ANDREWWORSDALE discusses the season’s children’s films, and some of his own all- time favourites
PROBABLY the greatest kid’s movie of all time is The Wizard of Oz because it appeals to adults and their progeny, maybe because the wicked witch is a bit terrifying for toddlers. My favourite kids’ movies of the past year, Babe and Toy Story, have been pictures that cross that age barrier with guileless humour and charm.
Maybe it’s because I’ll be a father soon … I would rather see a film aimed at youngsters with a degree of freshness, vision and originality, and those two movies had that in abundance.
The same can nearly be said for Disney’s latest animated musical Hunchback of Notre Dame. The studio has had great success with this film and with ventures like The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin that revive a tradition of romantic “cartoonship” that dates back to Pinocchio in 1939.
As founder Walt Disney remarked: “I don’t make films exclusively for children. I make them to suit myself , hoping they will also suit the audience.”
And that’s the major reason for the new film’s success. No one can help but respond to its timeless romanticism (even if Quasimodo doesn’t get the girl) and with the new technology the images and music are a sensual joy.
Despite an amount of syrupy Disneyisation, I’m sure author Victor Hugo won’t be wincing in his grave about this new adaptation of his great work – the heartening tale of the harassed hunchback who escapes from his prison in Notre Dame to attend the annual Parisian Festival of Fools and is rejected by the crowd, excpt for gypsy beauty Esmerelda.
Hunchback is probably Disney’s slickest work to date. The images are entrancing, the voicing by Tom Hulce, Demi Moore and Kevin Kline is faultless and the songs by composer Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz are wickedly humorous.
Unfortunately the same can’t be said for this week’s other kiddie picture Flipper, a feature film version of the hit Sixties United States TV series. It follows the fortunes of a sulky 14-year-old boy, played by Elijah Wood, who is dispatched one summer to his grungy uncle (caricatured affectionately by Crocodile Dundee’s Paul Hogan) to befriend a dolphin, fall in love and defeat a villain who’s filling the ocean with toxic waste.
Like a re-run of Free Willy, the movie fails to bring any originality or vision to its subject. It’s the kind of movie the kids might take to, but any mom or pop who accompanies them is bound to be bored to tears unless ice-blue ocean photography like old Cinzano ads holds any appeal.
As Jeff Shannon, a US critic, said: “The film is the movie-going equivalent of link sausage. We can assume that all of the ingredients have passed inspection and offer a measured degree of wholesome nutrition but in the end it’s still a sausage – looking, feeling and tasting like all the sausages we’ve had before … The problem with the creative logic behind movies like this is that kids will be content with more of the same. Even ice cream gets sickening if you’ve eaten too much.”
There are bound to be more formulaic kiddie movies around this festive season, but I’ll stick to the Hunchback or rent Babe and Toy Story as a delirious family double feature. And perhaps I’ll add The Wizard of Oz.
Hunchback of Notre Dame and Flipper are currently on circuit nationwide