What's odd is how familiar this all looks. The setting, character design, tone... did George Lucas think that he just dreamed the movie Epic and quickly wrote down what he could remember of it? It's uncanny. To be fair, Epic could in some ways be seen as lifting the story from Lucas' own 1988 live-action fantasy Willow (directed by Ron Howard, credit where it's due). Still, it's a bit disconcerting that Strange Magic looks thus far more like a ham-fisted jukebox musical mash-up of Epic and Frozen.
This isn't to say the film looks bad necessarily, and the cast is actually pretty good for it. Evan Rachel Wood, Alan Cumming, Kristin Chenoweth, Maya Rudolph, Alfred Molina, Peter Stormare, that's a lot of fine actors and nothing to be sniffed at. And director Gary Rydstrom is no stranger to the world of animated film, having previously directed Pixar shorts and the English-language cast for a handful of Studio Ghibli films (and this is all after winning seven Oscars in the field of sound design). Really, this film does have a pretty decent pedigree.
However, right now, it just looks a bit uninspired, a bit too much like films we saw only a year ago, so there's not a great deal that we can comfortably point to as Strange Magic's own personality. We'll perhaps have a better idea in the build up to its 2015 release, but for now... meh.