Wizards

I haven't been mentioning quite so much over on FXM, largely because there hasn't been so much in the rotation that I haven't already blogged about. One movie that does fit the bill is the animated Wizards, which gets two airings tomorrow (May 5), at 3:00 AM and 11:35 AM.

Wizards is set in a distant future, after a nuclear war which took 2,000,000 years to deal with all the radiation. In some places, there are horrible mutants, while in other places, the land is ruled by fairies, dwarves, and elves. One of the fairies, the queen, in fact, gives birth to twin wizards. One of the twins, Avatar, is pure good, while the other, Blackwolf, is pure evil.

Avatar is also a bit of a bohemian, drinking and smoking cigars while teaching the daughter of the president, a busty young woman fairy named Elinore. (Yeah, this isn't exactly mindless kids' stuff.) However, Blackwolf has found where Avatar and the rest of the good inhabitants live, sending a robot to kill the president. Worse, Blackwolf has come up with a new way to fight the war against the non-mutants: technology. He's discovered a movie projector and a stash of Nazi propaganda, and uses it to make a weapon that makes soldiers stop in their tracks, terrified of the Nazis, even if 2,000,000 years hence they don't know what the Nazis stood for. It must be those boss uniforms.

Avatar has to set out on a mission with Elinore; the robot who killed her father, whom Avatar turned peaceful; and a dwarf warrior named Weehawk to get inside the castle where Blackwolf has his headquarters and defeat Blackwolf in a final battle of good versus evil.

There's nothing particularly new in the story that Wizards presents, with the quest and the battle of good and evil being two of the oldest stories known to man. Taking animation and making it more adult wasn't really new either, in that the Looney Tunes cartoons definitely had in-jokes that the grown-ups would get, but it's certainly taken to a new level here.

As for the technical aspects of the animation, those are interesting because there's not one specific look throughout. Parts of the movie look like one of those Ken Burns documentaries where he's panning over sepia-tone images and giving narration. Others look as professional as Hanna-Barbera stuff that was quickly churned out for Saturday morning TV in high volume. And some of it combines live-action backgrounds and other visual effects.

It all adds up to a viewing experience that's certainly interesting enough for one go, but not any sort of masterpiece, and in some ways stuck in the late 1970s. It's definitely worth a watch, but not the sort of thing I'd make a point of looking to get on DVD.