Spellbound (PG), on Netflix
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Caution: spoilers.

This has a "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which I think is pretty ridiculous. Granted, for most of the movie I wasn't sure how highly I would end up rating it, but I always thought it was at least kinda good. And by the end, I thought it was kinda great (so I rated it "kinda loved"). I really liked the animation, and the songs were okay. And I really liked the main character, and enjoyed all the acting. And I loved the fact that the way it ended, while happy, was unexpected.

It's set in the kingdom of Lumbria, where Princess Ellian (voiced by Rachel Zegler) has just turned 15. For the past year, she and the rest of the palace staff have been hiding the fact that a curse had turned her parents, King Solon (Javier Bardem) and Queen Ellsmere (Nicole Kidman), had been turned into mindless monsters by a curse. The two main members of the staff are Ministers Bolinar (John Lithgow) and Nazara (Jenifer Lewis), who come up with a plan to make Ellian queen, and let the kingdom believe the old king and queen had died. But Ellian agrees to go along with this plan only if her own plan doesn't work. She seeks help from the oracles of the sun and moon, Sunny (Tituss Burgess) and Luno (Nathan Lane). (It seemed to me like they might have been a married couple, but that wasn't explicit.) The oracles visit the palace, but are surprised to find that Ellian was being literal when she called her parents monsters. They get scared off, accidentally leaving behind a magic fob (which Sunny had used to replace their wands).

That night, Ellian accidentally lets her parents loose when she forgets to re-lock their cages, and they escape from the palace. So she has to admit to everyone that the king and queen had become monsters, to prevent the guards, led by General Cardona, from killing them. But the general still wants to send the beasts away from the kingdom. Ellian finds the fob and uses it to take herself and her parents, along with her pet, Flink (Dee Bradley Baker), to see the oracles at their home in the Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness. They are chased by the guards, and along the way Flink accidentally uses the fob to switch bodies with Bolinar. When they reach the oracles, they tell Ellian that only her parents can break the curse, by traveling through several dangerous lands, to the Lake of Light. And Bolinar can't get his body back until the two bodies are in the same place. (Flink, in Bolinar's body, is traveling with the general and the guards, who are unaware of the body switch despite Flink's behaving like the small critter he is.) And throughout Ellian's travels with her parents and Bolinar, they are pursued not only by the guards, but by a black tornado sort of thing called the Darkness. It is attracted to negative feelings, and can curse the ones having those feelings, as it had cursed the king and queen a year ago. Also over the course of their journey, the king and queen begin learning to speak, and to remember who they and Ellian are.

I don't want to spoil exactly what happens when they finally reach the Lake of Light, but it causes Ellian to have negative thoughts, which leaves her vulnerable to the Darkness, which soon surrounds her. I was maybe a bit disappointed that it never turned her into a monster, though I wouldn't have wanted her to be one for long, anyway. But before anything like that could happen, her parents manage to calm her down and save her. They finally get their bodies restored to normal, and Bolinar and Flink switch back to their own bodies. A year later, on Ellian's 16th birthday, we see that she's gotten used to living with her parents in a way that wasn't quite the way it used to be, as she'd hoped, but accepted the new situation. I don't want to spoil the nature of their situation, but I will say that it made sense from a narrative perspective, and it turned the whole movie into a valuable lesson for kids who might be going through a similar situation with their own parents. (Not that they became literal monsters, or anything, but... whatever.) It's that lesson that made me (kinda) love the movie. But the rest of it was good, too. It's just that one thing that I believe elevated the movie to greatness. (You know, not super great, but as I said at the outset of my review, kinda great.)