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Can the major studios still make magic? From the looks of "Oz the Great and Powerful," a dispiriting, infuriating jumble of big money, small ideas and ugly visuals, the answer seems to be no — unless, perhaps, the man behind the curtain is Martin Scorsese or James Cameron. The Walt Disney Company is the studio lurking behind "Oz," and, as usual, it is banking that it can leverage this 3-D prehistory of the Wizard of Oz (James Franco) for its wonderful world of cross-promotional marketing and ancillary revenue streams. With so much riding on this "Oz" it's a surprise that the results are so uninspired — or given Disney's recent run with the likes of "Alice in Wonderland," maybe not.

The bigger bummer, though, is that the studio that has enchanted generations with Tinker Bell and at least a few plucky princesses has backed a movie that has such backward ideas about female characters that it makes the 1939 "Wizard of Oz" look like a suffragist classic. Which it was, in its charming way: L. Frank Baum, who wrote the 1900 book "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and its 13 follow-ups, was the son-in-law of the pioneering feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, and her influence permeates the Oz books, which take flight with a brave girl who saves her friends and their land. Baum's second book, "The Marvelous Land of Oz," even features a parodic take on the suffrage movement, with a female general, Jinjur, leading an all-girl army equipped with knitting needles.

"Friends, fellow-citizens and girls," Jinjur declares, "we are about to begin our great Revolt against the men of Oz!" Too bad they didn't storm Disney next.

If they had, maybe they could have jabbed some sense into the director Sam Raimi, best known for the first "Spider-Man" movies, and his five male producers, and then used those needles to shred Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire's script. A little sisterly outrage would have been appropriate because, among other offenses, the filmmakers have thrown over Dorothy — one of the greatest heroines in children's literature and Hollywood cinema — for prequel about a two-bit magician and Lothario with female troubles. In Baum's first book and in the 1939 film the witches are powerful forces for good and wickedness in the Land of Oz. In "Oz the Great and Powerful," a witch not only falls for the man Oz, she also turns green from envy when he cozies up to a pretty blonde. (Yeah, the baddie is a brunette.)

It starts better than it ends, partly because Mr. Raimi opens by paying tribute to the 1939 film — with black-and-white visuals and a square screen — when he introduces the young wizard, Oscar Diggs, or Oz. Fast talking and promisingly shady, Oz works in a dusty Kansas circus, hustling rubes with doves and peddling sweet nothings to the ladies. One miss, Annie (Michelle Williams), stands out, but — in a worrisome sign — he can't commit. When another woman's lover chases him, Oz hops in a hot-air balloon and, after riding out a storm, arrives in a garishly hued, digitally rendered land that brings to mind the (bad) cover of a prog rock album and announces that, while we aren't in Kansas anymore, neither are we in movie dreamland.

You know that place: It's over the rainbow and once upon a time, across a crowded room and in a galaxy far, far away. It's where dreams come true, and it's nowhere to be found in "Oz the Great and Powerful." Instead there is a little romance, some adventure, too much jokey patter, a rainbow coalition of Munchkins and enough digital wizardry effectively to make this an animated movie. Even the troika of witches — Theodora (Mila Kunis), Evanora (Rachel Weisz) and Glinda (Ms. Williams) — look as if they have received some unnecessary digital facial smoothing. They're as eerily gleaming and artificial looking as the most the movie's most visually arresting character, a porcelain doll, China Girl (voiced by Joey King), whom Oz rescues with kindness and glue.