Mia and her grandfather travel via a car to a resort near a coast. However, her vacation cannot last long since the fantasy land Centopia is invaded by the army of a toad, Toxor, who uses purple gas to transform everyone into his brainwashed, blue minion. Mia transforms into an elf and enters Centopia again, joining forces with her unicorn Lyra, warrior Iko and clumsy inventor Phuddle. Mia finds out her deceased parents came from Centopia. She uses special stones to transform Toxor into a normal, good personality, and thus saves Centopia. Mia returns back to the real world and goes to jump with her grandfather into the sea.
Seven years after the live action-animated fantasy TV series "Mia and Me" concluded, this feature length film was made, yet such a long pause wasn't unfortunately used by the screenwriters to conjure up an especially inspired plot. "Mia and Me: Hero of Centopia" is disappointingly thin and meager, capitulating too much towards the routine, offering only the bare minimum: Mia travels to Centopia, defeats the bad guy, leaves, the end. It's all too schematic, without any layer of ingenuity, humor or creativity to upgrade and enrich such a standard good vs. evil story. A big problem is that 90% of the movie plays out in the computer-animated fantasyland Centopia, while only 10% are invested into the live action segment. In the TV series, the live action parts were always the best, having charming moments of Mia trying to find excuses to leave from school or trying to keep her elf identity a secret from other students. By having only two characters appear in the live action segment, Mia and grandfather, this was too little to have better character dynamics or interaction. No students, no school, no other characters. The animated segment is too straight-forward, featuring only generic fighting of the characters against the villain, while attempts at humor are mostly a hit-or-miss affair, except for one good joke, the one involving a unicorn that can talk, so he demonstrates that he knows also other languagues of ducks, pigs and crabs, yet he admits that crabs don't speak but just make "noises".
Grade:+
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