This is a beautiful movie, with much higher quality animation than the Ice Age movies, which were made by the same studio, Blue Sky. The story itself leaves (pardon the pun) much to be desired. It has two main arcs: first, the daughter who goes to live with her (estranged? Not much details about family situation) father in the woods, apparently upstate New York somewhere; the father (an academic?) has a fruitless obsession with finding the "little people" in the woods whose presence he seems to detect in various ways, but who constantly allude him. Father's obsession chases daughter away, until she is herself drawn into (shrunken down to) the world by the dying queen of the forest. The queen, her leaf men, and other denizens of the forest are locked in a battle against the evil boggans, who apparently represent the forces of rot. We all want the forest to survive and prosper, but it's unclear just what exactly the rot represents: if it's a natural process, it doesn't exactly threaten to destroy the forest. And the father's heroic acts at the end suggest that human intervention can save ecosystems from their own natural processes. Finally, it's nice to see the daughter and father understand each other at the end, but the implication is also a bit weird: they will continue to live in isolation in their (real) fantasy world, with the daughter beginning a relationship (implied anyway) with one of the tiny leaf men. That was a longer review than expected - but it helped me work out what I felt was so strange about the storyline.
Review of Epic
