Say someone gets their hands on the device that could change fairy tales forever. Instead of happy endings, bad things happen to those beloved characters. Jack gets stomped on the beanstalk, Sleeping Beauty doesn’t wake up, Red Riding Hood sits in the digestive track of a wolf, and the entire fairy tale kingdoms goes awry.
What if they stay in this backwards time span, yet still find a happy ending? Do you follow the Terminator timeline and the inevitable happens without going back? Or maybe things play out like Déjà vu on separate timelines, where one version of the character is forced to repeatedly play out the original story as stated in Happily N’Ever After.
Then again, who cares? This movie is a mess. Trying to get logical or scientific on the whole thing may seem ridiculous, but there’s nothing else to do while you watch this humorless, dull, and unimaginative animated film.
The fairy tale parodies were done better in all three Shrek movies. The retellings here have no new concepts or laughs behind them. Animation is stiff and on the level of a TV cartoon. Characters are sloppy and lacking originality. How many cute cartoon pigs does the world need?
The cast is filled with names including Sarah Michelle Gellar, Andy Dick, Sigourney Weaver, and George Carlin in a small role (maybe 10 lines total). Any movie with the voice work of Patrick Warburton should be instantly enjoyable as well, yet he’s given nothing to work with.
Aside from a few small snickers, Happily struggles to elicit any of its laughs. These parodies all feel familiar in this day of CG animation, and this movie can do nothing to shake the feeling. How this ended up in theaters instead of direct-to-video is an answer only the execs at LionsGate can answer. 
Article comments