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There isn’t anything observably wrong with Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, except that I didn’t care what was happening. This latter is, of course, sort of the Main Deal in these parts, so it’s unsettling not to be able to pinpoint where the rupture is. Nothing seems to be broken, but the break is in here somewhere.

Script? Good. A solid, if never exemplary, Campbellian monomyth – about owls this time, but it might just as well be those damned penguins or Luke Skywalker or somebody else. Our lead is Soren, a teen (?) owl who gets pushed out of his nest (literally/figuratively/etc.), is abducted by the Bad Owls, and has to go find the Good Owls and wage Owl Battle. All fine.

Voice performance? Uniformly strong, and these Aussies tickle me pink – it’s actually a nice, individual choice in the landscape of animated films, to have all of these particular creatures sound this particular way. It feels right, for example, when a mean-as-hell old Screech owl shows up with the voice of Geoffrey Rush. Who would you rather hear in that role?

And the look of the thing? Hell damn fart, son - this is, visually, the handsomest film Zack Snyder has yet generated, and that’s saying something. It’s also his least frenetic, even though the extreme speed ramps start up immediately (the first is less than 30 seconds into the film). In all other regards, the swooping geometry of the owl lifestyle and their various encounters/battles/wars is capably rendered by Snyder and his CGI work crew. There are even, by my mark, two flight moments in the film – both involving the heroic efforts of young Soren - which achieve a pretty substantial “wow.” Thanks for the bliss-outs – and thanks for confirming that The Golden Compass fucked up the armoured-animals angle through its own incompetence, rather than any inherent flaw in the concept.

And yet, I fell asleep three times. Maybe it’s the 3-D? In spite of being conceived for the format rather than post-converted, Ga’Hoole gains nothing by its so-called immersion technique; this is a film of bright colours and exciting movements, and watching through fog-tinted windows is just a disservice to the visual design and, perhaps, my own emotional engagement. Perhaps the archetypal story, too, is a bit too archetypal – it never bends the rules or offers up a twisted take on the classical tropes, except that this time it’s about owls.

And maybe, sad to say, owls are just crappy heroes. They’re adorable, but not in the way that WALL-E or Toothless were adorable. They don’t invite you in. How could they? They’re birds. We yearn for flight because we are so unalike.