Animation Station: Rise of the Guardians Is Saved by Its Ending.

Posted on April 18, 2025 by stationmaster

I feel a bit guilty that so many of my Animation Station blog posts have been about Disney and so few have been about Dreamworks, especially since I’m planning on doing another one about a Disney movie soon as well as an Adaptation Station post that just happens to be about an animated Disney film. The only Dreamworks animated movie I really feel like writing about though is Rise of the Guardians (2012.) That’s not to say I consider it the best one or, for that matter, the worst. My favorite is Kung Fu Panda if it isn’t one of their collaborations with Aardman or one of the movies I’ve already covered here. But I don’t feel like I have anything to write about those movies that others haven’t already expressed better or will express better in the future. But I do have things to write about Rise of the Guardians. This movie wasn’t a critical or a commercial hit upon its release but has since gained a following. I can understand both of those things.

Rise of the Guardians is based, somewhat loosely, on the book series The Guardians of Childhood by William Joyce, a children’s author who has had a surprisingly big impact on American animated films. The premise is that Santa Claus (voiced by Alec Baldwin), the Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman), the Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher) and the Sandman (voiceless) are powerful immortal beings tasked with keeping childhood a magical, rewarding time of life. But their ancient foe, long thought defeated, has reemerged. Pitch Black the Boogeyman (Jude Law) seeks to destroy children’s belief in the Guardians and fill their lives with fear. To combat this threat, the mysterious Man in the Moon chooses rootless winter spirit Jack Frost (Chris Pine) to be a new Guardian.

Now there are a lot of holes I could pick in all this. It’s presented as a terrible thing for kids to lose faith in the Easter Bunny, but I don’t know how many actually care about him in real life. Easter just doesn’t have that much of an interesting secular mythology compared to Christmas. The movie even jokes about the Bunny not being as big a deal as Santa early on but then turns right around and presents him as a huge deal. I’m pretty sure even as kids, we all knew the Tooth Fairy was a joke, and the Sandman is considered just an expression like Jack Frost. The only one of these characters in whom a lot of kids believe is Santa Claus and I’m not even sure how true that is nowadays. The reason people can see the four Guardians and not Jack is that they believe in them but since all those Guardians are supposed to do their jobs unseen, isn’t that a rather counterproductive system? If it’s so important for children to believe in them, why don’t the Guardians make a public appearance as soon as they hear of Pitch’s threat?[1]The idea that what they need is for kids to believe in them without proof is appealing but the story ends up contradicting it. And if the Guardians lose their powers if everyone stops believing in them, wouldn’t Jack be more of an asset if he didn’t become a Guardian and therefore didn’t share their weakness?

OK, enough nitpicking. On to more serious critique.

When you go into a Dreamworks movie featuring Santa Claus as a muscular, hard bitten, saber wielding warrior with a thick Russian accent and the Easter Bunny as a muscular, hard bitten, boomerang wielding warrior with a thick Australian accent, you go in with certain expectations, mainly the expectation that this will be a comedy.[2]Not necessarily a good comedy, mind you, but a comedy. But Rise of the Guardians weirdly plays its goofy premise as a straight fantasy adventure. The prologue, in which Jack Frost comes to life with no memory of his origins or identity and finds he’s invisible to everyone, could have come from a drama and when we finally do learn about Jack’s origins, they’re shockingly dark and come with the implication that the other Guardians had dark origin stories too. The movie does display a sense of humor more frequently than the books by William Joyce which also had this strange disconnect between premise and tone, but no more frequently than your average drama with comic relief. Honestly, I’m not even sure at what audience this film is aimed. I feel like kids young enough to really believe in Santa Claus, etc., aren’t ready for this kind of action-adventure and kids old enough for it wouldn’t be caught dead going to see a movie about Santa Claus, etc. Rise of the Guardians feels like a kids’ movie but the theme of protecting childhood innocence seems like something that would only resonate with adults.[3]That’s probably why the movie is titled Rise of the Guardians even though The Guardians of Childhood would have fit the content better. Yet in the end, the movie actually achieves the mythic power for which Joyce strove in his book series and which, in my opinion, he largely failed to attain.[4]I really only read the whole thing because I wanted to be able to compare it to the movie on this blog.

The film’s premise may be wacky, but its narrative is formulaic. (This paragraph is naturally going to spoil much of it, but I feel like you can predict most of this.) An antihero gets asked to join a group of heroes. The antihero refuses. Then the villain does something terrible, establishing himself as a serious threat and giving the antihero a selfish motivation to help the heroes. The antihero bonds with the heroes and becomes more genuinely heroic. But the antihero messes up[5]Remember that selfish motivation I mentioned? with major consequences and the heroes decide they Never Should Have Trusted Him. The villain approaches the antihero and offers to let him join him, saying They’re Not So Different. The antihero refuses. Then the antihero has a big revelation and saves the day. To be fair, that’s not a bad structure for a story. I don’t feel that Rise of the Guardians does anything too interesting with it until the last act though.

The movie’s visuals are basically fine. Dreamworks, at this point, had enough money and was lavish enough when it came to throwing it around that this was never going to look that bad. It doesn’t look as beautiful as might be wished though. The various domains of each Guardian just aren’t as magical or appealing as they should be.

Santa’s workshop
The Tooth Fairy’s palace
The Easter Bunny’s warren

And the character designs all fall somewhere between bland and vaguely ugly.

The most fun part of the movie visually is the character of the Sandman who communicates entirely through images made of floating sand that hover above his head.

Alec Baldwin and Hugh Jackman make little impression as the voices of Santa Claus[6]He’s mostly just called North which made more sense in the books. and the Easter Bunny. In all fairness though, the script by playwright David Lindsay-Abaire doesn’t give them much interesting with which to work. Isla Fisher is a bit more fun as the Tooth Fairy but that may be just because she gets most of the movie’s better jokes. Chris Pine’s performance as Jack is a mixed bag. Sometimes he’s great, especially towards the end. At other times, he just sounds bored and mumbly. He also sounds far too old for this youthful character.[7]I feel the same way about Jay Baruchel as the voice of the lead in the original How to Train Your Dragon. The best vocal performance is that of Jude Law as Pitch Black who makes for a good cartoon villain. If the movie were just a little better at creating a creepy atmosphere, he’d be a great one. His character design being vaguely ugly even makes sense for the character.

There are some clever touches like Jack Frost having an antagonistic relationship with the Easter Bunny, a figure associated with springtime, but despite holding the world record for being on the naughty list, having a good relationship with Santa, another winter-related character. I also like that the movie has Jack apologize for insulting the Bunny as part of his character development when I probably wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t. And the surprising decision to make the Man in the Moon an invisible, Godlike presence rather than characterizing him like the other mythical figures works well.

So far, I’ve made the movie sound middling. Why did I feel like writing about it after all these years then? What makes it interesting besides the oddly serious execution of a goofy premise? Well, as I’ve indicated above, I feel the conclusion really elevates what came before, tying together the movie’s themes of finding one’s purpose in life, facing childhood fears and the importance of childlike faith in an emotionally resonant way. But to explain all that, I’d have to spoil the whole thing for those who haven’t watched the movie. On the other hand, if I don’t explain it, I risk overhyping it. People might very well read this blog post[8]OK, not super likely., become curious, go watch the movie and then wonder what on earth I meant. The following paragraph is my attempt at a compromise, both getting into some specifics and keeping the description broad. If you’d really like to see the movie unspoiled, just skip it.

Pitch’s goal throughout the story is to get children everywhere to believe in and therefore fear him. An unspoken question is what are the Guardians supposed to do about that? Should they try to make kids believe Pitch doesn’t exist when he obviously does? It turns out that the way to defeat the Boogeyman isn’t so much to disbelieve in him as it is to not fear him. That’s where Jack comes into the picture. Another question in the movie, this one spoken, is how is he supposed to be one of the Guardians when they reward the nice and punish the naughty whereas he shuts down schools and encourages kids to throw snowballs at each other? It turns out mischief is useful for helping children overcome fear. I am reminded of The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis. The book’s narrator confides that, as a demon, it’s his job to tempt humans with fun but he doesn’t really like it, saying, “(fun) has wholly undesirable tendencies. It promotes charity, courage, contentment and many other evils.” I lied when I called Jude Law’s vocal performance the best in the movie. That honor really goes to Dakota Goyo as the young boy with whom Jack bonds in the film’s last act.[9]This footnote is really going to give away something specific, especially if you’ve been paying attention but I feel compelled to include it anyway. I especially like that when Jack finally … Continue reading

All that plays out beautifully and it’s why I’m fond of Rise of the Guardians. Great conclusions don’t always save so-so works of art in my experience, especially not when they don’t connect much to do with what precedes them. But the climax and ending of Rise of the Guardians, again, satisfyingly ties together themes the story has already established, elevating what came before in retrospect. And honestly, while I’ve ragged on this aspect of the movie, there’s something endearingly quixotic about its insistence that belief in the Easter Bunny is vital to a child’s mental well-being.

References

References
↑1 The idea that what they need is for kids to believe in them without proof is appealing but the story ends up contradicting it.
↑2 Not necessarily a good comedy, mind you, but a comedy.
↑3 That’s probably why the movie is titled Rise of the Guardians even though The Guardians of Childhood would have fit the content better.
↑4 I really only read the whole thing because I wanted to be able to compare it to the movie on this blog.
↑5 Remember that selfish motivation I mentioned?
↑6 He’s mostly just called North which made more sense in the books.
↑7 I feel the same way about Jay Baruchel as the voice of the lead in the original How to Train Your Dragon.
↑8 OK, not super likely.
↑9 This footnote is really going to give away something specific, especially if you’ve been paying attention but I feel compelled to include it anyway. I especially like that when Jack finally gets someone to believe in him, he’s not trying to do so. Instead, he’s trying to help another Guardian and his least favorite one at that.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Second Adaptees Awards Ceremony

Posted on April 16, 2025 by stationmaster

Remember when I did that anniversary post that was like an awards ceremony for characterizations in all the movies/miniseries/plays the blog had covered thus far? Wasn’t that fun? Well, I thought it was fun, and since I probably won’t do the blog that much longer, I wanted to do it again. Let’s go over some rules.

This is just for things the blog has covered since the first ceremony. Otherwise, a number of winners would be the same and that’d be boring. Also, this is only for actors/characters from things that have been the main subjects of blog posts, not ones I just mentioned in passing. For example, I’ve mentioned that I love Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and Sleeping Beauty (1959), but I haven’t done any posts specifically analyzing either of them. That’s why neither is represented here.

I’m excluding any actors/characters from the Faerie Tale Theatre episodes I’ve reviewed for the same reason I excluded any from The Storyteller last time. However, since I’ve now reviewed feature-length Peanuts cartoons, characters from them are finally eligible.

This was harder than the first Adaptees because there were more characters who fit into multiple categories. For example, Cyrano de Bergerac could easily have won in the antihero category and in the woobie category.[1]I ultimately put him in neither. I decided that each fictional figure could only win in one category even if it’s an oversimplification of them. There is one exception I made which I’ll explain in a footnote when I get to it.

I deregistered the best female woobie category since I just haven’t blogged about many such characters since the last Adaptees[2]The only ones I could come up with were Amanda Ryan’s Agnes Wickfield and Michelle Stacy’s Penny. and I came close to doing the same for tragic (male) villains for the same reason.[3]Willoughby from Sense and Sensibility is a pretty great character but the only adaptation this blog has covered in depth fumbled his characterization. On the other hand, I’ve also added a new category solely so that I could include more great character portrayals, and I’ve expanded the possible number of runners up from two to three for the same reason.

With no further ado…

Best Purely Heroic Heroes: Vincent Martella’s Phineas Flynn and Thomas Brodie-Sangster’s Ferb Fletcher[4]I know it’s cheating to give the award to both, but neither character would work as well without the other and it’s in their characters to want to share it.

“Thank you, thank you, everyone! I just have to say I’m a lucky guy!” “Actually, what I’d love to do is direct.”

Runners Up: Dee Bradley Baker’s Perry the Platypus, Ben Barnes’s Caspian X[5]You could argue this character isn’t quite pure enough for the role, but I did give the award to a version of Nicholas Nickleby last time in spite of his faults. Of course, there’s a good … Continue reading

Best Antihero: Anthony Calf’s Pip

“For God’s sake, don’t be so good to me!”

Runners Up: Jeremy Irvine’s Pip, Will Poulter’s Eustace Scrubb

Best Hero That’s Hard to Classify: Peter Dinklage’s Cyrano de Bergerac

“Live for other people’s opinions of me? No, thank you. I prefer a different life. My own.”

Runners Up: Dev Patel’s David Copperfield, Skandar Keynes’s Edmund Pevensie[6]In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he was an antihero but in Prince Caspian, he’s more purely heroic, so I thought this was the best category for him. I freely admit the writing and … Continue reading

Best Purely Heroic Heroine: Susan Franklyn’s Biddy[7]I know, I know, she’s more of a supporting character but I prefer the character so much to any of the candidates who really are the heroines that I had to give her the award.

“You’d get on very well (without me), I’m sure.”

Runners Up: Rosalind Eleazer’s Agnes Wickfield, Georgie Henley’s Lucy Pevensie[8]See my comments about Caspian arguably not being pure enough for this category and about Edmund not being as great in the third Narnia movie as in the first two.

Best Antiheroine: Kim Thomson’s Estella

“I must be taken as I have been made.”

Runner Up: Ashley Tisdale’s Candace Flynn, Beatrice Schneider’s Imogene Herdman

Best Heroine That’s Hard to Classify: Anna Popplewell’s Susan Pevensie

“Thanks.”

Runners Up: Joanna Page’s Dora Spenlow[9]I’m more of a fan of the literary character of Dora than I am of the literary character of Susan. But in the miniseries, Dora isn’t quite as rounded as in the book, I wanted someone from … Continue reading, Judy Greer’s Grace Bradley

Best Villain You Love to Hate: Nicholas Lyndhurst’s Uriah Heep[10]Roland Young’s Uriah Heep is more what I imagine reading the book and Ben Whishaw’s has a nice layer of tragedy. But this Uriah gives me the most creeps.

“Oh no… ambition ain’t for me. A person like myself had better not aspire.”

Runners Up: Trevor Eve’s Edward Murdstone, Sergio Castellitto’s Miraz, Damian Alcazar’s Sopespian

Best Tragic Villain: Oliver Milburn’s James Steerforth

“You see right through me…”

Runners Up: Chris Pine’s Prince, Dan Povenmire’s Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz[11]OK, I know he’s far too ridiculous to count as a tragic villain and, anyway, he gets a happy ending eventually. But he really is kind of tragic in his farcical way.

Best Villainess You Love to Hate: Bernadette Peters’s Stepmother[12]By which I mean Cinderella’s stepmother as portrayed by Bernadette Peters.

“Our family has always been known for its fascinating women.”

Runners Up: Zoe Wanamaker’s Jane Murdstone, Tilda Swinton’s White Witch, Jean Marsh’s Mombi

Best Tragic Villainess: Jean Simmons’s Miss Havisham

“Can you believe that there’s anything human in my heart?”

Runners Up: Helena Bonham Carter’s Miss Havisham, Cherie Lunghi’s Mrs. Steerforth, Clare Holman’s Rosa Dartle

Best Woobie (Male or Female): Pete Robbins’s Charlie Brown

“This whole thing makes me feel like I’m being drafted!”

Runners Up: Daniel Radcliffe’s David Copperfield[13]Here’s that exception. I’m placing a version of the character as a child in the woobie category because his character basically exists for us to feel sorry for him and a version of him as … Continue reading Noah Schnapp’s Charlie Brown

Best Mentor Figure (Male or Female): Maggie Smith’s Betsey Trotwood

“Never be mean in anything. Never be false. Never be cruel…It’s just a little dust in my eye. It’s nothing, it’s nothing!”

Runners Up: Annette Crosbie’s Fairy Godmother[14]By which I mean Cinderella’s fairy godmother as portrayed…oh, you know., Edie Adams’s Fairy Godmother

Best Comedic Supporting Character (Male): Bill Melendez’s Snoopy

“Hey!”

Runners Up: Bob Hoskins’s Wilkins Micawber, Glenn Gilger’s Linus Van Pelt, Hugh Laurie’s Mr. Dick

Best Comedic Supporting Character (Female): Imelda Staunton’s Emma Micawber

“I never will desert Mr. Micawber!”

Runners Up: Dawn French’s Mrs. Crupp[15]Part of me wants to give her the award since she’s funnier than Mrs. Micawber but Mrs. Micawber is more developed and interesting as a character., Carole Shelley’s Lady Kluck

Best Heroic Supporting Character (Male or Female): John Rhys-Davies’s Joe Gargery

“Astonishing! This is very liberal of you, Pip, old chap, and such is received in grateful welcome though never looked for!”

Runners Up: James Thorton’s Ham Peggotty, Alun Armstrong’s Daniel Peggotty, Ken Stott’s Trufflehunter

Well, in the immortal words of Porky Pig, “That’s all, folks!” Hope you enjoyed the ceremony. Sorry you’ll have to throw your own afterparty.

References

References
↑1 I ultimately put him in neither.
↑2 The only ones I could come up with were Amanda Ryan’s Agnes Wickfield and Michelle Stacy’s Penny.
↑3 Willoughby from Sense and Sensibility is a pretty great character but the only adaptation this blog has covered in depth fumbled his characterization.
↑4 I know it’s cheating to give the award to both, but neither character would work as well without the other and it’s in their characters to want to share it.
↑5 You could argue this character isn’t quite pure enough for the role, but I did give the award to a version of Nicholas Nickleby last time in spite of his faults. Of course, there’s a good argument to be made that Caspian’s dark side is presented as a serious issue in the way Nicholas’s is not but I really wanted to include him and it’s my blog.
↑6 In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he was an antihero but in Prince Caspian, he’s more purely heroic, so I thought this was the best category for him. I freely admit the writing and Keynes’s performance weren’t nearly as great in the third Narnia movie. But they were great enough in the first two that I had to give Edmund a mention.
↑7 I know, I know, she’s more of a supporting character but I prefer the character so much to any of the candidates who really are the heroines that I had to give her the award.
↑8 See my comments about Caspian arguably not being pure enough for this category and about Edmund not being as great in the third Narnia movie as in the first two.
↑9 I’m more of a fan of the literary character of Dora than I am of the literary character of Susan. But in the miniseries, Dora isn’t quite as rounded as in the book, I wanted someone from the Narnia movies to win something, and Susan is arguably one of the most consistently well written characters in them. Also, I was attracted to Anna Popplewell as a kid.
↑10 Roland Young’s Uriah Heep is more what I imagine reading the book and Ben Whishaw’s has a nice layer of tragedy. But this Uriah gives me the most creeps.
↑11 OK, I know he’s far too ridiculous to count as a tragic villain and, anyway, he gets a happy ending eventually. But he really is kind of tragic in his farcical way.
↑12 By which I mean Cinderella’s stepmother as portrayed by Bernadette Peters.
↑13 Here’s that exception. I’m placing a version of the character as a child in the woobie category because his character basically exists for us to feel sorry for him and a version of him as an adult in another category since he’s more complex.
↑14 By which I mean Cinderella’s fairy godmother as portrayed…oh, you know.
↑15 Part of me wants to give her the award since she’s funnier than Mrs. Micawber but Mrs. Micawber is more developed and interesting as a character.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Protected: My Thoughts on the Controversy Around Netflix’s Upcoming Narnia Movie

Posted on April 9, 2025 by stationmaster

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments Off on Protected: My Thoughts on the Controversy Around Netflix’s Upcoming Narnia Movie

Sense and Adaptability

Posted on March 14, 2025 by stationmaster

Was I overly harsh when I called screenwriter Andrew Davies’s 2008 miniseries adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility “so-so?”

I admit it. I gave into the allure of alliteration, and I was trying to contrast it with his 1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries, which is one of the best adapted Jane Austen adaptations out there. It’s not a huge favorite of mine since Pride and Prejudice isn’t my favorite Austen book and even if it were, Austen isn’t really my favorite author. But the writing really does a great job of replicating her style while still feeling like a TV series. The writing for Davies’s Sense and Sensibility doesn’t capture its source material anywhere near as well. In fact, I wouldn’t even say it does as good a job on that score as his Emma adaptation.[1]Though I should stress I feel Sense and Sensibility (2008) works much better as piece of entertainment. I doubt I’d ever have guessed they were written by the same person. But there’s a difference between not being as well written and faithful as the 1995 Pride and Prejudice and not being well written or faithful at all.

Sense and Sensibility is about the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne.[2]There’s also a third sister, Margaret (played by Lucy Boynton in the 2008 miniseries), but she’s not important. While the story is unquestionably romance-driven, it focuses on the relationship between those two gentlewomen to an unusual extent for Austen.[3]That’s not to say Jane Austen never wrote about relationships between women. Far from it. She just usually focused more on relationships between men and women. While the sisters are loyal and devoted to each other, they also frequently rag on each other’s different sensibilities. Swoony Marianne believes people should be ruled by emotion whereas practical Elinor believes emotions should be ruled by reason and morality. And the book champions Elinor’s philosophy over Marianne’s. That was not a universally accepted position back when it was first written[4]Austen lived during the Romantic era and the emotionalism of Victorian culture was on the horizon. and it’s become even less popular nowadays. Marianne begins the story believing that “to aim at the restraint of sentiments” to be “not merely an unnecessary effort but a disgraceful subjection of reason to commonplace and mistaken notions.” Modern therapy culture, which has been on the rise in the 2020s, goes even further, considering the suppression of emotions to be downright unhealthy. The average Disney or Pixar movie (cf. Frozen, Inside Out, Encanto, Turning Red) all but states that telling children to hide their feelings for the sake of the family-the very thing for which Sense and Sensibility heroizes Elinor and condemns Marianne for failing to do-as the worst thing a parent can do.[5]In fairness, most, if not all of those movies, also show unrestrained emotions, such as anger, having negative consequences. But few, if any of them, really seem to want viewers to notice that. It may sound strange, even silly, to cite children’s movies in this context. Wouldn’t it make more sense to contrast Sense and Sensibility with the latest romance novel? But I feel like citing children’s media shows just how early people these days are ingesting the suppressing-feelings-is-bad message. These are very earnest children’s movies. It’s not like telling kids to believe in Santa Claus.

Commentators are quick to assure us that Elinor and Marianne are really portrayed as having individual strengths and weaknesses and that what Austen is really advocating is a happy medium between sense and sensibility.[6]In her culture “sensibility” meant something like sensitivity. It’s a good thing she wasn’t writing today because Sense and Sensitivity would be a horrible title. There’s some truth in this[7]As the book nears its conclusion, we get more moments where Elinor visibly betrays her emotions, and they aren’t moments where we’re meant to dislike her. but it’s very different from the impression one gets from actually reading the book. The clear, overall message is “don’t be a Marianne; be an Elinor” and while it’s not always the main theme, this is also the overarching philosophy of Jane Austen’s oeuvre.[8]Persuasion, her last completed novel and probably her “girliest,” is something of an exception. The heroine’s biggest regret at the beginning is that she didn’t take a … Continue reading Honestly, that’s why I think it’s important in this age of self-expression for us to read Sense and Sensibility. It’s telling us something we don’t want or expect to hear. Another recurring theme in Austen is that the people who tell us those things are the one who helps us grow the most.[9]The book A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship and the Things That Really Matter by William Deresiewicz comes highly recommended in this context. It recently occurred to me that Neil Postman’s comments on George Orwell vs. Aldous Huxley apply to Charles Dickens vs. Jane Austen. To use his phrasing, Dickens feared that what we fear will ruin us whereas Austen feared that what we desire will ruin us. I’m a much more enthusiastic fan of Dickens than I am of Austen, but I feel like her message is more what the modern world needs right now.

Of course, I’m one to talk! While I might admire Elinor in theory, in practice, I’m a Marianne. Anyway, let’s get going.

Ironically, just as the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie had to compete with Davies’s acclaimed miniseries adaptation for the minds and hearts of fans, his Sense and Sensibility had to compete with the acclaimed 1995 movie adaptation. I actually read Emma Thompson’s academy award winning screenplay online before I either saw the film or read the book. I adored it, only to be rather disappointed by my first viewing of the movie itself. I don’t know if it was a problem with the sound mixing or the actors’ performances, but I found I had to constantly strain my ears to hear the dialogue and when you have to strain to hear jokes, they aren’t very funny-which is a real shame because they’re great on paper. Take this exchange between Marianne, her mother and Elinor over the dashing young man they’ve just met.

Marianne: He expressed himself well, did he not?
Mrs. Dashwood: With great decorum and honor.
Marianne: And spirit and wit and feeling.
Elinor: And economy-ten words at most.

But you’d never know from watching it that the movie is supposed to be a comedy. The quiet line deliveries of the main actors combined with the lack of music for much of the movie’s first half make it a struggle for me to follow or get invested in the story.[10]Of course, you could argue that keeping music to a minimum fits the message of “be less emotional.” I probably sound like Marianne with these criticisms. I know Ang Lee is a highly acclaimed director, and the movie is beloved. I wish I loved it too and I’ve tried to do so more than once. But I always find it a tastefully shot boor.

While the writing for the 2008 miniseries isn’t nearly as quotable, at least I don’t have to turn the volume up to the maximum level to understand it. And while film snobs doubtless find John Alexander’s directing inferior to Ang Lee’s, I find it much more engaging to watch. And while there are few actresses whom I consider more charismatic than Emma Thompson, who besides writing the 1995 screenplay also played Elinor, Hattie Morahan looks far closer to the heroine’s age, making her emotional maturity more impressive. Charity Wakefield is likewise a good Marianne.

Dan Stevens and David Morrisey are appealing as the heroines’ respective love interests

and Mark Gatiss, Claire Skinner and Anna Madeley shine as the hissable villains. Sense and Sensibility boasts some of the best of those character types that Austen ever created.[11]The most interesting of them is the Dashwood sisters’ greedy half-brother, John, since he’s the only one who regularly shows glimmers of a conscience.

There’s only one actor here who’s really miscast but I’ll get to him later since he’s the biggest problem with this miniseries.

As I mentioned, this adaptation doesn’t do the best job of making its original dialogue blend with Austen’s. In the first episode, Elinor’s love interest, Edward Ferrars, describes himself as “a ship without an anchor” after his father’s death, which sounds too poetic for an Austen character. (I also suspect the literary Marianne would condemn it for being “a commonplace phrase.”) Weirder is a line in the third episode comparing Marianne to a wild horse who needs to be tamed by her true love, Col. Brandon. Not only does that not sound like something Jane Austen would have written, isn’t it rather offensive to modern sensibilities? To its credit, the series takes plenty of its dialogue from the book though it doesn’t choose the funniest lines. This is probably the least funny of Andrew Davies’s Jane Austen adaptations.[12]His Emma just manages to be funnier in my opinion. That’s disappointing considering how hilarious the book’s biting sarcasm was. In particular, the various annoying social butterflies that plague the Dashwoods with their friendliness, such as Sir John Middleton (Mark Williams), Mrs. Jennings (Linda Bassett) and Mrs. Palmer (Tabitha Wady), aren’t nearly as entertaining as they are in the book or the 1995 movie. This is especially disappointing to me since as an introvert, I appreciate Austen’s skewering of annoyingly friendly people.

Lest that sound too contemptuous, one of the heartwarming things about the literary Sense and Sensibility was how the annoyingly friendly characters genuinely cared about the Dashwoods and rallied around them during the crises of the climax.[13]As did the bitterly caustic Mr. Palmer (Tim McMullan in the miniseries.) Except for Mrs. Jennings, we sadly don’t see any of that in this adaptation and even with her, we don’t see it much. I wish the miniseries had spent less of its time on montages of the main characters’ daily lives and more time developing the supporting cast. As it is, I’m ready for the series to be done well before the last episode is over. To be fair though, I also feel that the original book could have stood to be shorter, so I guess that’s just accurate adaptation. Still, I’d say the series could have made better use of its runtime than it does.

On the plus side, this adaptation includes the memorable characters of Edward Ferrars’s tyrannical mother (Jean Marsh) and the ditzy Anne Steele (entertaining Daisy Haggard), both of whom were cut from the 1995 film.[14]Technically, Mrs. Ferrars still existed but we never saw her onscreen.

There’s some beautiful scenery in this miniseries once the Dashwoods move to the seaside.

It also does a good job of making Marianne’s eyebrow raising actions, which don’t seem all that scandalous to us nowadays, like letting her suitor have a lock of her hair or being alone with him in his house, come across as sexy.[15]Well, the hair thing might still seem sexy to us if anyone ever did it anymore.

This brings us to that big casting blunder to which I darkly alluded earlier. Dominic Cooper is simply not appealing as Marianne’s romantic false lead, Mr. Willoughby. He doesn’t come across as a charming hero who turns out to be a villain. He comes across as, well, a villain. Mind you, it’s not super hard to guess his role in the original book which is why I’m not apologizing for spoiling it here. Nearly every Jane Austen book has a male character who seems like the perfect match for the heroine but who ends up being an antagonist to some extent.[16]A few of her books also have female characters like this. By contrast, another man, like Col. Brandon, will initially seem like a bad match for her but prove to be the real love interest in the end. Even ignoring that, Willoughby seems just too good to be true at the beginning of the story. He seems so perfect for the high maintenance Marianne and is introduced so early that the very structure of the story leads us to wait for the other shoe to drop. Still, even if we can easily guess he’ll be a villain, we should still be able to understand the other characters-even Elinor to an extent-being charmed by him.

Is this the face of a man who can be trusted?

This isn’t just a problem with the actor. The writing also spends too much time telegraphing that Willoughby is no good. The very first scene of the miniseries, before the opening credits, shows him seducing a vulnerable young woman (Caroline Hayes) as ominous music plays.[17]A snarky fan on the internet once described the opening thus. “SEX!!! And now a Jane Austen novel.” Since we never see his face in the scene, it’s likely we’re not supposed to guess his identity but it’s also likely that we do anyway. (We do hear his voice.) Ominous music also plays when Col. Brandon, whom we’ve already established as a sympathetic character, meets Willoughby at the end of the first episode. The colonel abruptly leaves. “How extraordinary,” says the girls’ mother (Janet McTeer.) “He’s an extraordinary man,” says Willoughby, a little too casually. This is the episode’s cliffhanger, so the series clearly expects us to find it dramatic. It’s also clear from the music that we’re not just supposed to pity Brandon, who now has a rival for Marianne and didn’t have much hope even before that, but to be suspicious of Willoughby. Towards the beginning of the next episode, Brandon takes him aside and asks him about his intentions towards Marianne. Willoughby responds by taunting him. It’s true that Willoughby mocked Brandon in the book, as did Marianne under his influence, and this was a bad sign. But there they mocked him behind his back and their mockery was witty, not just petty or childish. While the scene that is Willoughby’s final bid for sympathy in the last episode takes much of its dialogue from the book, Elinor is never tempted, as she is there and as Austen herself may have been tempted, to pity him despite her better judgement. It’s true that he probably doesn’t deserve pity but if nobody is even tempted to give it to him, what’s the point of including the scene?

Notwithstanding that major problem, this retelling of Sense and Sensibility works albeit not brilliantly. I was probably wrong to call it so-so. It’s more like…OK-ish. While this is hardly the best written of Andrew Davies’s adaptations of classic literature, it’s hardly the worst either.[18]Or if it is, that reflects well on him. I like Marianne’s insight in the final episode that Willoughby deceived not only her and her family but even himself. And while her summary of the story’s seemingly antiromantic message may have undertones of being embarrassed by it and wanting to explain it away, it’s also an accurate summary and I like it too.

It is not what we say or feel that makes us what we are. It is what we do. Or fail to do.

References

References
↑1 Though I should stress I feel Sense and Sensibility (2008) works much better as piece of entertainment.
↑2 There’s also a third sister, Margaret (played by Lucy Boynton in the 2008 miniseries), but she’s not important.
↑3 That’s not to say Jane Austen never wrote about relationships between women. Far from it. She just usually focused more on relationships between men and women.
↑4 Austen lived during the Romantic era and the emotionalism of Victorian culture was on the horizon.
↑5 In fairness, most, if not all of those movies, also show unrestrained emotions, such as anger, having negative consequences. But few, if any of them, really seem to want viewers to notice that.
↑6 In her culture “sensibility” meant something like sensitivity. It’s a good thing she wasn’t writing today because Sense and Sensitivity would be a horrible title.
↑7 As the book nears its conclusion, we get more moments where Elinor visibly betrays her emotions, and they aren’t moments where we’re meant to dislike her.
↑8 Persuasion, her last completed novel and probably her “girliest,” is something of an exception. The heroine’s biggest regret at the beginning is that she didn’t take a romantic risk in her youth and a sign that the romantic false lead is a phony is that he never shows “any burst of feeling and warmth of indignation or delight at the good or evil of others.” Even in Persuasion though, Austen gives the heroine a foil whose impetuosity and risk taking gets her in trouble. And while the book concludes with the “bad morality” that “When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor or ever so imprudent or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other’s comfort,” it stresses that with its romantic leads, that was far from the case.
↑9 The book A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship and the Things That Really Matter by William Deresiewicz comes highly recommended in this context.
↑10 Of course, you could argue that keeping music to a minimum fits the message of “be less emotional.” I probably sound like Marianne with these criticisms.
↑11 The most interesting of them is the Dashwood sisters’ greedy half-brother, John, since he’s the only one who regularly shows glimmers of a conscience.
↑12 His Emma just manages to be funnier in my opinion.
↑13 As did the bitterly caustic Mr. Palmer (Tim McMullan in the miniseries.)
↑14 Technically, Mrs. Ferrars still existed but we never saw her onscreen.
↑15 Well, the hair thing might still seem sexy to us if anyone ever did it anymore.
↑16 A few of her books also have female characters like this.
↑17 A snarky fan on the internet once described the opening thus. “SEX!!! And now a Jane Austen novel.”
↑18 Or if it is, that reflects well on him.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Sense and Adaptability

This Special Is a Mixed Bag, Charlie Brown

Posted on March 8, 2025 by stationmaster

The 2011 animated special Happiness Is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown came at a strange crossroads in the history of the Peanuts franchise. It was made neither by Mendelson/Melendez productions nor by Apple TV but by Warner Bros television. Despite the lengths to which it goes to recreate the feel of classic Peanuts, there’s nothing quite like it.

There’s also a lot to love about the thing, starting with the premise. Linus Van Pelt’s blanket-hating grandmother will be visiting his family in a week and if he hasn’t given up his beloved “security blanket” by then, she’s threatened to make him give it up. This allows directors Andy Beall and Frank Molieri and writers Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine) and Craig Schulz (The Peanuts Movie) to adapt some of the most memorable storylines from the comic strip about Linus either trying to kick his blanket habit or someone else forcibly taking it from him. I’m delighted by this since Linus’s relationship with his blanket has long been one of my favorite running gags in Peanuts, but it had never been the main subject of a special before this.[1]I’d be remiss though not to mention that two of the storylines here were previously adapted in a segment of the episodic 1983 special It’s an Adventure, Charlie Brown. While that was very … Continue reading I am disappointed that Linus agreeing to give up his blanket if Grandma gave up smoking isn’t included here but I can see it wouldn’t have fit in with this special’s story.

Happiness Is a Warm Blanket was clearly made by ardent Peanuts fans. At one point, it even recreates the very first comic as part of a flashback montage. In another scene, Charlie Brown can be seen eating snicker snacks, his favorite cereal at one point in the comic’s history. Now that’s something hardly anyone would know!

Mark Mothersbaugh’s music does a great job of evoking Vince Guaraldi’s compositions for the classic Peanuts specials while still doing its own thing on occasion to good effect. The character designs are unusual in that they specifically evoke the look of the strip in the later 50s and early 60s. (The choices of which characters to use reflects this as well.) You see, the visual style of Peanuts evolved over time. Back when the comic strip was still running, the characters in the movies and specials would always be designed to look the way they currently did in the newspapers. After Peanuts creator Charles Schulz’s death, they would either look the way they did in the 90s or like the most recognizable versions of themselves. The specifically 50s-vibe of Happiness Is a Warm Blanket stands out and not in a bad way.

Unfortunately, the creators’ goal of having the child voice actors sound like the ones from the oldest Peanuts specials doesn’t work as well. The monotone line readings that sounded charmingly amateurish when coming from, well, amateurs just sound flat when they’re being imitated by actors who would probably have done better if they’d been allowed to make the characters their own. Trenton Rogers, who voices both Charlie Brown and Schroeder, particularly feels like a soulless carbon copy of their original voices. And it’s unfortunate that Grace Rolek is one of the least memorable Lucies, given that the character has a major role as antagonist in this special. The best vocal performance is easily that of Austin Lux as Linus, which is fortunate since he’s the protagonist and has a lot of dramatic lines to deliver. The second-best vocal performance is Amanda Pace’s adorable turn as Sally.

Despite its pains to evoke the oldest Peanuts specials, Happiness Is a Warm Blanket regularly employs camera angles that wouldn’t have been used in them. I don’t have a problem with this in theory. I’ve enjoyed seeing Peanuts animation be visually ambitious in the past. But what with the aggressively retro approach of every other aspect of this special, I find it odd and distracting.

While nearly all of the special’s jokes come from the comic strip, it often fiddles with them and expands on them, usually so that it can include more characters. Sometimes this works well, as in the aforementioned flashback montage, but other times it just ruins the comic timing. The worst example of this is how it adapts the hilarious comic where Charlie Brown manages to keep a kite in the air without it crashing or getting tangled up in anything, only for it to explode as if the laws of physics refused to let him fly a kite. In Happiness Is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown flying the kite is in the background during a conversation between Linus and Lucy rather than being the focus of the scene. This makes the punchline more confusing than funny.

This is going to sound odd coming from me since I’ve praised the slow pacing of old Peanuts movies in the past but this special feels a bit too slow. There are a lot of scenes with the supporting Peanuts characters that-on a first viewing-don’t seem to connect to the story of Linus and his blanket at all and-on a first viewing-come across as padding. Presumably, Stephan Pastis knew this was the only Peanuts special he was going to make and wanted to include his favorite characters but the choice of comics to adapt isn’t the best. Some of them like Lucy destroying Schroeder’s bust of Beethoven only for him to reveal he has a whole closetful of them, are ones that have appeared in previous Peanuts specials.

I will say this special does it with a flair that’s never been done before.

But that’s on the first viewing. In the end, all the seemingly irrelevant comedic business pays off as Linus gives a big speech defending his blanket addiction in one of the best dramatic moments in the history of Peanuts animation. Its greatness is especially notable in that it’s one of the few moments in this special that is entirely original and not just taking what Charles Schulz wrote/drew and giving it a little twist. Yet it feels as if it could have been written by him. That’s what I appreciate about Happiness Is a Warm Blanket now more than when it was first released. For all its flaws, you can tell the creators are trying to capture the spirit of Peanuts even as they do a bit of their own thing. By contrast, the modern Peanuts specials produced by Apple TV may have their gentle charms, but they seldom feel like Peanuts.[2]To understand what I mean, compare the classic special It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown to the recent It’s the Small Things, Charlie Brown, which has a very similar premise but is infinitely … Continue reading

(My spoiler-averse readers should probably bail out now.) In the end, this special even finds a way to have Lucy come to terms with Linus’s blanket without flying in the face of her character. There’s no way to actually write dialogue for her saying she accepts the blanket, which is what Apple TV or The Peanuts Movie would do, without sounding wrong.[3]Even in the heartwarming A Charlie Brown Christmas, the nicest thing she says is “Charlie Brown is a blockhead but he did get a nice tree.” Happiness Is a Blanket has her show her support with the slightest of facial expressions. It’s an understated moment but a beautiful one in context.

References

References
↑1 I’d be remiss though not to mention that two of the storylines here were previously adapted in a segment of the episodic 1983 special It’s an Adventure, Charlie Brown. While that was very far from being the greatest piece of Peanuts animation, it did add a gloss to how Linus’s blanket is returned to him after one separation which was a great stand-up-and-cheer moment.
↑2 To understand what I mean, compare the classic special It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown to the recent It’s the Small Things, Charlie Brown, which has a very similar premise but is infinitely more touchy-feely and less funny.
↑3 Even in the heartwarming A Charlie Brown Christmas, the nicest thing she says is “Charlie Brown is a blockhead but he did get a nice tree.”
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments Off on This Special Is a Mixed Bag, Charlie Brown

Ranting About Cyrano (2021)

Posted on February 14, 2025 by stationmaster

Cyrano (2021) is a movie adaptation of a 2018 stage musical which was itself based on Edmond Rostand’s 1897 tragic comedy-or comic tragedy-Cyrano de Bergerac. I’d better state upfront that this is going to be one of those blog posts where I can’t explain my opinions about the adaptation without giving away practically the entire plot of the original story, so anyone unfamiliar with Rostand’s masterpiece should really stop reading right now and go experience it first. I recommend the 1950 English-language movie starring Jose Ferrer, which was my introduction to the play.[1]Actually, my introduction was an episode of Wishbone, but I’d forgotten about that by the time I saw the 1950 movie. If you’d prefer to experience it in the original language, there’s the 1990 film starring Gerard Depardieu. Or you could always just read Edmond Rostand’s script itself. If, like me, you don’t speak French, the best English translation I’ve found is the one by Brian Hooker. Mind you, I can’t say if it’s the most accurate but if it’s not, it must have improved upon what it was translating.

You’ll notice I haven’t recommended watching Cyrano (2021) itself as an introduction to this story.

Yep. This is going to be one of those posts.

Cyrano starts by annoying me right off the bat. The scene is Paris circa 1640. The beautiful Roxanne (Haley Bennet) is getting ready to attend the theater with the villainous Duke de Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn.) Her servant/chaperone, Marie (Monica Dolan), urges her to marry him but she protests that she doesn’t even like him, let alone love him. Marie reminds her that she’s running out of money. “A clever marriage is your only option,” she says. Argh! Does every period piece have to include a version of this scene? I’m not saying none of them should do so. Both the 1995 Sense and Sensibility and the 2019 Little Women have the female characters lament that marriage is the only way they can get financial security in their culture and those are both wonderfully written adaptations.[2]As I’ve written before, I don’t find the movies themselves that fun to watch but their screenplays (by Emma Thompson and Greta Gerwig respectively) are great. One of my favorite movies/musicals, Fiddler on the Roof, has a whole song (Matchmaker) on the topic. But with each of those movies, the topic actually relates to the classic story being retold. By contrast, Roxanne’s financial status is never an issue throughout the rest of Cyrano.[3]To be fair, it was developed a bit more in the screenplay as written as was the character of Marie. But that was cut from the final film. The opening conversation serves no purpose but to make the movie needlessly cliche. Sure, feminists may appreciate the movie acknowledging the historical hardship faced by women, but you know what feminists might also appreciate, possibly more so? A period piece where the heroine is a powerful figure who can marry whatever man she chooses.[4]The 1950 movie made a better attempt to make the material more feminist by having Roxanne explain to Cyrano why she demands her lover be both handsome and eloquent thus: “You men own the world … Continue reading

At the theater, we meet our hero, master poet/swordsman Cyrano de Bergerac (Peter Dinklage, husband of Erica Schmidt, who wrote the movie and the stage musical.) The musical’s biggest twist on the original play is that instead of having a ridiculously big nose, Cyrano’s big physical defect is that he’s a little person. I’m sorry but I fail to see the appeal of this. It changes the tone of the story since dwarfism is a real reason a man would feel like a conventionally attractive woman could never love him. Nothing wrong with stories about serious real-world problems, of course, but what was wrong with the story being “a heroic comedy” as Rostand intended? Was it just so Dinklage could play the character? That’s not the worst reason since he’s the movie’s biggest asset. But why not have Cyrano be both a little person and have his traditional deformity?[5]Well, one reason might be that it’s arguably important that the thing keeping Cyrano from being handsome or at least not unhandsome is technically small. It’s his vanity more than his … Continue reading Is Dinklage just too big an actor to wear a gag nose?

Maybe I could respect the choice if this Cyrano really felt like it was trying to be a grittier, more realistic and grounded version of the story. But with its modern sounding dialogue[6]The mindsets of the characters are also, more or less, modern compared to those in the original play., the caricatured performances of most of the supporting cast and the cheesy musical numbers, this movie doesn’t really feel like it’s avoiding goofiness.

How can I complain about the musical numbers in this movie when I love the ones in Les Misérables (2012), another modern movie adaptation of a stage musical based on a classic work of French literature, especially since it’s one that’s darker and grittier than Cyrano de Bergerac? Shouldn’t they be more of a hindrance to taking that story seriously? Likely, it’s an innate advantage of a sung-through musical over a non-sung-through musical. Since (almost) every scene in Les Misérables is a song[7]This is not as true of the movie version as of the stage musical but it’s close to the truth., it’s easier to get used to it and accept that this is a world where people sing all the time instead of talking. With the characters in Cyrano and other such musicals alternating between singing and speaking, it’s more jarring.[8]I know this isn’t a universally held opinion and there are viewers who feel Les Misérables didn’t need to consist entirely of songs. What can I say? Those viewers aren’t writing … Continue reading I think it also might be because there’s lots of singing in Les Misérables but barely any dancing, so it doesn’t try to make bakers baking bread a metaphor for sexual desire or have a training session for a garrison of soldiers turn into a ballet or show characters rubbing love letters against their skin like they’re making out with them.

But I suspect the main reason is that Les Misérables‘s songs are just much better than the ones lyricists Matt Berninger and Carin Besser and composers Aaron and Bryce Dessner wrote for Cyrano. Maybe I was overly harsh to call them cheesy, but I can’t give any of them a more positive description than “pleasant.” The one that comes closest to being memorable is Heaven Is Wherever I Fall, in which various soldiers about die reminisce about their loved ones. It’s a problem when the most moving song in your musical is all about background characters.

The movie may not entirely dispense with the original play’s often whimsical tone, but it frequently bungles what made its comedy work-or its drama work for that matter. (This is the part of the blog post that will really spoil a first viewing experience, so if anyone newcomers haven’t bailed out yet, now is the time.) Early in Rostand’s version, Roxanne confides in Cyrano, her cousin,[9]The 2021 has them be old friends to reduce any squickiness. Remember what I mentioned about the characters being modernized. that she and a handsome new recruit in his regiment, Christian de Neuvillette (Kelvin Harrison Jr in this movie) are in love though they have never spoken. She asks him to protect the man, not realizing that Cyrano is secretly in love with her himself. Later, to impress the other cadets who are hazing him, Christian insults the infamously touchy Cyrano’s nose. Cyrano is about to literally kill him when he’s told his name and immediately restrains himself for Roxanne’s sake. But, as Cyrano is recounting a story, Christian keeps making nose puns. Finally, Cyrano explodes and orders everyone else out of the room. The audience and most of the characters expect the worst but once Cyrano is alone with Christian, he embraces him and says he’s glad the man Roxanne loves is so brave. The musical simplifies this scenario to the point that it’s only a fifth as funny and not a tenth as suspenseful. Later, while it keeps Cyrano being told to stall the predatory De Guiche until Christian and Roxanne have wed, the movie completely removes the sequence of him posing as a lunatic who claims to have been to the moon.[10]An allusion to the actual writing of the historical Cyrano. Why?!

In the original play, not only did Roxanne sneak past enemy lines to be with Christian on the battlefield and possibly die with him but she smuggled in a feast for the starving French troops. Like Anthony Burgess’s 1970 English translation, this movie dispenses with all that, presumably because it’s not realistic.[11]In his defense, Burgess did later revise his translation to be closer to the text. Again, with the realism thing? This story isn’t supposed to be realistic. It’s supposed to be fun. And when so many modern adaptations strain themselves trying to make the heroines more proactive, it’s bizarre to see this one make her less so, especially since it sometimes seems like it’s trying to offer a female perspective on the material. (When De Guiche admiringly says that only a woman could suggest a plan of revenge such as the one she, for secret purposes of her own, has given him, she retorts that “only a man could think so.”) Instead of having Roxanne being physically present to tell Christian she now loves him for his “soul,” not his looks, the musical has her tell him this in a letter. Since Cyrano has been the one ghostwriting all of Christian’s love letters and feeding him all his romantic lines, Christian realizes this means it’s truly Cyrano Roxanne loves, and he’s already realized Cyrano loves her. He insists Cyrano tell her the truth and that their unconsummated marriage be annulled if she wishes it. In Rostand’s version, this leads to Cyrano questioning Roxanne as to whether she’d really love Christian if he were ugly, hardly daring to believe this. When she insists it’s true, his hopes rise and he’s about to confess, when he’s informed that Christian is dying. Unwilling to let him die unmourned by Roxanne, he resolves to keep up the deception. Of course, in the movie, there is no Roxanne present so there are none of the rising and falling hopes that make the scene so dramatic. No sooner has Christian insisted that Roxanne be told the truth than he is killed. What’s more, Cyrano’s decision not to tell Roxanne, which was already hard to understand in the original, becomes completely baffling here. Since Christian’s last wishes were that Roxanne know all, not telling her seems disrespectful to him as well as brutally unfair to her. The whole ending becomes boring in its bleakness rather than satisfyingly tragic.[12]This excellent LiveJournal post about the Anthony Burgess translation makes many of the same points I am making.

Having said all that, I’m going to give this movie a mild recommendation. Why?

Well, the dialogue may not be Rostand, but it is generally fun and engaging and it retains enough of his ideas to be interesting. Director Joe Wright (Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice) makes the movie look good even if he doesn’t have the best taste in scripts. I love the staging of Christian’s one attempt to woo Roxanne with his own words with the two of them staring down from a great height in keeping with his feelings of panic. Bennet and Harrison are appealing in their roles. But it’s Dinklage who really saves the film. His tough, scrappy Cyrano vividly conveys having had to fight for people’s respect his entire life. Yet when he speaks with Roxanne-or even just speaks of her-the vulnerability in his eyes can break your heart.

Even burdened with a boring song, he shines in the classic scene of Cyrano impersonating Christian in the dark, expressing his real feelings for Roxanne for once.

I like the painted ceiling behind Roxanne, symbolizing how Cyrano and Christian equate her with Heaven.

I’ve claimed that the changes this adaptation makes to the climax ruin the ending, but Dinklage and company still manage to make the last scene a powerful tearjerker.

I’d still recommend any of the versions of this story I mentioned in this post’s first paragraph over this one. But if, after partaking of them, you become a fan, it wouldn’t hurt to check this Cyrano out too.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody!

References

References
↑1 Actually, my introduction was an episode of Wishbone, but I’d forgotten about that by the time I saw the 1950 movie.
↑2 As I’ve written before, I don’t find the movies themselves that fun to watch but their screenplays (by Emma Thompson and Greta Gerwig respectively) are great.
↑3 To be fair, it was developed a bit more in the screenplay as written as was the character of Marie. But that was cut from the final film.
↑4 The 1950 movie made a better attempt to make the material more feminist by having Roxanne explain to Cyrano why she demands her lover be both handsome and eloquent thus: “You men own the world and all that is in it. Woman is at best a prize, a property valued much the same as a horse or a dog…If I must be chattel, then the terms shall be mine and the price according to my own values.”
↑5 Well, one reason might be that it’s arguably important that the thing keeping Cyrano from being handsome or at least not unhandsome is technically small. It’s his vanity more than his actual appearance that hurts him.
↑6 The mindsets of the characters are also, more or less, modern compared to those in the original play.
↑7 This is not as true of the movie version as of the stage musical but it’s close to the truth.
↑8 I know this isn’t a universally held opinion and there are viewers who feel Les Misérables didn’t need to consist entirely of songs. What can I say? Those viewers aren’t writing this blog.
↑9 The 2021 has them be old friends to reduce any squickiness. Remember what I mentioned about the characters being modernized.
↑10 An allusion to the actual writing of the historical Cyrano.
↑11 In his defense, Burgess did later revise his translation to be closer to the text.
↑12 This excellent LiveJournal post about the Anthony Burgess translation makes many of the same points I am making.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 1 Comment

A Cinderella Musical That’s Not Rodgers and Hammerstein

Posted on January 17, 2025 by stationmaster

The Slipper and the Rose: The Story of Cinderella is a 1976 cinematic musical retelling of the famous story of the siege of Orleans.

Just kidding. It’s a retelling of Cinderella.

There’s plenty to love about this film, starting (literally) with the spectacular Austrian scenery in its opening credits.

Its greatest strength is highly witty dialogue courtesy of the screenplay by director Bryan Forbes and songwriters Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman.[1]I’ve mentioned them on this blog before. Much, if not all, of the humor is actually aimed more at adults than at kids as you would expect. It doesn’t always make me laugh out loud, but it’s always got personality. In one of the first scenes, the king of the fictional kingdom of Euphrania (Michael Hordern) is about to bestow a knighthood on his son, the prince (Richard Chamberlain), who protests he hasn’t earned it. “Nobody earns this,” his father retorts. “It’s given because I am the king, and I like it.” As part of the ceremony, the king kisses the newly minted knight on the cheek. “That’s the part I like best,” says the queen (an underused Lally Bowers) to her companion. “Sometimes I give medals to a whole regiment!”

Later in the movie, the king is told by his lord chamberlain (Kenneth More) that of the sixteen princesses he has invited to “a bride finding ball” for his son, only six will be coming. “Well, I think that’s a fair average, don’t you?” he says. To pay for the event, the king announces that he’ll put a tax on snobbery, something all his nobles will have to pay. In the next scene, Cinderella (Gemma Craven)’s stepmother (hilarious Margaret Lockwood) and stepsisters, Palatine (Sherrie Hewson) and Isobella (Rosalind Ayres), go to a dress shop to buy apparel for the ball, only to be told by the shopkeeper (Norman Bird) that he’s sold out. “Sold out?! What do you mean, you ridiculous man?” demands the outraged stepmother. “How can you be sold out when we have not purchased anything?”

It should be clear by now that the movie benefits from a great supporting cast. Not only a great cast of actors but a lot of fun roles for them to fill. In addition to those I’ve already mentioned there are Dame Edith Evans as the senile dowager queen, Julian Orchard as the prince’s mincing, sycophantic cousin, the duke of Montague, and, best of all, Annette Crosbie as Cinderella’s fairy godmother whom I can only describe as genteelly grumpy. This blog has covered several adaptations of this fairy tale and many of them have had fun takes on the fairy godmother, but this version might very well be my favorite. “I suppose I shall simply have to rise to the occasion again and do something spectacular,” she laments at one point, “and spectaculars always take so much out of me!” It doesn’t hurt that the fairy godmother sings Suddenly It Happens, the musical’s best attempt at a dramatic song.

The mention of the musical numbers brings me to the movie’s…less consistently strong points. A good rule of thumb for The Slipper and the Rose is that if a song is trying to be fun, like What Has Love Got to Do With Being Married? or What a Comforting Thing to Know, it’s fun but if it’s trying to be serious, like Once I Was Loved or I Can’t Forget the Melody, it’s painfully dull. There are exceptions to this rule, one of which I’ve already mentioned, but it generally holds true.[2]It’s also true, though not quite to the same extent, of the Sherman brothers’ 1973 musical adaptation of Tom Sawyer though thankfully that one has far fewer serious songs.

The movie’s biggest flaw is also, alas, the main thing that distinguishes it from other cinematic Cinderellas. It makes the prince the main character. Maybe there’s a way that could have been interesting and not just an arbitrary gimmick but if so, the film doesn’t find it. The prince doesn’t have a wicked stepfamily or a fairy godmother. There’s really no good reason he, rather than Cinderella, should be the center of the story. And his entire character pretty much consists of complaining about what a pain it is to be a prince and have to marry a princess. Nearly every line of dialogue he has is along those lines.[3]The fairy godmother’s dialogue also mostly consists of complaints, but we’re not necessarily meant to take them seriously and, anyway, they’re funnier. Even when his father’s royal ball to which he objected introduces him to Cinderella, he doesn’t apologize or rethink his earlier stance. Instead, he blames her mysterious disappearance on his father and continues to rant against him. If the writing weren’t so witty and Richard Chamberlain didn’t do his best to make the character likeable, he’d be downright insufferable. I’m not saying that having to make a politically advantageous marriage or even just endure the tedious formalities of royal life isn’t a real burden but there are others out there with worse problems like, I don’t know…Cinderella!

And the real shame is that Gemma Craven is so sweetly appealing as the famous heroine. I’d love it if she were the main focus of the movie.

All the prince’s talk about royal life not being as great as it’s cracked up to be might have seemed original back in 1976 but similar fictional prince and princesses since have made it conventional. And, honestly, I’d argue this take on Cinderella’s prince wasn’t even that unusual even back in the day. It’s pretty standard for retellings of this story to portray him as resenting his parents’ wishes for him to wed. While we’re told about the prince more than we actually see him in Disney’s 1950 animated Cinderella, what we hear of him and what we do see of him at the ball prior to Cinderella’s entrance suggest he’s a rebel, first refusing to marry and settle down and then refusing to marry any but one particular woman. All three movie versions of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, two of which came out before The Slipper and the Rose, despite their different scripts, have the prince view the ball as a dehumanizing contest with him as the prize. In Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998), not only does the prince not want to make a connubial alliance but he confides in the Cinderella character that he doesn’t want to become king at all and be perpetually “defined by (his) position.” She responds that countless lower-class people also suffer from being only seen as what they are, not who they are, and if he became king, he could help them. I wish The Slipper and the Rose went that route, but it doesn’t. To its credit though, it does have a subplot in which the prince bestows a knighthood on his companion-at-arms, John (Christopher Gable), allowing him to marry his sweetheart, Lady Caroline (Polly Williams.) That goes some way toward making the prince less of a whiner and more likeable.

However, the John-and-Caroline subplot also reflects the movie’s second biggest flaw. It’s two hours and twenty-six minutes and you really feel them. Even some of the more fun songs can drag. (The less said about the serious ones, the better.) To give you a really good idea of this, I’m going to have to spoil several scenes, so if you’re really interested in seeing the movie, skip to the last paragraph. In most Cinderella movies, this is how the prince finds Cinderella after the ball. We get a montage of the glass slipper being tried on all the single girls in the kingdom. It ends with the stepsisters’ turn. After they fail, Cinderella tries on the slipper, and it fits. She marries the prince and the movie is over. In The Slipper and the Rose, we get the standard montage including the stepsisters, but Cinderella strangely doesn’t even appear in the scene. Then three months pass! John and the prince talk about their love problems. We get a song and dance number, Position and Positioning. (To be fair, it’s pretty fun.) The prince knights John. Then the prince throws away the slipper in the despair. Cinderella’s dog-she has a dog in this version-brings it to her. She dances with it in a meadow where John and Caroline happen to be picnicking. They see her and go tell the prince. He rides up on his horse and kisses Cinderella. And the movie still isn’t wrapping up!

We’ve now reached The Slipper and the Rose‘s biggest addition to the traditional fairy tale. After she’s been presented to the court, the lord chamberlain privately and gently explains to Cinderella that if the prince doesn’t make a politically advantageous marriage, the kingdom will be consumed by war. Tearfully, she agrees to give him up. This scene features some beautiful acting from both Kenneth More and Gemma Craven. I especially like the moment where Cinderella briefly appears bitter (“You have forgotten nothing then.”) but then sees the chamberlain’s regret and implicitly apologizes. (“I thank you for bringing such tidings with tact and understanding.”) It also leads to the movie’s second-best attempt at a dramatic song, Tell Him Anything (But Not That I Love Him.)[4]By the way, if you’re wondering about the rose in the film’s title, at the beginning of the song, Cinderella stares at a bouquet of roses from one of which a petal dramatically drops. … Continue reading

But I almost feel like the scene makes too good a case against the marriage between the lovers. Sure, it’s sad if they don’t end up together, but isn’t the well-being of a whole nation of citizens more important than the happiness of just two?[5]The position the movie itself takes is a little hard to interpret. During the scene itself of Cinderella agreeing to give up the prince, it feels like we’re supposed to admire her, but the … Continue reading Maybe the problem is that the romance between this Cinderella and her prince, which mostly involves staring into each other’s faces, just isn’t moving enough for us to forget about all the realistic problems with the match. Having established that either the couple can be together, or their kingdom must be ravaged by war, the movie then resolves this seemingly insurmountable dilemma with a deus ex machina.[6]What happens to absolve the prince of his responsibilities is arguably kind of creepy if you think about it. But in all fairness, if you have a problem with a deus ex machina, you’re probably not the target audience for Cinderella.

If you’re not interested in Cinderella adaptations and don’t appreciate these lengthy, old school movie musicals, this one probably won’t make you a convert.[7]Unless maybe your problem with Cinderella is that it doesn’t have enough court intrigue or political satire. But if you are part of the target audience, give it a chance. Its charms may reward you and even the things I’ve described as flaws at least help it stand out as interesting.

References

References
↑1 I’ve mentioned them on this blog before.
↑2 It’s also true, though not quite to the same extent, of the Sherman brothers’ 1973 musical adaptation of Tom Sawyer though thankfully that one has far fewer serious songs.
↑3 The fairy godmother’s dialogue also mostly consists of complaints, but we’re not necessarily meant to take them seriously and, anyway, they’re funnier.
↑4 By the way, if you’re wondering about the rose in the film’s title, at the beginning of the song, Cinderella stares at a bouquet of roses from one of which a petal dramatically drops. That’s the only justification for the title I can remember. I don’t get it either.
↑5 The position the movie itself takes is a little hard to interpret. During the scene itself of Cinderella agreeing to give up the prince, it feels like we’re supposed to admire her, but the fairy godmother scolds her for it later.
↑6 What happens to absolve the prince of his responsibilities is arguably kind of creepy if you think about it.
↑7 Unless maybe your problem with Cinderella is that it doesn’t have enough court intrigue or political satire.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments Off on A Cinderella Musical That’s Not Rodgers and Hammerstein

Is Return to Oz Really the Better Oz Adaptation?

Posted on January 3, 2025 by stationmaster

Whenever anyone does a parody or an homage to The Wizard of Oz, you can bet they’re really doing one to the 1939 MGM movie, not the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.[1]From what I understand, The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire is a partial exception, taking some cues from the book and some from the movie. Understandably, this can bug fans of the original book. A film that some recommend as a superior alternative to MGM’s The Wizard of Oz is Return to Oz, the 1985 sequel (of sorts) from Disney which combines the stories The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz, L. Frank Baum’s first two literary follow-ups to The Wonderful Wizard. Return to Oz was bombed with critics and audiences upon its initial release but has since gained a cult following. It’s relatively common to read people online say they prefer it to MGM’s The Wizard of Oz because it has a darker tone and is truer to the original Oz books.

I disagree with that last claim.

Well, that’s not entirely true.

I agree that in several ways Return to Oz is closer to its source material than your average Oz adaptation. But being darker is not one of them. In his introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum wrote that he intended it to be “a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained, and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.” That may seem like an odd description of a story about a girl being carried miles away from her home by a terrible cyclone, attacked by various animals and monsters and enslaved by a tyrannical witch. But there’s truth in it too. However terrible the villains or the peril in the Oz books, Baum’s prose style keeps them from ever being really intense reads. For example, Ozma of Oz begins with Dorothy Gale being swept overboard, clinging to a chicken coop, in a terrible storm at sea. Sounds scary, right? But here’s the book’s description.

Dorothy had a good ducking, you may be sure, but she didn’t lose her presence of mind even for a second… “Why, I’ve got a ship of my own!” she thought, more amused than frightened at her sudden change of condition; and then, as the coop climbed up to the top of a big wave, she looked eagerly around for the ship from which she had been blown. It was far, far away, by this time. Perhaps no one on board had yet missed her, or knew of her strange adventure. Down into a valley between the waves the coop swept her, and when she climbed another crest the ship looked like a toy boat, it was such a long way off. Soon it had entirely disappeared in the gloom, and then Dorothy gave a sigh of regret at parting with Uncle Henry and began to wonder what was going to happen to her next.

Just now she was tossing on the bosom of a big ocean, with nothing to keep her afloat but a miserable wooden hen-coop that had a plank bottom and slatted sides, through which the water constantly splashed and wetted her through to the skin! And there was nothing to eat when she became hungry—as she was sure to do before long—and no fresh water to drink and no dry clothes to put on.

“Well, I declare!” she exclaimed, with a laugh. “You’re in a pretty fix, Dorothy Gale, I can tell you! and I haven’t the least idea how you’re going to get out of it!”

Not exactly spine tingling, is it? Return to Oz by comparison is next door to a horror movie. I don’t mean that as an insult. Horror movies-or movies next door to horror-have their place. I just question whether this is really true to the spirit of the Oz books.

Here’s the setup. It’s been six months since the cyclone and Dorothy (Fairuza Balk) still keeps talking about the Scarecrow (Justin Case), the Tin Woodman (Deep Roy of The Neverending Story and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and the Cowardly Lion (voiced by John Alexander.) Thinking she’s crazy, Aunt Em (Piper Laurie) and Uncle Henry (Matt Clark) send her to the deceptively friendly Doctor Worley (Nicol Williamson) for his new shock therapy treatment. Director Walter Murch and his co-screenwriter Gill Dennis do a great job making the hospital scary with its narrow hallways, tall windows, squeaky gurneys and the stern Nurse Wilson (Jean Marsh.) Just as Dorothy is hooked up to Worley’s machine one stormy night, the electricity goes off. The adults leave to check on this, leaving her strapped to the gurney. Another patient, a girl (Emma Ridley), frees her and tells her they’ve got to escape. The offscreen screams Dorothy can hear, she explains, are patients who have been damaged by the machine and imprisoned in the cellar. The girls flee into the storm with Nurse Wilson pursuing them. They get separated and Dorothy is swept away by a turbulent river.

Horrifying, right? And except for the part about Dorothy being swept away, absolutely none of that is from the books.[2]Though, credit where credit is due, Dr. Worley sounds like the name of an L. Frank Baum character. What’s more, this Oz adaptation is actually copying one of the changes The Wizard of Oz movie made to its source material that book fans tend to find most irritating: having everyone and everything in Kansas correspond to someone and something in Oz. It even has Dorothy fall unconscious prior to waking up in that country and then when she returns home, reawaken in the same place she left without too much time passing. To be fair, the main thing that bothers fans is the implication that Oz is a dream of Dorothy’s and the ending of Return to Oz makes clear that isn’t so.[3]To be fair, to the MGM movie, I’ve heard that it was going to end with a shot of the magic slippers, revealing Oz was real after all but this was dropped for distracting from the main business … Continue reading And, hey, I can’t really blame Return for following in The Wizard of Oz‘s footsteps there because it is fun in both films to play spot-the-actor and hunt-the-parallel especially for kids. Still, this does suggest to me that this adaptation isn’t as free from MGM’s influence as some make it out to be.

In fact, in many ways, it takes a similar approach to adapting the books. It simplifies the story by combining supporting characters and eliminating episodes. Actually, it does even more simplifying since it’s taking two Oz stories and turning them into one.[4]I can’t really blame it for doing that since The Marvelous Land of Oz made the mistake of not featuring Dorothy and who wants a Wizard of Oz sequel without her? You could even argue making the story darker was also something the MGM Wizard of Oz did though you could just as easily argue it wasn’t.[5]On the one hand, the 1939 movie cut the more violent parts of the book, mostly involving the Tin Woodman’s axe. On the other hand, it made the winged monkeys creepier and the Wicked Witch of … Continue reading But make no mistake. In many other ways, Return to Oz does make its own path. There are no musical numbers and more action scenes. Dorothy is played by a child, not a teenager. Both Kansas and Oz are in color.[6]Actually, Kansas being in black and white was sort of from the book. L. Frank Baum described everyone and everything there as being gray. The movie just took him really literally. The sets and locations aren’t just matte paintings. The characters all look more like the illustrations by W. W. Denslow and John. R. Neill. And all that is to generally good effect.

Back to the story. Dorothy finds herself at the outskirts of Oz along with her family’s hen, Billina[7]I wish the movie could have included the story behind her name from Ozma of Oz. who can now talk (and is voiced by Denise Bryer.)[8]Why does Billina get the ability to speak when she arrives in Oz, but Toto didn’t? Well, continuity wasn’t one of Baum’s strengths. Dorothy is delighted to be back but horrified to discover that the Yellow Brick Road has been torn up, the Emerald City is practically a ruin and its denizens, including her old friends, have been reduced to statues.

Again, this is pretty disturbing stuff and again, it’s not true to the books. The Emerald City does get conquered and stripped of its jewels in The Marvelous Land of Oz. But it’s by an army of frustrated housewives armed with knitting needles. They win because the City’s army consists of one soldier whose gun isn’t loaded for fear of accidents. The conquerors’ tyranny consists of making the men do housework and take care of the children and their leader, General Jinjur, just wants to sit on a throne and eat chocolates all day. What I’m saying is it’s played more for laughs. In Return to Oz, creatures called Wheelers[9]Remember those hospital gurneys with squeaky wheels back in Kansas? prowl the Emerald City and menace Dorothy. These come from Ozma of Oz, but I feel the movie makes them creepier than Baum did.

The Wheelers eventually conduct Dorothy to Mombi (Jean Marsh), the sorceress who has declared herself Princess of Oz.[10]What I wonder is what happened to all the good witches? There were two in the book version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and one in the movie. Return to Oz can’t quite make up its mind which … Continue reading Mombi is a combination of three characters from the books: the previously described General Jinjur, an old sorceress from The Marvelous Land of Oz who was actually named Mombi and Princess Langwidere from Ozma of Oz who had one neck but kept thirty beautiful heads in a cabinet and wore a different one every day.

The head in this image is played by Fiona Victory

Like Mombi in Return to Oz, Langwidere wanted Dorothy’s head for herself and imprisoned the girl when she refused but she offered to trade Dorothy another head for it. There was no implication that losing her head would kill Dorothy as there is in Return. Langwidere was spoiled and selfish, but she wasn’t much of a villain. According to Baum, the head she happened to be wearing when she met Dorothy had a temper that “was fiery, harsh and haughty in the extreme, and it often led the Princess to do unpleasant things which she regretted when she came to wear her other heads.” When Dorothy’s comrades showed up and demanded her release in Ozma of Oz, Langwidere readily gave it. There was nothing like Return to Oz’s chilling scene of Dorothy sneaking out of Mombi’s room with all the heads in the cabinet coming to life and calling her name and the headless Mombi rising from bed to pursue her.

Dorothy winds up in the underground lair of the Nome King (Nicol Williamson)[11]I prefer the spelling “Gnome King” but Baum felt differently. along with a posse of friends she’s collected along the way. (More on them later.) The Nome King has transformed the Scarecrow into an ornament and agrees to turn him back if any of the heroes can pick him out of a vast collection of ornaments. But if they fail three times, they will become ornaments themselves. This terrible guessing game comes from Ozma of Oz but, as with Mombi and the Wheelers, this adaptation makes the Nome King creepier and in his case, more physically intimidating.[12]It also adds the detail that with each wrong guess the heroes make, he becomes more human though why that should be or why he would want to be human is anyone’s guess. There also isn’t any scene where the King tries to devour any of Dorothy’s friends in Ozma.

Neither does he undergo anything like the disturbing demise he does in Return to Oz.[13]After the Wicked Witch of the West melted, it became rare for villains in the Oz books to die.

For the record, I’m not saying that to bash this movie. I’m cynical about this actually being true to Baum’s vision but that doesn’t mean I disapprove of it on its own terms. After all, while many kids don’t enjoy being scared, many also do enjoy it. And there’s plenty to love about Return to Oz. The Nome King and Mombi are unforgettable villains. The casting is all great. So are the action scenes, the visuals, apart from some bad bluescreen, and the overall direction and sense of atmosphere. A big part of me wants to give this movie a hearty recommendation. Yet…I can’t honestly call this an improvement on The Wizard of Oz (1939) or even its equal. Here’s where I’m really going to alienate fans of the books because I believe this movie’s main problems come not from infidelity to Baum but from following him too closely.

Well, that’s not totally fair. It’s more like the movie glosses over Baum’s storytelling strengths, other than his visual imagination, which was admittedly his main one, while maximizing his weaknesses.

Besides Billina, Dorothy’s comrades in Return to Oz include a mechanical man called TikTok (voiced by Sean Barrett), Jack Pumpkinhead (voiced by Brian Henson), a wooden man with a jack o’ lantern for a head and the Gump (voiced by Lyle Conway), an amalgamation of furniture brought to life by Mombi’s magic powder.[14]Why do the Gump and Jack Pumpkinhead need the magic powder, but the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman were automatically alive? Like I said, continuity was not one of Baum’s strengths. Regrettably, we don’t get the Wogglebug, the highly magnified and thoroughly educated insect who was the funniest character in The Marvelous Land of Oz. Neither do we get the army with twenty-six officers and one private from Ozma of Oz or that book’s Hungry Tiger who was cursed with both a ravenous appetite and a conscience that kept him from eating anybody. To be fair though, I can’t really think how Return to Oz could have contrived to include any of them. Anyway, Dorothy’s allies that we do get are great fun visually, but they don’t have much in the way of personality. L. Frank Baum was great at ideas for characters-or, perhaps more accurately, he was great at character designs, but he wasn’t great at making them individuals. All their dialogue tended to sound the same. The script for The Wizard of Oz by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf actually improved on the literary characters a little by making Dorothy more vulnerable and conflicted, the Scarecrow a bit more irritable, the Cowardly Lion funnier and the Wizard more silver tongued. Return to Oz, on the other hand, actually makes the characters even less endearing than they were in the source material. The pacing is so fast that we barely get to know them. Billina gets some good funny lines, TikTok has a bit of an arrogant streak, the Gump is grumpy and gets one great pun (“I should have quit when I was a head”) and I honestly can’t remember anything else about their characters.

Something nice that both the book and the movie versions of The Wizard of Oz had that neither The Marvelous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, nor Return to Oz has is that the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion each had a personal goal of their own. Mind you, I don’t think the story would have become a classic if it had just been about them without Dorothy the lynchpin but the fact that she was helping them as much as they were helping her made the bond between them all feel more real. By contrast, Billina, TikTok, Jack Pumpkinhead and the Gump pretty much exist just to assist Dorothy. I guess that makes sense in TikTok’s case, him being a robot, but it doesn’t make for a great relationship. Jack does have a yearning to find his creator, but this isn’t developed. Perhaps it’s telling that while the villains in Oz have counterpart characters in Kansas, the good guys only have objects if that.[15]There is one big exception, but I don’t want to spoil it.

L. Frank Baum was a genius in some ways. The Oz books are full of creative ideas, exciting plots and fun worldbuilding.[16]Not consistent worldbuilding, mind you, but fun. But he didn’t have a great writing style.[17]Not when writing for children anyway. Much children’s literature at the beginning of the 19th century had a condescending tone. It’s been trying to get away from that for a long time. The prose in the Oz books has a flat, stiff, tone weirdly devoid of human emotion and everyone’s dialogue sounds the same. Sometimes this comes across as hilarious deadpan humor as in the Scarecrow’s nonreaction to learning that his city has been conquered in The Marvelous Land of Oz.[18]One way Baum’s sequels to The Wonderful Wizard improved on it is by having more humor. It also might have come from Baum’s desire to keep from distressing his young readers. But I can’t help feeling it reflects his limitations as an artist. Even as a kid, while I enjoyed the Oz stories quite a bit, I realized they weren’t as well written as, say, the Narnia books or Peter Pan. Not helping was that as the series went on, Oz lost the relative edge of earlier books, becoming so utopian that eventually its denizens were literally not allowed to die.[19]To be fair, this rule did eliminate questions about why the bad guys didn’t just kill the good guys. It crossed the line between charmingly innocent and saccharine and never looked back. I’ve never finished the series and probably never will.

What do I mean by “weirdly devoid of human emotion?” Well, remember that scene from both Ozma of Oz in which Dorothy is imprisoned by someone who wants to take her head? Well, TikTok tries to defend her, but can’t because his machinery has run down. “Well, it can’t be helped,” says Dorothy with a sigh. That’s a ridiculously calm reaction under those circumstances but it comes across as even more so in Return to Oz, which, as I’ve described above, makes Dorothy’s enemy in that scene much scarier. An even worse instance and one that I should stress doesn’t come from the books is when Dorothy, trying to rescue Jack Pumpkinhead, ends up falling out of the sky. He calls out an apology. “That’s all right, Jack,” she calls back as she tumbles seemingly to her doom, “It can’t be helped.” Fairuza Balk is great in this movie but even she can’t sell that dialogue. And the script’s insistence on keeping Baum’s, shall we say, innocent tone clashes bizarrely with its aspirations of being dark and thrilling. I actually think the best written scenes are the ones in Kansas since they don’t try at all to sound like the Oz books.

What both the literary and cinematic versions of The Wizard of Oz had that The Marvelous Land, Ozma of Oz and Return to Oz all lack is a heart. While Baum’s subsequent Oz books had more humor and arguably even more creativity, none of them is considered the classic that is The Wonderful Wizard, and I believe that is because of the emotional resonance of Dorothy’s goal. She can see Oz is infinitely more colorful than her humdrum home but, like Odysseus preferring Penelope to Calypso, that’s what she wants. And MGM’s The Wizard of Oz made this theme even more compelling by making Dorothy’s relationship with her aunt and uncle more complicated, having her initially want to leave Kansas and giving her more of a character arc while still maintaining her most important personality traits from the source material. Theoretically, Return to Oz also has an emotionally compelling theme in that Dorothy’s goal is to save her friends. But as mentioned above, the movie is too fast paced to develop a bond between her and her new friends and it’s hard to worry too much about her old ones when we’ve never met them in this continuity.[20]Presumably, we’re supposed to project our memories of either the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or the movie but it’s hard to say which. On the one hand, Return to Oz includes details … Continue reading I almost wish the filmmakers could have just adapted The Wonderful Wizard. I know I’ve just described the movie as improving upon it, but there are also memorable images and ideas exclusive to the book. Even if it didn’t end up being as iconic as the MGM version, a Wizard of Oz movie in the style of Return could have had its own charms. But I can also sympathize with Baum fans who are tired of the first Oz book being the only to be adapted. As it is, less familiar source material does give this sequel a special appeal.

Rather than improve on the original story, Return to Oz actually makes the resolution depend more on luck than it does in Ozma of Oz. To be fair, the happy endings of Oz books, including that of The Wonderful Wizard-especially that one in fact-depend on coincidences and convenience. But at least the Nome King’s defeat in Ozma was accomplished more through the heroes’ cleverness and quick acting, not just lucky guesses and good luck. This, combined with the lack of an uplifting theme, makes Return to Oz‘s happy ending feel less cathartic and more tacked on than it should. My problem with the movie isn’t that it indulges in, to use Baum’s terminology, “heartaches and nightmares.” Those are fine. My problem is that it lacks “wonderment and joy.”

I’m sorry to end on such a negative note. There really is a lot to love about Return to Oz. In the past, I’ve defined a cult classic as something that really isn’t good enough to be a classic but is too good or at least too interesting to be dismissed and forgotten. I think that summarizes this movie very well.

References

References
↑1 From what I understand, The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire is a partial exception, taking some cues from the book and some from the movie.
↑2 Though, credit where credit is due, Dr. Worley sounds like the name of an L. Frank Baum character.
↑3 To be fair, to the MGM movie, I’ve heard that it was going to end with a shot of the magic slippers, revealing Oz was real after all but this was dropped for distracting from the main business of the ending.
↑4 I can’t really blame it for doing that since The Marvelous Land of Oz made the mistake of not featuring Dorothy and who wants a Wizard of Oz sequel without her?
↑5 On the one hand, the 1939 movie cut the more violent parts of the book, mostly involving the Tin Woodman’s axe. On the other hand, it made the winged monkeys creepier and the Wicked Witch of the West more of a threat to Dorothy. In the book, the Good Witch of the North’s kiss on her forehead magically prevented anyone from harming her.
↑6 Actually, Kansas being in black and white was sort of from the book. L. Frank Baum described everyone and everything there as being gray. The movie just took him really literally.
↑7 I wish the movie could have included the story behind her name from Ozma of Oz.
↑8 Why does Billina get the ability to speak when she arrives in Oz, but Toto didn’t? Well, continuity wasn’t one of Baum’s strengths.
↑9 Remember those hospital gurneys with squeaky wheels back in Kansas?
↑10 What I wonder is what happened to all the good witches? There were two in the book version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and one in the movie. Return to Oz can’t quite make up its mind which continuity it’s using.
↑11 I prefer the spelling “Gnome King” but Baum felt differently.
↑12 It also adds the detail that with each wrong guess the heroes make, he becomes more human though why that should be or why he would want to be human is anyone’s guess.
↑13 After the Wicked Witch of the West melted, it became rare for villains in the Oz books to die.
↑14 Why do the Gump and Jack Pumpkinhead need the magic powder, but the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman were automatically alive? Like I said, continuity was not one of Baum’s strengths.
↑15 There is one big exception, but I don’t want to spoil it.
↑16 Not consistent worldbuilding, mind you, but fun.
↑17 Not when writing for children anyway. Much children’s literature at the beginning of the 19th century had a condescending tone. It’s been trying to get away from that for a long time.
↑18 One way Baum’s sequels to The Wonderful Wizard improved on it is by having more humor.
↑19 To be fair, this rule did eliminate questions about why the bad guys didn’t just kill the good guys.
↑20 Presumably, we’re supposed to project our memories of either the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or the movie but it’s hard to say which. On the one hand, Return to Oz includes details like the Tin Woodman’s origin story and a Deadly Desert cutting Oz off from the rest of civilization. On the other hand, it does things like have the magic slippers be made of rubies rather than silver. Disney actually had to pay MGM to do that so I don’t know why they couldn’t have just followed the books and made things less confusing.
Posted in Comparing Different Adaptations | Tagged | Comments Off on Is Return to Oz Really the Better Oz Adaptation?

The Best Christmas Pageant Adaptation Ever

Posted on December 13, 2024 by stationmaster

I was delighted to hear that there would be a new movie adaptation of Barbara Robinson’s 1972 novel The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. It’s a book that resonates greatly with those of us who have grown up in the American Midwest where mothers force their kids to be in church Christmas pageants every year and force their husbands to attend. The marketing for the movie looked fairly promising though I had some reservations. Mainly, I was worried that it would sentimentalize the six Herdman kids, ruthless-or seemingly ruthless-juvenile delinquents more likely to fly than to find favor with God or anyone north of the Devil, who go to Sunday School in search of snacks one fateful day and bully their ways into the biggest roles in the annual Christmas pageant. Commercials and interviews made it sound like the movie would portray them too much as misunderstood victims of society which would be quite the exaggeration. Having seen it, I’m overjoyed to say that this adaptation completely won me over. My concern wasn’t exactly unwarranted, but the film was so good it reconciled me to any changes of emphasis. While the 1983 made-for-TV movie written by Barbara Robinson herself technically stuck closer to the book, it suffered from subpar line deliveries from its child actors.[1]Robinson also wrote a play version of her book, and she expressed regret that she couldn’t include certain incidents. I’m sure she’d be tickled to know those made it into this new … Continue reading The 2024 Best Christmas Pageant, on the other hand, has some of the best acting from children I’ve ever seen, and the adults are all perfectly cast too.

And, hey, it’s not like the new movie doesn’t stick to the book at all! Far from it. The opening narration comes almost straight from the first chapter. The screenplay by Platte F. Clark, Darin McDaniel and Ryan Swanson makes great use of cutaway gags that captures Robinson’s meandering, digressive style.[2]I’d call it gossipy, but that word has negative connotations. Nearly all of the book’s funniest moments are here and even though I knew the punchlines, the movie’s comedic is so great that it made me laugh at them anyway. What’s more, the script features some hilarious lines and moments of its own. As someone who considers director Dallas Jenkins’s hit show The Chosen to be basically good but overhyped by some, I was surprised by how much I love his directing of this movie. He and others involved in the production have talked about creating a nostalgic atmosphere. This made me raise my eyebrows since the book The Best Christmas Pageant Ever never struck me as nostalgic for anything. So much of it is concerned with things like the Herdmans’ reign of terror at school or even how just how boring the church kids generally find the Christmas pageant.[3]To be sure, reading the book now, many parents may feel nostalgic for a time when librarians refused to let kids read dirty books. On the other hand, reading about the Herdmans, some may be grateful … Continue reading But what reconciled me was the filmmakers’ reference to Norman Rockwell. While people think of Rockwell’s art as being nostalgic, much of it mines the inconvenient realities of everyday life for humorous effect.[4]And that’s not even getting into his more political art. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever‘s handsome production design and art direction likewise create a warm and cozy depiction of small-town America while still putting its warts front and center.[5]The filmmakers have also mentioned A Christmas Story (1983) with its blend of nostalgia and cynicism as a point of reference.

Did Barbara Robinson intend The Best Christmas Pageant Ever to be a Christian story? None of her other books have to do with Christianity but Robinson’s daughter, Margie Pinto-Leite, has praised the 2024 movie for capturing (among other things) “the deeper meaning of (her) mother’s story” and it explicitly proclaims a Christian message. I think that’s a perfectly fair take since the book’s thoughtful finale emphasizes the humanity of Christ, a major Christian doctrine, and, whether intentionally or not, many plot points are reminiscent of things from the gospels.[6]I thought of listing some, but this blog post will give away enough as it is, and I’d rather encourage readers to connect the dots for themselves. And I really do think The Best Christmas Pageant Ever‘s Christian themes or at least its church setting are what have given it the staying power that Robinson’s followups, The Best School Year Ever and The Best Halloween Ever haven’t had. It’s certainly not a case of the sequels being less engagingly written![7]Weirdly, I feel that due to its emotional finale, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever works better as the last book in the series even though it was written first. As I’ve discussed before, the best screenplay adaptations are like duets between the original author and the screenwriter. Sometimes even the most respectful of them are guilty of putting their own spin on the material. It’s hardly something unique to Christians. However, I can’t help but wonder if by emphasizing a Christian message, this adaptation actually removes a big part of the book’s appeal for American Evangelicals. They’re typically portrayed either as long-suffering heroes (in stories they tell about themselves) or as villainous bigots (in stories about them from secular perspectives.) In the literary Best Christmas Pageant Ever, Grace Bradley (Judy Greer in the movie), the mother who ends up directing the titular tableau, leans toward the former extreme, compared to other characters anyway, and Alice Wendleken (Lorelei Olivia Mote), the pharisaical girl who normally plays Mary, and her equally insufferable mother (Danielle Hoetmer) come close to being the latter[8]There’s also Helen Armstrong (Mariam Bernstein), the domineering woman who typically directs the pageant but she’s more officious than malicious. but for the most part, the book’s Christians are neither particular saintly nor particularly evil. They’re just ordinary everyday people. I like that. The 2024 film though wants to tell a story about good Christians vs bad Christians.

In the book, Alice’s mother bluntly tells the Ladies’ Aid that Imogene Herdman (Beatrice Schneider in the movie) portraying Mary would be a sacrilege but the negative reaction from others is less over the top. Some hide their distaste for the Herdmans behind the excuse that it’s unfair for one family who don’t even go to the church to take over the pageant. One woman suggests the compromise of having the Herdmans hand out programs at the door. They don’t seem to want to say “you can’t be in our pageant because you’re horrible people” even though that’s obviously what they think. In the movie, on the other hand, Grace is confronted by a mob of evil church ladies who bluntly tell her to throw the Herdmans out.

I might have preferred a more nuanced, less caricatured take on these characters. I actually think how the book handles them is funnier. But they’re certainly not unfunny in the movie and the book’s dynamic is still preserved in the characters of the church’s pastor and his wife (Kirk B. R. Woller and Daina Leitold, both very funny) who squeamishly try to welcome the Herdmans and restrain their instinctive desire to beat them off with sticks.

Grace can definitely be described as the hero of the book The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, but she wasn’t exactly meant to be a Christian role model. Her motivations were less showing Christian charity to the Herdmans, though there’s a good case to be made that’s what she ended up doing, than proving herself to those church ladies who questioned her judgement in casting them in the pageant. In the movie, her motives arguably start out as even more prideful. The whole reason she volunteers to direct the pageant when the usual director breaks her leg is to put Mrs. Wendleken in her place. (In the book, she did it because nobody else wanted the job with or without Herdmans.) But as she gets to know them better, she starts to sympathize with the Herdmans, even becoming something of a parental figure to them. This actually isn’t too much of a stretch. In the book, the fair-minded Grace is quick to point out whenever the Herdmans show any good instincts, which is seldom, and to defend them on the rare occasions they’re accused of something they didn’t do. She still handles her tough situation with a mixture of admirable patience and understandable exasperation in the movie. In one scene, she explains to the kids for the umpteenth time that they’re supposed to create a beautiful picture to inspire the congregation to contemplate what Christmas means. “What does it mean?” demands Ralph Herdman (Mason Nelligan.) Convention would dictate that Grace give a big speech here but instead she wearily sighs and says she can’t remember. The most interesting way in which the movie makes her more idealized than the book does comes after a particularly calamitous dress rehearsal when the whole church is in an uproar and the pastor suggests canceling the pageant.

“Certainly not!” Mother said. By that time, she was mad too. “Why, it’s going to be the best Christmas Pageant we’ve ever had!”
Of all the lies she’d told so far, that was the biggest, but you had to admire her. It was like General Custer saying, “Bring on the Indians!”

In the movie, the pastor tells her if she says everything is fine, he believes her. After hesitating, Grace sighs and admits that she can’t promise everything is fine, but she also believes the church shouldn’t cancel the pageant. I find the big lie in the book endearingly human but what the movie does is a great dramatic moment. Did the movie need the ensuing scene in which she explains to her daughter, Beth the narrator (Molly Belle Wright), why she believes those calling for the Herdmans to be kicked out are wrong?[9]Actually, the movie is narrated by Lauren Graham as Beth’s adult self. In the books, I always imagined the narrator as still a kid. Much of the humor comes from her being like the child in The … Continue reading Not necessarily. I think Christian viewers could infer the message for themselves. But it’s a beautifully acted, beautifully lit, beautifully scored scene and very much what such a mother would say to her child under these circumstances.[10]When people complain about Christian movies having unrealistic dialogue and being too preachy, I wonder if they realize that Christians talking about their beliefs is actually realistic, especially … Continue reading I especially love the moment where Grace admits that this will probably end badly for her, but she still believes persevering with it is the right thing to do.

Early in the book, Beth’s brother, Charlie (scene stealing Sebastian Billingsley-Rodgriguez in the film)[11]In the original book, Charlie was actually the only member of his family to be named. Barbara Robinson gave the rest of them names in sequels and adaptations., announces that his favorite thing about Sunday School is the absence of Herdmans. “Not a very Christian sentiment,” opines his father, Bob (Pete Holmes), but his mother rejoins that it’s a very practical sentiment. It’s important to the story that the Herdmans-Ralph, Imogene, Leroy (Ewan Matthys-Wood), Claude (Matthew Lamb), Ollie (Essek Moore) and Gladys (Kynlee Heiman)-are genuinely awful. They don’t just do things to which only Christians would object like taking the Lord’s name in vain. They’re also physically violent arsonists, thieves and vandals. You can’t blame the church or anyone for not rolling out the welcome wagon for them. Even the insufferable Alice has an understandable reason to resent Imogene-especially Alice in fact! I’m pleased to report the movie doesn’t chicken out on any of this. The Herdmans smoking is actually edgier now than it was in 1972.[12]The movie has other characters rebuke Imogene for both the Lord’s name thing and the smoking, either to pacify concerned parents or as a reflection of the screenwriters’ own concerns. I … Continue reading The movie doesn’t show Imogene blackmailing her peers by threatening to reveal their weight, which may be a nod to delicate modern sensibilities, or it may just be a case of the movie not having time to include every detail from the book. (It’s amazing how many they do include!) We still see her extorting things from them though. No, the movie doesn’t pull many punches with the Herdmans but it does provide medical attention to wounds quicker than the book does. The literary Imogene is a mysterious character whose motivations are often left for readers to guess. The movie all but states that the reason she wants to star in the pageant is so she can be the center of community approval for once. When she volunteers for the part of Mary, Grace nervously hedges, saying they need to give everyone a chance. “Everyone’s had their chance!” Imogene protests. “They’ve had all kinds of chances!” This line invites us to see the Herdmans not just as bullies who eliminate their competition through threats, though it doesn’t deny they’re that, but also as underdogs and therefore sympathetic. It is also all but stated that Imogene is genuinely hurt by the hostility the church shows to her. If she ever cared about what people thought of her in the book, that was a deeply buried subtext.[13]Though she and Ralph were described as hesitating before they made their entrances during the pageant, perhaps suggesting stage fright on their part.

I will say the 1983 movie did a better job of making the Herdmans’ faces look dirty.

If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book yet, I beg you to skip the following two paragraphs. If you haven’t seen the movie but have read the book, just skip the first paragraph. The book’s narrator tells us in the first chapter that her strategy for dealing with Imogene is to stay out of her way. Beth begins the movie with the same mindset. In fact, the adaptation emphasizes this by having her consider helping her mother by volunteering to play Mary and keeping at least one Herdman out of the pageant but refrain out of fear of Imogene’s wrath. But late in the movie, it looks like Imogene is backing out of the pageant of her own accord and Beth, inspired by her mother’s example, goes right up to the Herdmans’ house and insists that Imogene go through with it. Theoretically, I’m not a fan of this reimagined climax. The vulnerability Imogene shows in it makes the vulnerability she later shows in the pageant much less of a shock. Watching the confrontation between Beth and Imogene, we just know the latter is going to pull through in a way we don’t in the book.[14]Not that the happy ending was a complete surprise in the source material. I mean, the very title gives it away. But I loved cheering for Beth here. It’s great seeing her stand up to, as well as encourage, Imogene this way after being so scared of her the whole movie and it adds a welcome bit of nuance to the film’s message about Christians needing to welcome sinners, showing they can challenge them at the same time. The story has gained as well as lost by the addition. And it helps that Beatrice Schneider and Molly Belle Wright give such great performances. Much of the movie rests on the two young actresses’ shoulders and, boy, do they ever carry it.

As much as I love the original book and as excited as I was when I first heard about this new movie, a part of me wondered whether The Best Christmas Pageant Ever could have the impact now that it had in the 70s. Only last year there was a Superbowl ad comparing the Holy Family to refugees, the same comparison that occurs to Beth as she watches Ralph and Imogene’s takes on Joseph and Mary. The Nativity Story (2007) takes a fairly gritty approach to the material, visually emphasizing the arduous trek to Bethlehem and the inconvenience of birth in a stable as does Dallas Jenkins’s own portrayal in Christmas with the Chosen.[15]Then again, other recent portrayals of the Nativity have been an animated comedy about talking animals (2017’s The Star) and a glitzy musical-comedy (2023’s Journey to Bethlehem) so … Continue reading Pastors and Christian speakers are more likely nowadays to remind listeners that the birth of Christ, as depicted in the Bible, was not as picturesque as traditional nativity scenes would have them believe and believers are more likely to imagine Mary as being, in this movie’s words, tough as well as sweet.[16]It’s true that I don’t think we’ve ever had a depiction of Mary burping the Baby Jesus. I keep waiting for a director with vision to come along. Would the message of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever just be white noise, I wondered. Happily, in its portrayal of church culture, the movie does such a good job of establishing that traditional picturesque conception of the Nativity that the Herdmans’ version really does feel like a revelation even if it really isn’t. The music, acting and overall direction all come together superbly in that scene. I don’t normally cry over movies but the finale to this one brought me as close as I’ve ever been.

I’ve suggested in this post that an emphatically Christian version of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever may not be the best idea. But after analyzing the 2010 movie adaptation of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which clearly wanted to appeal to the Christian section of the book’s fanbase but didn’t know how, it was so refreshing to watch this adaptation which really understands why the source material resonates with Christians. Even to the extent that the story represents a critique of the Church, it critiques it along lines any serious Christian will understand. It makes even secular filmmakers’ best attempts at making something for “faith-based audiences” feel clumsy by comparison.

Now that I’ve written that, I fear I’ve steered secular viewers away from the movie. That would be a great disservice to them because the comedy really is hilarious for everybody[17]Though it does probably help if you grew up in the American Midwest and attended church there. and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the emotional moments don’t transcend a Christian audience too. After all, while I’ve described the story’s themes as Christian, it could also be interpreted as humanist, showing even the worst of people as being capable of goodness. And both Christians and non-Christians can appreciate The Best Christmas Pageant Ever‘s reminder of the plight of the impoverished.

But why am I worrying about people not going to see this movie? It’s already a hit. There’s not always a lot of overlap between movies I love and movies the public loves. There also aren’t many book adaptations I consider just as great as their source material in their own very-similar-but-slightly-different ways. So I’d like to thank the makers of this Best Christmas Pageant Ever for giving me such a wonderful early Christmas gift.

References

References
↑1 Robinson also wrote a play version of her book, and she expressed regret that she couldn’t include certain incidents. I’m sure she’d be tickled to know those made it into this new adaptation.
↑2 I’d call it gossipy, but that word has negative connotations.
↑3 To be sure, reading the book now, many parents may feel nostalgic for a time when librarians refused to let kids read dirty books. On the other hand, reading about the Herdmans, some may be grateful for all the antibullying programs we have now. Then again, the fact that the Herdmans don’t engage in cyberbullying or pull guns or knives on their victims may make readers feel perversely nostalgic these days.
↑4 And that’s not even getting into his more political art.
↑5 The filmmakers have also mentioned A Christmas Story (1983) with its blend of nostalgia and cynicism as a point of reference.
↑6 I thought of listing some, but this blog post will give away enough as it is, and I’d rather encourage readers to connect the dots for themselves.
↑7 Weirdly, I feel that due to its emotional finale, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever works better as the last book in the series even though it was written first.
↑8 There’s also Helen Armstrong (Mariam Bernstein), the domineering woman who typically directs the pageant but she’s more officious than malicious.
↑9 Actually, the movie is narrated by Lauren Graham as Beth’s adult self. In the books, I always imagined the narrator as still a kid. Much of the humor comes from her being like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes who bluntly states what all the adults are too discreet to say aloud. But I don’t mind what the movie does. It emphasizes what a long-lasting impact this Christmas pageant had on Beth.
↑10 When people complain about Christian movies having unrealistic dialogue and being too preachy, I wonder if they realize that Christians talking about their beliefs is actually realistic, especially if they’re talking to their children. Of course, that doesn’t mean such discussions always make for entertaining movie dialogue.
↑11 In the original book, Charlie was actually the only member of his family to be named. Barbara Robinson gave the rest of them names in sequels and adaptations.
↑12 The movie has other characters rebuke Imogene for both the Lord’s name thing and the smoking, either to pacify concerned parents or as a reflection of the screenwriters’ own concerns. I don’t mean that as a criticism by the way. The rebukes mostly make sense coming from the characters that give them.
↑13 Though she and Ralph were described as hesitating before they made their entrances during the pageant, perhaps suggesting stage fright on their part.
↑14 Not that the happy ending was a complete surprise in the source material. I mean, the very title gives it away.
↑15 Then again, other recent portrayals of the Nativity have been an animated comedy about talking animals (2017’s The Star) and a glitzy musical-comedy (2023’s Journey to Bethlehem) so there’s that.
↑16 It’s true that I don’t think we’ve ever had a depiction of Mary burping the Baby Jesus. I keep waiting for a director with vision to come along.
↑17 Though it does probably help if you grew up in the American Midwest and attended church there.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments Off on The Best Christmas Pageant Adaptation Ever

Animation Station: A Wrapping Menace, an Exercising Cat and a Talking Christmas Tree

Posted on December 7, 2024 by stationmaster

I first came up with the Animation Station series because I realized there were movies and shows about which I wanted to blog, but which weren’t adaptations. Well, that’s not quite true. Many of them were adaptations of preexisting material but I didn’t want that to be the main focus of my blog posts about them. What they did have in common was being animated. Now I’m really stretching that label to write about what I wish. The…thing described in this post is barely animated at all. But I love reading about fascinatingly weird and silly pieces of media online and wanted to try my hand at describing one and this little obscurity called out to me.

How did I learn of it? Well, one of my favorite web pages is The Island of Misfit Christmas Specials which covers a couple of rarely broadcast Christmas specials or movies every year. I enjoy reading about them but only occasionally does one of them sound so interesting that I get the urge to watch it for myself. One such “Misfit” was The Talking Christmas Tree which Peter Paltridge (the writer for the site) claims to have found on VHS at Goodwill. I’m glad I found it on YouTube because Paltridge’s entertaining but brief writeup hardly does this thing justice. The Talking Christmas Tree[1]or The Talking Christmas Tree Bedtime Stories as it’s called by its credits. was made by a chain of department stores for a local TV channel in Portland, Oregon and seems to be a series of five episodes which would air on the nights leading up to Christmas. Yet strangely the host refers to stickers coming with the video box, implying it was made specifically for the VHS format. I guess kids were just supposed to stop the tape after each episode and start it again the next night. Who knows?

Anyway, each episode begins with an annoying theme song that rips off When I See an Elephant Fly from Dumbo. (“If you’ve ever seen a house fly or a kitchen sink/or a door jam or a camera wink, etc.”) These lyrics were written by Bob O’ Donnell, who was the mastermind behind this whole thing, writing, producing and directing every episode. The music was by Jon Newton who also did the entire background score. The singer is the titular Christmas Tree, a rather freaky looking fellow who appears in (barely) animated form at this point.

We then see the Tree as a costumed actor in Santa Claus’s living room. It still looks freaky.

Santa is played by a very…enthusiastic actor. Note that I didn’t say a good actor, just an enthusiastic one. I assumed that this was the man who played Santa for the department store or maybe some random guy they pulled off the streets but no, if Dallas McKennon is the same as Dal McKennon[2]The credits don’t actually list him as playing Santa but they say “special thanks to Dallas McKennon.”, he’s actually had a career stretching back all the way to 1940 even though he mostly appeared in bit parts. His biggest role seems to have been the voice of Gumby.[3]Well, that or his role on the old TV series, Daniel Boone but I imagine modern audiences are more likely to recognize Gumby. It’s possible McKennon also voices the Talking Christmas Tree itself since I can’t find anyone else credited.

At the beginning of the first episode, Santa explains that the Talking Tree is “a colorful, laughable once-a-year slapstick-al, magical talking tree!” This description gets repeated in subsequent episodes. Allegedly, all the Christmas decorations in this world are magically created by the Talking Tree. It makes a new one with every kind thought someone has. “Santa! Get ready!” cries the Tree as it spins in a circle. “It’s that special wonderful holiday feeling!” Sure enough, a cardboard wreath materializes above Santa’s cardboard fireplace. Hearing the chiming of a clock, Santa says to the camera, “It’s seven snowflakes past an icicle(?) and we’d better get started cause you have to get to bed!” It turns out the Tree can make ornaments out of stories too with the help of young viewers, he stresses, and Santa is going to read one a night out of a “special storybook.” Each story is accompanied by artwork that sometimes gets a trifle animated. I’d have assumed these were from picture books ala Reading Rainbow but, no, apparently the stories and the images were specifically created for this by Bob O’ Donnell. Well, the stories were written by him. The first one is called Too Much Wrapping Paper and it’s my favorite of them, but it should really be titled The Mad Wrapper.

Matt and Jenny loved the Christmas season because that meant all of their friends and relatives would come to visit and they had lots of friends and a big, wonderful family.

Despite that being the opening sentence, Matt and Jenny hardly figure in the story at all. The real main characters are their Uncle Henry and Aunt Hannah who live “not too far” from them. I can’t say much for the artwork by Mary Rinaurd on display here but at least the writing shows some wit.

If Uncle Henry had a fault in the world, it was that he believed mirrors tell lies. “When I was a young man, mirrors didn’t leave hair off the top of my head the way they do today!” he liked to tell Aunt Hannah.

Aunt Hannah’s one fault meanwhile is hoarding wrapping paper and bows. In fact, whenever her family opens presents, she’s there “with a busy grin on her face to collect the wrappings sometimes before they even got all the way off the package.”

See a fanatical gleam in her eye yet?

One fateful night[4]“Right about now,” says the Talking Christmas Tree. What’s that supposed to mean? she wraps all the Christmas presents for her family in the blink of an eye but her appetite for wrapping is still not sated, so she wraps her husband’s slippers, toothbrush and toothpaste and puts “Do Not Open till Christmas” stickers on them. But her lust for parceling only grows and she then wraps up a chair and the TV and the garbage cans! Uncle Henry returns from work to find everything in his house wrapped including his supper and the dog, Pepper. Somebody, call the PETA!

He finds Aunt Hannah sleeping peacefully upstairs and reasons that at least she’s got that crazy urge out of her system. But this proves to be wishful thinking. The next day at work, he gets a call telling him his wife has brought traffic to a standstill by wrapping a stop sign. She’s even taken to wrapping up people like the mayor and at the moment, is working on every ketchup bottle at Ferguson’s Market. You’d think the police would put a stop to all this but (a) she’s wrapped up what seems to be their only motorcycle and (b) she’s also put “Do Not Open till Christmas” stickers on everything and the people in this community really respect those signs, so much so that they’ll apparently let the mayor suffocate and allow any number of traffic accidents rather than unwrap anything with one of those stickers. (Thankfully, she neglected to put one on Pepper.) Uncle Henry solves the problem by wrapping up Hannah’s tape and scissors and putting “Do Not Open till Christmas” stickers on them. Whatever else can be said against her, Aunt Hannah really respects those stickers, much more than she respects stop signs apparently.

Uncle Henry expects an angry mob but, no, on Christmas Day the townspeople have a wonderful time unwrapping everything. (“But they didn’t unwrap the mayor,” we’re told, “because he might have made a speech.”) We end on an ominous note as Aunt Hannah privately murmurs that next year she’d better get started early on her wrapping.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

“I liked Aunt Hannah,” declares Santa with his usual enthusiasm. “She’s the sort of person who can’t do enough for people!” Excuse me, is that what we were supposed to take away from that insanity?! Aunt Hannah was clearly putting her own depraved desires over everyone else’s convenience and safety. In any case, the sound of canned clapping is heard which Santa tells us means everybody else liked the story too. The Tree gets that “special, wonderful holiday feeling” again and an Aunt Hannah-shaped ornament appears. Santa hangs it on the Talking Christmas Tree.

The next episode begins with Santa looking over some letters. One is from a girl who says a classmate doesn’t believe in Christmas because her dad is out of work and can’t afford any gifts, so the letter writer would like all her own gifts to go to her instead. This kind thought causes the Tree to create a star ornament. “Thank you to whoever wrote that letter,” says Santa. Did he forget her name already? Or is he just trying to protect her privacy by not mentioning it on the air? I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a real letter. Anyway, the title of this night’s story, which features artwork by Mike Black, is The Magic Elevator. It begins with four kids, Marie, Janet, Will and Eddie, decorating a nontalking Christmas tree at their daycare center for an upcoming party. All is not well. “Decorating for Christmas isn’t work,” insists the narrator[5]Yeah, about that…, “but to these kids, it was an awful chore.” It turns out the kids are sad because their parents have to miss the party due to work. In fact, their parents have to work so much they’ve missed all their (the kids’) last birthdays. “I hate elevators!” shouts Will. “It’s all the fault of elevators!” That…is a sentence. “Every time my mom leaves me to go to work in the morning, she goes up and up in an elevator and then when she comes down at the end of the day, she’s tired and worried and doesn’t even smile at me! Elevators keep taking our parents away!”

Will’s mom: elevator victim

After the way the last story went, I’m wondering if this will lead to the kids going on a rampage and vandalizing elevators all over town. Instead, with “a happy sound(?) and a twinkle of light,” the partially decorated tree transforms into a smiling man in a green uniform, one with a tiny Christmas tree on his cap. “Did someone call for the magic elevator?” he asks. Unlike those ordinary elevators that take you where you want to go, he explains, the magic one he operates take them where it’s fun to go.

The kids barely have time to process this before they realize their daycare is flying over the city. Apparently, the magic elevator is just whichever room in which the operator, Ted, happens to be. The elevator lands and the walls of the daycare center open to reveal Marie’s mother in a room full of gray-suited businesspeople talking about money and charts. The horror! Ted grabs Marie’s mother and takes her into the elevator. It travels across town, doing the same to everyone’s parents. Now they have no choice but to attend “the silliest, happiest Christmas party ever.”

I kind of hate that people will find these images if they Google this blog, but I feel like I have to include them, so you know I’m not making up this stuff.

Everyone has a great time partying as they fly over “people in gray clothes who ride in elevators that only go up and down.” Losers! Eventually, the elevator returns the parents to work, the daycare goes back to its usual location and Ted reverts to being a Christmas tree. Although Marie, Janet, Will and Eddie hadn’t finished decorating him, the job has been completed by those kind thoughts they had for their overworked mothers and fathers. This is good since other kids have now shown up for the party as originally scheduled. Later that day, Will’s mother tells him “All of a sudden this afternoon, I got the happiest, silliest Christmas spirit. For a while, I felt like I was flying in the sky like Santa.” So… does that mean the magic elevator didn’t physically take the parents from their jobs? That was all a metaphor? It just lifted their spirits? Is that why their employers aren’t angry about it? Or did he really kidnap them and then alter their memories? Whatever makes sense to you, I guess. This great work is clearly open to many interpretations.

The Magic Elevator receives even more canned applause than Too Much Wrapping Paper and creates another ornament, this one depicting the elevator/daycare center. The following episode begins with the Talking Tree getting “that special wonderful holiday feeling” and creating a menorah. Santa explains its significance. Whenever a Christmas special does something like this, I wonder about the intent. Do the creators seriously think that Jewish families are going to watch this every year because they talk about Hannukah for roughly a minute?[6]Of course, not all Jews are practicing Jews. Maybe the idea is supposed to be to educate kids about other cultures. But the episode ends with the Tree sending “a special message of holiday cheer to our Jewish friends,” which seems weird if they’re not watching. “Good wishes can be expressed all sorts of ways,” Santa rhapsodizes, “which brings us to tonight’s story.” That story being Jingles the Christmas Cat featuring illustrations by Chris Powers. We’re told Jingles’s owner, a girl called Ellen, gave him his name because he seemed to love the song Jingle Bells. He also loves food to the extent that Ellen’s father is insisting he lose weight. He says this just as Jingles is settling down for his evening nap, “the one he took to give him energy to go to bed.” “If he doesn’t slim down in a couple weeks,” says Dad, “I’m going to send him out to Uncle Leo’s farm. He can live with the barn cats until he gets into shape.” Hey, if you didn’t want your daughter to have a pet who just eats, sleeps and gains weight, maybe you shouldn’t have gotten her a cat.

Ellen gathers all her friends for a meeting to discuss how to save Jingles. One girl, Lois, says her mother teaches an aerobics class, so the kids sneak Jingles in for some exercise, but he refuses to comply. But then he notices a small exercise outfit in the window of a giftshop. Jingles rubs against the glass and purrs. This provides Ellen with the perfect way to motivate the cat. She buys the outfit and tries to squeeze Jingles into it to no avail. “See?” Ellen tells him. “If you’d go to exercise class, you’d become a skinny mini and this outfit would fit you just right.”

Jingles runs back into the class. Who knew cats were so interested in snazzy clothing?

For the next few days, he was the best exerciser you ever saw. He did the Jamming Jump. He did the Frantic Footwork (with the Funky Finger-snap of course.) Finally, Lois’s mother gave him a special diploma, like you get in high school, for being the best cat in the class.

My guess is she just wanted to get Jingles out of there so he wouldn’t make the humans feel bad about themselves. The cat’s weight loss impresses Dad but as he happily dreams of aerobics class at night, he keeps everyone else in the house awake by purring “in a jazzy rhythm.” Before this, his flab kept the noise down. (Is that how it works?) Jingles is in danger of being sent to the farm after all, but Ellen saves the day by giving him an early Christmas present. It’s that exercise outfit which insulates his purring. On Christmas morning, Ellen unwraps a matching outfit of her own. It comes with a note, ostensibly from Jingles, thanking her for her care. Did he really write that or was it her parents? Normally, I’d assume the latter but with these wacky stories, who knows?

The ornament for this story, interestingly enough, portrays Jingles eating, not Jingles exercising. I guess that wouldn’t have felt Christmassy. The next episode begins with Santa freaking out because the Tree has a jack-o-lantern with valentine hearts carved into it and a birthday cake that looks like an Easter egg.

Santa: Everybody knows that you give eggs at Eastertime and for a birthday you bake-
Tree: A pumpkin pie filled with turkey.
Santa: No, no, no, no! You cook a turkey for Thanksgiving and for Halloween-
Tree: You dress up like a ghost and slide down the chimney and go “ho ho ho!”

Santa fears the Tree has “had too many corndog fudge sundaes” but it turns out the Tree is just messing with him to introduce the fourth story, Have a Happy Whatever illustrated by Nancy Ramsay.[7]I wonder if all these people appreciate me crediting them. It begins with two prankish young brothers, Reggie and Tyrone, whose parents send them to visit their neighbor, Mr. Walls, who’s “so out of touch he cooks a Labor Day turkey and puts flags on the drumsticks.” Ed Lumley, who normally plays a wise man in the town’s annual Christmas pageant, is sick this year and Mr. Walls is going to take his place. Reggie and Tyrone’s parents want them to catch him up on what a wise man in a Christmas pageant should be like.

His outfit and decor do not bode well.

Mr. Walls’s first question is “isn’t Wise Men’s Day in February?” He’s thinking of Presidents’ Day. “But I thought Presidents’ Day was December twenty-fifth,” says Mr. Walls when they tell him this. “No, that’s presents day,” explains Tyrone, “the day when you give presents.” Feeling mischievous, the boys con Mr. Walls into wearing his sparkly Uncle Sam costume for the fourth of July to be a wise man. (He calls it his “Thanksgiving party outfit.”) At the pageant, Mr. Walls enter from the west instead of the east like the other wise men, wearing that red, white and blue costume and carrying sparklers. Didn’t they rehearse this at all? The audience’s laughter awakens the baby playing Jesus who cries. But the sight of Mr. Walls quiets it for some reason. He’s a hero and plays a wise man in the pageant every year afterwards in the same outfit. “As everybody says, it just wouldn’t be Christmas without Mr. Walls.”

“Reggie and Tyrone saw that playing tricks on someone could hurt their feelings,” Santa concludes. Um, that’s a good message but when did they see it? Giving Mr. Walls bad advice actually led to him being the hero. Then again, the pageant might not have needed a hero if it hadn’t been for his misguided wardrobe in the first place. As the Talking Tree says, “Everything turned out all right in the long run.” The ornament for this story depicts Mr. Walls with his sparklers.

The Talking Christmas Tree actually performs most of the host duties for the final episode. Santa bails out towards the beginning since it’s Christmas Eve and he’s got a lot to do. As for the Tree, “Tomorrow morning, I go back to the forest,” it says, “because the whole world will be decorated for Christmas and my work will be over too.” Santa compliments the Tree, saying, “the world’s never been this beautiful, thanks to you!” I find that hard to believe when half the ornaments we’ve seen this Tree create have been paper cutouts of what look like uninspired picture book illustrations. It isn’t actually delivering presents that takes Santa away from the episode. “Candy canes! Candy canes! We haven’t got enough candy canes!” he cries as he runs offscreen. The Tree reads the final story in his absence. For once, it’s not an original. Instead, it’s Clement C. Moore’s famous poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas better known as The Night Before Christmas.[8]Well, some claim it’s actually Henry Livingston Jr.’s poem but that’s controversial. The visual accompaniment largely consists of still images of Dallas McKennon’s Santa Claus superimposed on illustrations.

We also get some pictures from previous stories. When the poem mentions “the children… nestled all snug in their beds,” Ellen is shown sleeping with Jingles and for “mamma in her ‘kerchief,” we get Aunt Hannah asleep after a long night of wrapping. The Tree reiterates that it’ll be back in the forest tomorrow. “But I’ll be thinking of you,” it promises, “and waiting for next year when Santa will come get me and you and we can decorate another Christmas season with bright happy wishes!” The last ornament it makes is an image of itself, not anything to do with the story we just heard. What a narcissist!

Well, that was The Talking Christmas Tree. I can’t really say it was good, but it was entertainingly weird. You can’t say there was no creativity on display in some of those stories. Hopefully, my recap was both good and entertainingly weird. If not, well, I’ll settle for the last one. Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah (I suppose.)

Next Week: Mr. Walls as a Wise Man Wasn’t the Biggest Example of Miscasting in a Christmas Pageant

References

References
↑1 or The Talking Christmas Tree Bedtime Stories as it’s called by its credits.
↑2 The credits don’t actually list him as playing Santa but they say “special thanks to Dallas McKennon.”
↑3 Well, that or his role on the old TV series, Daniel Boone but I imagine modern audiences are more likely to recognize Gumby.
↑4 “Right about now,” says the Talking Christmas Tree. What’s that supposed to mean?
↑5 Yeah, about that…
↑6 Of course, not all Jews are practicing Jews.
↑7 I wonder if all these people appreciate me crediting them.
↑8 Well, some claim it’s actually Henry Livingston Jr.’s poem but that’s controversial.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments Off on Animation Station: A Wrapping Menace, an Exercising Cat and a Talking Christmas Tree