CACrown ArchivesThe cinema collection
Menu
Research dossier · Arts & Letters

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole

2010 animated film directed by Zack Snyder

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 23, 2026
Entity authorityQ622763
Source-derived summary

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole is a 2010 animated fantasy action-adventure film directed by Zack Snyder. Based on the Guardians of Ga'Hoole book series by Kathryn Lasky, the film was written by John Orloff and Emil Stern and features the voices of Helen Mirren, Geoffrey Rush, Jim Sturgess, Hugo Weaving, Emily Barclay, Abbie Cornish, Ryan Kwanten, Anthony LaPaglia, Miriam Margolyes, Sam Neill, Richard Roxburgh, and David Wenham. An international co-production between Australia and the United States, the film was produced by Village Roadshow Pictures and Animal Logic, following their success with the 2006 film Happy Feet. In the film, Soren (Sturgess), a barn owl, is kidnapped and taken to St. Aegolius Academy for Orphaned Owls led by Metal Beak (Joel Edgerton) and Nyra (Mirren), where owlets are brainwashed into becoming supremacist soldiers. He befriends a fellow owl named Gylfie (Barclay), and they later escape the facility and sets out to find the Island of Ga'Hoole to rally the Guardians for war.

Legend of the Guardians was theatrically released in RealD 3D and IMAX 3D in North America on September 24, 2010, and in Australia on September 30, 2010, by Warner Bros. Pictures; it was accompanied by a new 3D Looney Tunes cartoon entitled Fur of Flying. The film received mixed reviews from critics, who praised its dark tone, animation and voice acting, but criticized the changes made to the source material and grossed $140.1 million worldwide against a budget of $80 million.

Plot

A young barn owl named Soren lives in the kingdom of Tyto Forest with his family and enjoys listening to his father's stories of the "Guardians of Ga'Hoole," valiant warrior owls who fought the evil Pure Ones.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole” is 2010 animated film directed by Zack Snyder. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Legend, Guardians and Owls, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA useful identification and reception guide that helps separate the work itself from editions, performances, ownership and later interpretation. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2010, 2006—that can be checked directly. The authority record carries competing date values—2010-09-19, 2010-09-24, 2010-09-30, 2010-10-07—which should remain separate until their references and qualifiers are resolved. For this dossier, Legend, Guardians and Owls is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “2010 animated film directed by Zack Snyder” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q622763. VIAF identifies the subject as 183372867. 4 of 7 selected statements include explicit references; 6 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2010 and 2006.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole primary sources, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole archive and Legend research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole”?
  2. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
  3. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.