Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (2010)

Zack Snyder's first foray into the world of animated films is a bit of a left field choice for the director who has thus far displayed a knack for gloriously over the top violence; a fantasy story focusing almost exclusively on Owls based on a series of children's books. As well as being lumped with that unfortunate subtitle, the film struggles throughout to really create an identity for itself, its hooting protagonists aside, the story is unfortunately generic, but Snyder's artful direction and the film's gorgeous animation help it entertain more than it perhaps should.
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Jim Sturgess lends his voice to Soren, a young owl who, along with his siblings, is captured from his family home one day and brought to St Aggies, an orphanage that fronts a more sinister purpose, brainwashing kids and stray owls into forming an army at the behest of Joel Edgerton's Metal Beak. After managing to escape Soren seeks out the legendary Owls of Ga'Hoole to help combat the rising darkness. Needless to say originality isn't the film's strong suit and beat for beat much of the film can be easily predicted. Now this isn't necessarily a problem, if the characters are interesting and engaging enough, unfortunately this isn't the case. There's nothing wrong per-se with any of the cast, voice wise they are all fine, but enough isn't really done to make us root for them in the story. This isn't helped by the fact that there are a lot of quite similar looking characters in the film, a limitation of having just one primary species of animal to choose from. 
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That said the owl's themselves, whatever you may think about them inhabiting a fantasy world and spouting dialogue about honour and courage, do look incredible. Snyder deliberately chose a realistic style for the film and as such it is remarkable that the animators were able to make the characters work as well as they do. There is limited space to emote but the differing varieties of Owl's are well used and painstakingly rendered. In fact everything about the film is truly stunning to look at, from the subtle animation of the individual features to Snyder's stunningly framed shots of the scenery. Whatever the failing of the story, Snyder never stops impressing visually, however without the real emotional engagement it becomes a bit of a hollow experience in the end.
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Not that I found the film to be expressly bad, one slightly cloying and badly judged musical montage late-on excluded, but neither did it truly engage me. Truthfully I was sceptical of the entire premise so that fact that the sheer strangeness of what you are watching (Owls remaking Star Wars essentially) doesn't detract from the experience was enough of a surprise. Obviously the film is skewed at a younger audience, though with this in mind some sections remain quite violent thanks to the realistic look of the characters and Snyder's fondness for action. 
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Overall there are few surprises in the film, aside from the fact that it works at all, and truthfully as a spectacle with some decent action and a familiar story it works perfectly well. Synder definitely has a knack for the animated medium and his presence certainly elevates the film from what it might have been. So it remains a solid animated adventure but one that's biggest problem is a lack of identity, you get the feeling that having the character's be Owls was the only big idea, and no more followed. This fact being true does nothing to influence the story or characters, and so it seems arbitrary, which unfortunately is something of a fitting metaphor for the film as a whole.