Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole

jim sturgess as soren

Twilight: If I have to hear another of his Owl Jokes!

Digger: What? They're a hoot!

quick fox: C- | Copper

emily barclay as gylfie

winding dragon

A few years ago, one of the more entertaining/devastating stories that circulated the Internet was about the Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) painting. An elderly woman in Spain tried to restore a 1930s fresco of Jesus Christ…with mixed results. Ironically, the restoration is now a major tourist attraction (complete with t-shirts and coffee mugs) at the Sanctuary of Mercy church in the small village of Borja. 

But imagine being the artist of that painting and seeing the “finished” result. It’s such stuff that nightmares are made on. Though the level of horror isn’t to that same extreme as Ecce Homo, I can imagine that the animators of Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (2010) must have felt a similar despondency after they watched the finished film. 

Based on Kathryn Lasky’s fantasy series (Books 1-6), Ga’Hoole is about a young barn owl named Soren (Jim Sturgess). Soren is a good-hearted dreamer (although sometimes a bit dense), and yearns to live in the legendary Ga’Hoole Tree, home to a band of owls dedicated to preserving peace throughout the kingdom. But before he can properly fly, agents of St. Aggie’s Academy kidnap him and his brother Kludd (Ryan Kwanten). The leaders of St. Aggie’s, Metal Beak (Joel Edgerton) and Nyra (Helen Mirren), are basically Nazis in owl form and wish to purify the owl kingdom. Soren escapes, and flies off to find the Ga’Hoole Tree and warn the guardians of the impending war.

I made the analogy between Ecce Homo and Ga’Hoole because I feel bad for the 500+ animators who worked on the film. It’s not as though the movie is an unmitigated disaster, but the awe-inspiring artwork and animation is wasted on a film that can offer little else. 

Fans of the books will cringe at some of the bigger discrepancies—Kludd’s capture, the magical energy contained in “flecks”, Digger’s personality in general—while everyone else will wonder why all the events seem to take less than a week’s time. Ga’Hoole jumps from scene to scene with more energy than a caffeinated owl. The film editing never lets the pacing take a breath, which severely limits Soren’s development (he doesn’t change at all from beginning to end) and the audience’s ability to connect with any of the characters. 

Part of the problem is that like many fantasy series adaptations, Ga’Hoole suffers from the ghost of a lost sequel—that is, because it didn’t know if it’d get any more films, it tried to cram all six books into one movie. Granted, Lasky’s books are fairly short, but what happens is the screenplay is reduced to bland conversation and cliché one-liners in order to progress Soren from one event to the next. And I’ve seen other movies like this and haven’t been as bothered by it, but the questionable voice acting accentuates the problem. None of the varying British and Australian dialects matched well, especially Soren’s heavy accent that was often distracting.

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole is a frustrating film because it’s a stream of inconsistencies sprinkled with short scenes of exceptional beauty. There were several times where I actually said “whoa” out loud because I thought the artwork was that impressive—Soren’s first sight of the Ga’Hoole Tree; Soren flying through a rainstorm; or when Soren fights Metal Beak are especially spectacular. It’s all the more disappointing that the other aspects of the film are utterly forgettable.  

ryan kwanten as Kludd