Leg­end of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole

Adapt­ed from the first three (of 15) books in Kathryn Lasky’s Guardians of Ga’Hoole series, Zack Snyder’s ani­mat­ed fea­ture is the Star Wars saga reimag­ined in a world dom­i­nat­ed by owls.

The Luke-like owlet Soren is enthused by the leg­ends of the Jedi-like Guardians, and will grad­u­al­ly learn to mas­ter his Force-like pow­ers of flight and bring down the secret weapon of mass destruc­tion devel­oped by the Vad­er-like Met­al­beak and his fas­cist forces, includ­ing Soren’s own broth­er Kludd. It is a clas­sic tale of good ver­sus evil with a hero­ic com­ing-of-age arc to bring all the wish-ful­fil­ment flights of fan­cy that younger view­ers might need.

What most lit­er­al­ly stands out in Leg­end of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole is the 3D imagery, at its most breath­tak­ing when, as in Avatar and How to Train Your Drag­on, char­ac­ters are shown swoop­ing, glid­ing and div­ing through the air – some­thing which for­tu­nate­ly owls do quite a lot. Equal­ly strik­ing is the extreme pho­to­re­al­ism of the CG ani­ma­tion – although in fact this hyper-nat­u­ral­ism sits rather uneasi­ly with the film’s unapolo­getic adher­ence to fantasy.

Usu­al­ly the visu­al styl­i­sa­tion of car­toons can make all man­ner of implau­si­ble or even impos­si­ble events seem entire­ly accept­able – but here when owls are shown talk­ing, play­ing lutes, hang­ing out hap­pi­ly with oth­er species of ani­mal, wear­ing wrought iron hel­mets and armour, and deploy­ing half-mag­i­cal/half-mechan­i­cal devices, the verisimil­i­tude of their appear­ance has an effect that is dis­tract­ing­ly dis­turb­ing and uncanny.

These char­ac­ters look exact­ly like real owls, but evi­dent­ly the owls are not what they seem – and the mis­match of Aus­tralian and Eng­lish accents in the voice cast hard­ly helps to anchor all this arti­fi­cial authenticity.

The film’s pro­found con­fu­sion of dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories and par­a­digms is reflect­ed in its atti­tude to nature and evo­lu­tion. The vil­lain­ous Met­al­beak is mod­elled on Hitler, pro­mot­ing a mas­ter race of ​‘Pure Ones’ while using ​‘infe­ri­or’ species of owl (and bat) as labour for his mil­i­tary machine. For him, sur­vival of the fittest is a sociopo­lit­i­cal prin­ci­ple that entails elim­i­nat­ing or enslav­ing the weak.

The Guardians, on the oth­er hand, have cre­at­ed a har­mo­nious mul­ti­cul­tur­al utopia in the arbo­re­al out­post of Ga’Hoole – a nev­er-nev­er land that man­ages to be all at once a monar­chy and a mer­i­toc­ra­cy. In one jaw-drop­ping­ly irra­tional scene, Soren actu­al­ly namechecks Dar­win in con­sol­ing the ser­pent Mrs Plithiv­er (who is also, hon­est, his erst­while nurse­maid) for the fact that she is about to be eat­en by his new friends, as though ​‘On the Ori­gin of the Species’ were bed­time read­ing for all these crea­tures – but with­in moments, instead of becom­ing a snack, Mrs Plithiv­er joins Soren’s air­borne quest as ​‘the first snake to fly.’

Between Metalbeak’s embrace of Social Dar­win­ism and Soren’s will­ing­ness to sus­pend all nat­ur­al laws, there is lit­tle room left in this ani­mal king­dom for nature itself. Which is fine in a film like Fan­tas­tic Mr Fox, whose char­ac­ters are all strug­gling against their wilder natures in a stop-motion for­mat that entire­ly eschews real­ism. When pre­sent­ed in such insis­tent­ly life­like com­put­er images, how­ev­er, Snyder’s owls become lost between the myth­ic and the real, nev­er quite con­vinc­ing as either one or the other.

What might have come alive on the page feels odd­ly ster­ile on the screen, as every­thing is put right there before us in micro­scop­i­cal­ly hyper-vivid detail and our imag­i­na­tions are denied the pow­er to soar to their own heights.