by Victor Pryor
Cinapse Pick of the Week
Exactly what it sounds like, the Pick of the Week column is written up by the Cinapse team on rotation, focusing on films that are past the marketing cycle of either their theatrical release or their home video release. So maybe the pick of the week will be only a couple of years old. Or maybe it’ll be a silent film, cult classic, or forgotten gem. Cinapse is all about thoughtfully advocating film, new and old, and celebrating what we love no matter how marketable that may be. So join us as we share about what we’re discovering, and hopefully you’ll find some new films for your watch list, or some new validation that others out there love what you love too! Engage with us in the comments or on Twitter or Facebook! And now, our Cinapse Pick Of The Week…
Here is a generally unacknowledged truth about childhood: kids love to be scared.
Not all of them, of course, but certainly more than parents are willing to admit. If you delve into the defining moments of many grownups’ pop culture loves, you will find that some of the most influential will be the ones where they were faced with an image that burned itself into their brain, some horrible new thing they’re not yet ready to comprehend.
They cover their eyes with their hands.
And then they peek through, because they just have to know…
There are limits of course. Fifteen minutes of Hellraiser when you’re eight years old will do things to you.
Things you may never fully recover from.
Or… so I’ve heard.
But when it comes to kids’ movies, as long as a happy ending is in store, kids are more than willing, excited even, to experience a little bit of fear.
With that in mind, it is shocking to me that more people don’t sing the praises of Walter Murch’s Return To Oz.
Thirty years ago (and some 47 years after the original), Disney made an official sequel to The Wizard Of Oz. One imagines it was a huge deal at the time. And yet, the movie has somehow fallen into obscurity.
At best, it is a cult classic.
But it’s a movie that deserves to be a classic, full stop.
Loosely adapted from the second and third books on the ‘Oz’ series (The Marvelous Land Of Oz and Ozma Of Oz, respectively), Return is a far darker vision, taking the ending of the original to its unseemly, utterly logical conclusion:
Dorothy Gale is absolutely out of her mind.
Or at least, that would be the obvious reaction to a child who can’t stop talking about this dream she had six months ago.
This being the early part of the 20th century, the only logical conclusion is that, for her own sake, she must get treatment. Which, again, because it’s the early part of the 20th century, involves experimental electro-convulsive therapy.
Needless to say that after all these years, this is an extremely bold method of reintroducing us to our heroine.
Her inevitable escape during a thunderstorm leads her once again into the world of Oz, but it’s a very different Oz than the one we remember. The Yellow Brick Road is in ruins, and all the characters we love and remember have been turned to stone. And it falls to Dorothy and her new friends to get to the bottom of things.
And what new friends! A talking chicken, a robot, a Pumpkinhead, a flying moose/bed with wings… I mean, don’t get me wrong, lions are cool. But they’re not robots.
Fact.
And in this age of CGI creatures, of course I’m going to be utterly charmed by the brilliant design work and puppetry on display here. It’s tactile, lived in. Which goes for the world itself, which feels less like a soundstage (as the original did) and more like an actual place.
When I say Return To Oz is a darker film, let’s not confuse it for, say, Wild At Heart or anything; it’s still very much a kids’ movie. But it’s one that refuses to talk down to children, the way so many kids’ movies do.
Admittedly, my memories of Wizard Of Oz are fuzzy; it exists far more in the memory than it does as the cinematic perennial it’s become with time. But the movie led me to the books, and this new movie recaptures the ominous wonder that L. Frank Baum’s words filled me with. That sense that yes, there are definitely things in the dark. But if you face them with a brave heart and you don’t face them alone, things will work themselves out.
It’s an important message, and one that often gets lost in children’s films, which strain so hard to be inoffensive or to numb the viewer with empty sensation that the only message that gets received is “Your time is not valuable to us.”
Also: not for nothing, but in terms of onscreen Dorothys, it’s not even a contest Return blows Wizard completely out of the water.
Again, I’m working from a memory here. But my recollection is that Judy Garland (who was too old for the role in the first place), played everything with that overly earnest, studio-mandated affect. As ever, she’s putting on a show. Granted, it’s a damn good show, but… it’s still very much a performance.
On the other hand, in her film debut, we have Fairuza Balk, who is an actual child and 100% immersed in her weird reality.
Balk is so, so good as a slightly older, less naive version of Dorothy. Sincere and sad and utterly committed, Balk has a much more complicated role to play here and she absolutely nails it.
There’s just a ton of stuff to appreciate here: the aforementioned puppet designs are gorgeous, the villains are memorably weird (the Gnome King, as played by Nicol Williamson, is the stuff of nightmares), there’s genuine claymation by Will Vinton (and if you don’t know what claymation is, I weep for you), and I’ll reiterate: I can’t say enough about how good Balk is here.
Making a sequel to a stone cold classic is, generally speaking, a fool’s errand. And to attempt it with almost none of the characters that were so beloved in the first place is insane. And… well, Murch and Company pretty much reaped the consequences of said insanity. But with the fullness of time, and witnessed through the prism of a culture that is eating itself with no end in sight, Return To Oz is a work of art to be savored, a shining example of how much fun kids can have if they’re not afraid to be a little scared.
