The story for Legend of the Gaurdians is pretty much what you would expect from a fantasy story...but with owls. It follows the story of a young owl who never really knew the difference between real life, and the stories his father tells him. One day, this owl, ( If I remembered his name I would tell you), goes out for flying practice with his brother, ( I think the bother's name was "clud" or something). While the protagonist and his brother were practicing, they were kidnapped by two larger owls and taken to a distant land. There, the protagonist discovers a race of owls known as "The pure ones" who plan on attacking and enslaving all of the lesser owl kingdoms. The protagonist is then told from a rogue "pure owl" that the only ones who can stop "The pure ones" are "The Guardians of Ga'hoole" who the protagonist had heard of in the stories his father told him.

From there, the protagonist escapes from "the pure ones" and goes on a quest to find the "The Guardians of Ga'hoole". Like I said before, the plot in this movie isn't very original. A familiar plot isn't always a bad thing, but it is a bad thing when the plot hits almost every single fantasy cliche possible! I normally wouldn't of minded a few cliches, especially because this is a movie for children, but really, there are no surprises in this movie at all! After the first 10 minutes, you already know how the movie is going to end.

Not only do the cliches make the plot predictable, but the cliches run so deep that the story actually features countless two-dimensional characters that only exist because of the roles they were based off of in different fantasy stories. I could talk for hours about how many other tropes this movie hits, but I don't want to waste your time... I've been talking for awhile about how unoriginal this story feels, but that's not even the film's biggest problem. I would've forgiven everything, if this movie didn't have such a fast pace. The movie moves so quickly, and throws so many characters in your face that you don't ever have time to absorb everything that's going on, or even care about the conflict or the characters.

This movie is NOTHING but a tech movie. On that note, the animation and 3-D in this movie are the best I've ever seen in a feature animated film, but somehow, the amazing special effects were still not enough to save the emotionless plot. I know it's cool to hate Avatar right now, but the reason I defend Avatar, and the reason I'm referencing it, is because Avatar shares a lot of the same problems of this movie, like the un-original story and predictability; but Avatar's story moved slow enough, and long enough, to help us gather some depth to the setting, mythology, and characters; making us care about what was going to happen next, even though we already knew how the story was going to end. This movie, however, doesn't give us nearly enough time to care about anything, or anyone in the story. That's why I can't forgive this movie...

Now I know I'm being harsh to this movie. I know this movie was made for children; and I do think kids will like movie regardless of it's deep flaws. That said, I'm going to give this movie two ratings... If you have kids, or if you love 3-D movies, then I would recommend this movie as a LOW MATINÉE, because you'll definitely want to catch this movie in the theaters. For me, though, this movie was so boringly predictable and emotionally unsatisfying that it was eventually reduced to a bunch of beautifully rendered images with no deeper meaning. It is really hard for me to give this anything higher than a SOME OLE BULLS**T....