The animated Happily N'Ever After wants to be one of those hip fairy-tale satires. Not only does the Shrek series have that market cornered, those films tend to be clever and good-looking. This does not.

Vertically Challenged Credit: Lionsgate

A riff on Cinderella with a gimmick that could have worked in deft hands, this unengaging fantasy for the most part comes off as derivative and diluted.

The premise: a conscientious Wizard (voiced by George Carlin) has kept the happy ending equilibrium of Fairy Tale Land magically humming along for eons now. That leaves his trouble-prone assistants -- Munk the Pig (Wallace Shawn) and Mambo the Foxlike Something-or-Other (Andy Dick) -- bored. They're tired of Sleeping Beauty waking to her handsome prince and Jack outsmarting the beanstalk giant all the time.

So when the Wizard takes off on a Scottish vacation, you just know that Munk and Mambo are going to do something that, in the foxlike thing's words, "mixes it up a little, makes things edgier."

If only that happened to the film in general.

Anyway, enter Ella's wicked stepmother, Frieda (Sigourney Weaver, sounding like she's trying to have a good nasty time, but the dialogue defeats her). She grabs control of the Wizard's tower, summons all the ogres and trolls and other villains to take over FT Land's main castle, and sets about making sure that nobody ends up happy ever again.