Review: Elena of Avalor “Elena and the Secret of Avalor”

Find out how the hour-long special made out in this review.

Spoilers Below

Four months into the series, we finally get the origin story for Elena of Avalor. The hour-long movie is a crossover between Elena of Avalor and Sophia The First.

While sitting in class, Sophia gets a vision of a princess and her family being attacked by a sorceress. After school, as her family tries to decide where to go on vacation, Sophia finds out from a magical book in her secret library about the story of Elena, princess of Avalor. Elena has been trapped in the amulet on Sophia’s necklace for 41 years. Alakazar, the former royal sorcerer for the kingdom of Avalor, begs Sophia to help Elena escape the amulet. Sophia talks (well, sings) her family into going to Avalor for vacation and the adventure begins.

Once the royal family of Enchancia arrives in Avalor, they have to meet the current Queen, Shuriki. Only Sophia knows that Shuriki is the evil sorceress that imprisoned Elena. Shortly after the initial meeting, Sophia manages to get away from the rest of the family in order to get to Alakazar’s old house. With the help of the jaquins, of course. At the house, she meets Alakazar’s grandson, Mateo. Luckily, Mateo has been teaching himself magic so he can use his grandfather’s spell to call forth his animal spirit guide, Zuzo. Zuzo tells Sophia that she has to take Suriki’s wand and the magic amulet to a statue in order to release Elena.

Amazingly, Sophia manages to accomplish all of her tasks and free Elena. But now Elena needs to free her kingdom from Shuriki. At first, Elena attempts to attack Shuriki with her own wand. However, Elena can’t use magic. When she retreats back to Mateo’s house, she finds that she does not have to defeat Shuriki alone. The entire kingdom wants to fight for their princess and their freedom.

Elena and Sophia sneak back into the castle in order to free Sophia’s family from the dungeon. They are successful, thanks to some help from Armando. Meanwhile, Mateo takes another spell from his grandfather to free Elena’s family from a painting in the main hall. Once everyone has been freed, they all ride the jaquins back to the townspeople to storm the castle. However, Shuriki is ready for them now that she has her wand back. But Esteban, Elena’s cousin, grabs the wand from Shuriki before she can use it. He tosses the wand to Elena, who breaks it in front of everyone. As her magic fades, Shuriki returns to her old age. Distraught, she falls over the castle wall and into the waterfall below. The kingdom of Avalor rejoices to have their proper princess back again.

Yes, this movie explained a lot about how Elena got into the amulet, which we saw in the first episode of the series but it would have been better to have this information before the series started. The entire movie was told as a flashback, where Elena was telling the story to Naomi in order to figure out what to do with the broken wand. I feel that this would have been better as the premiere episode of the series instead of sitting through it months after it started. On the plus side, it was a pretty entertaining movie. There didn’t seem to be a ton of fluff stuffed in to keep the story moving. Though there were some new jaquins that appeared that we never see again. I demand more jaquins in the series!

SCORE
8/10