urban (01/14/83)
It's pretty interesting to see the different reactions
to "The Dark Crystal". People, the genre of this story
isn't "Epic" or "Heroic Fantasy", it's "Fairy Tale".
Now, you may not like the lack of plot twists, or the
two-dimensional characters, but that's surely a complaint
with the genre, not the execution. It doesn't rhyme or
scan either, but it's not supposed to be poetry.
Some of the critics have also had trouble with the
unpleasant "look" of much of the film. Too much Disney
tunefulness may have given them the wrong idea. Fairy
tales are, by and large, pretty grim (pun unavoidable).
Witches who eat children, people being forced to wear
red-hot iron shoes, poison apples, you get the idea.
Consider "Hansel and Gretel". It's a pretty simple story,
and not a whole lot of laughs (Hansel, in a cage, fools the
witch into thinking him insufficiently fat by presenting
her with a chicken bone instead of his thumb. I think this
is originally supposed to be funny). But Engelbert
Humperdink managed to rescue himself from obscurity by
writing an opera around the story. The tale's pretty much
the same, with all its simplicity, but the quality of the
music and the performance of the cast is where the Art is.
The Dark Crystal, similarly, tells a fairy story.
Instead of music, Jim Henson & Co. have used their own
unique brand of puppetry and sculpture to create a
genuinely artistic work. It may not be your cup of tea
(lots of people don't like opera either), but that doesn't
mean you should dismiss it as trash.
Not afraid to look into crystals,
Mike Urban
ucbvax!trw-unix!trwspp!urban