughter this morning. The premise is fabulous; get completely different animators to play out each scene in totally different styles and expand upon the magic that the book provides. Almost inexplicably it fails on every level. It’s as though the director didn’t ask each contributor what they were going to do before giving them the green light, and they were left with these productions that they couldn’t change. The movie fails in my opinion because: 1. The scenes aren’t sequential with the book which is off putting for children. Mentioning the cost wide bed within the first half hour was SO frustrating because that’s meant to be the end premise; 2. Different animation is a brilliant idea but some of it is so abstract and quite unappealing and confronting to children. One animation depicts a child in such an unflattering way it’s genuinely awful; 3. The expanded story lines from the book are largely unrelated to the theme of the story being the ‘Magic Beach’. The infant baby being rescued from the one-eyed seaweed creature by a person and his pink horse via the watermelon forrest (seriously I’m not making this up) is just bizarre. Why not tell us the story of how princess belinda came to rescue little prince James from the dragon? The only bright moment is the smugglers story, but then that falls away because the smuggler double crosses his colleagues, ultimately leading them to their death and then forever fearful of their ghosts as they come to haunt them. It’s a children’s movie?!?! 4. The themes that are in some of the sections are properly dark, and not adventurous and fun, and whimsical and magical as they should be. After being scared during the movie, my three year-old ultimately asked “Where’s the magic beach?” quickly followed by “Can we go”. I had absolutely no issue complying with that request. A properly awful movie that is not worth paying for. Would’ve given it zero stars. Do not pay to see this and to it’s creators, please stay away from ‘Imagine’.

One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen and fortunately all the reviews addressed the same concern. Why does a passionate, free thinking investigative journalist decide to take up helping her sick father’s weapons deal when he has treated her so badly throughout her life? She covers it in a conversation with Ben Affleck in the end, but not before you’re wondering “Why did she just abandon the weapons deal if she was doing it for her father?” and “Oh okay so she’s now pursuing her passion in the very country that her investigative journalism had been, but what is it that she’s really trying to uncover?” Then her father dies while she’s away and she suddenly has compassion towards her father again!?! All this occurs with fleeting scenes of Hathaway talking with her young daughter who’s in boarding school. She speaks highly of her to her father but then in many scenes she expresses how she has very little to live for!! YOU HAVE A DAUGHTER!! In the end you don’t know what happened with the arms deal; why she took a block of cocaine and then abandoned it; you don’t know what impact her information gathering was really having on the US government throughout; why/how she finds herself in a gay hostel; why/how does Jones fit into this mess; and why she suddenly sleeps with Ben Affleck I don’t know, so for 99% of the movie you don’t know what she’s really doing back in South America while some of the characters ask her that very question!! For the last 1% the director appears to realise “F*%# I forgot about the story!!” And tries to tie everything all together to show that even after her death, Hathaway’s investigations will still see the light of day, but by that stage any momentum in the story has just been completely lost because there are genuine holes in the story line. It’s a catastrophic movie that makes you wonder how no one in the movie realised how poor the story telling is.