Movie Thoughts: School of Magical Animals (2021)

• Released: 14 October 2021
• Directed by: Gregor Schnitzler
• Running time: 1 h 33 min
• Rating 1.5/5

Synopsis

A girl named Ida has trouble fitting in at her new school. Things get worse when a bunch of vandalizations take place around the school, and Ida gets blamed for them. Together with her new friends, one of which happens to be a talking magical fox named Rabbat, she goes to look for who the real culprit is.

My Thoughts

Note: this movie is of German origin and has not been released in English yet as far as I know.

Did I want to see this movie just because of the cute CGI fox? Why, yes. Is it bad? Yes. Also cringe. But at the same time also kinda cute.

This is really just a children's film for really, really young kids. Not really a family film that's also enjoyable for older audiences such as The Lion King, but really just a juvenile film for young children. And even those can be enjoyable, but this one pretty much falls into the "bad" category. It's a musical, yet most songs are bad and can even be downright cringe (e.g. one of the characters randomly starts rapping about pirates during a scene and it's supposed to be seen as an awesome character moment, yet it felt more cringeworthy than anything). The acting isn't very good, it overall feels really cheap and small-scale (which doesn't have to be a bad thing, but is the way it is executed here) and the writing was just plain bad.

Despite the title implying it's really more of a story about these children and their magical animal friends, the story really is more about Ida and her relationship to her new friends Benni (the blonde neurodivergent-coded kid) and Jo (the "bad boy" who has a troubled home life). Rabbat the fox really feels more like an afterthought. Heck, the movie even addresses this by one of the conflicts being that Rabbat feels left out because of how much time Ida spends with Jo, but the way it is written the movie just kinda glosses over it and it doesn't feel earned at all, because there was little to no buildup to the bond between Ida and Rabbat.

Ida and Rabbat become friends early into the movie, but honestly we don't get to see them grow or develop together. It's built up to be an unbreakable bond (kinda like a daemon in His Dark Materials, except that in this case the magical animals really are separate entities from their humans), but they just kinda get along instantly, so we don't see them bond. Then Ida starts spending time with Jo, Rabbat feels understandably left out and there's a big breakup moment between him and his person, but none of this feels emotional or earned because we barely got to see Ida and Rabbat get close together. They like each other and after that Ida starts to pretty much instantly ignore him (which is also weird on her part because Jo is still just another human being, whereas Rabbat is a magical talking fox she has only known existed for a couple of days now. Novelty sure wore of quick, huh). 

Her bond with Benni also just felt really rushed. I get that they were supposed to be friends but she treated him downright horribly and he was a bit too forgiving too soon if you ask me. She should've had more comeuppance for treating him like this. Honestly it kinda really hurt to see him treated like this because I'm neurodivergent myself and have been treated the same in high school. Benni isn't officially neurodivergent, obviously, but he's very much coded as such, at least to me. So to see everyone in school, including our main character, treat him this poorly...that hurt.

One thing I will praise the movie for (somewhat, at least) is the titular magical animals. I really like the design style they have to them, being neither hyper-realistic nor cartoon-y, but rather a nice balance of both. The animation on them was also pretty good. Unfortunately, where they kind of fall flat (other than feeling more like an afterthought in a movie that is literally named after them) is the implementing of them in the live-action footage. This movie obviously doesn't have a big Hollywood budget, and it shows. It's not downright horrible per se, but it definitely looks cheap and a bit rough around the edges, and there's a very limited amount of direct interactions between humans and magical animals.

So is this movie good? No, and I don't think most adults will have a good time sitting through this because it really just is a bad movie made for very juvenile kids. But I did at least appreciate the CGI fox. Not enough reason to go see it, but it was cute. It's not a downright offensive film or anything, but just not good and it probably won't amuse anyone over the age of five.