Fight For Balance

Walt Disney’s ‘Epic’ is an adventure great for all ages.

There is a war going on in the forest; one that most humans never truly see. But there is one human scientist who believes. Professor Bomba (Jason Sudeikis) believes that there is an advanced society of tiny people who live in the forest. He has placed cameras throughout the woods that respond to movement high in the trees. He even found a humming bird with a tiny saddle on it. He believes that the reason humans haven’t seen or heard them is because they move so fast, like insects.

There are small men who call themselves Leafmen who fight for the forest. There are also some strange bug-like things that are called boggons who fight against the Leafmen. They want the forest destroyed because they love rot and decay. (The classic good vs. evil; life vs. death.) The Leafmen ride hummingbirds while the boggons ride black birds or crows.

The job of the Leafmen is to protect Queen Tara (Beyoncé Knowles) and the forest. And by protecting the queen, they are protecting the very life force of the forest. Queen Tara can control and grow the plants of the forests. Every hundred years there will be a full moon on the day of the summer solstice. And on this day, the queen will select a pod to give her powers, there by choosing her replacement so the life of the forest will live on. That day has come and Ronin (Colin Farrell), leader of the leafmen, is worried because this is the one day that the queen will leave the safety of their home, Moon Haven, and journey into the forest. Only that morning boggons were spotted within borders making Ronin even more nervous.

Mandrake (Christoph Waltz) is the leader of the boggons. His son, Dagda (Blake Anderson), is the general of his forces. Mandrake hates the forest with all its greenery. He especially hates the queen who can fix what their rot can do. With a wave of the queen’s hand, she can regrow what he and his boggons have destroyed of the forest. He plans to kill the queen and steal the pod she chooses, so he can finally destroy everything!

Professor Bomba believed his theory so much that it ruined his marriage years ago and his wife divorced him and took their daughter Mary Katherine (Amanda Seyfried) with her. Now his former wife is dead and his daughter, who goes by the nickname MK, has come to live with him. Only her father is so lost in his work, that he’s not paying any attention to MK. MK ends up in the woods and is there when the queen needs help. The queen’s magic makes MK small like the rest of their people, and MK is tasked with taking care of the pod until it opens when the moon is at the highest point that night. Along the way she meets a glowworm named Nim Galuu (Steven Tyler), a snail named Grub (Chris O’Dowd), a slug named Mub (Aziz Ansari) who’s got the hots for MK, and a really cute former Leafman named Nod (Josh Hutcherson).

This is a great movie about the forest and its balance.