kalash@ucbcad.UUCP (03/10/84)
This message is empty.
cjh@cca.UUCP (Chip Hitchcock) (03/15/84)
I've seen it twice. It's definitely not your usual American animation (I saw it soon enough after THE SECRET OF NIMH to compare---I HATED tSoN because I felt it had really terrible sideplots and characterizations (the main plot wasn't so good either---I've never seen a disk harrow that would go through a cinderblock)). The work was done in Japan, in fact, and is similar in style to other Japanese animation you may have seen (human figures either incredibly thin, or short and squat, with ENORMOUS round eyes; not as much true animation as the old Disneys, but much more than anything recent except perhaps tSoN. The plot as reduced to movie length leaves out a couple of significant features, particularly Schmendrick's immortality and the cursed village that prospered as the rest of the land withered, but almost everything is there. The songs are also gone, even Prince Lir's, replaced by Jimmy Webb pieces---but some of them are tolerable. The voices are magic---Christopher Lee as Haggard, Angela Lansbury as Mommy Fortuna, and especially Alan Arkin as Schmendrick, the Last of the Red-Hot Swamis. Despite the Webb songs and some lightening of the dark/cynical tone of the original I think it's a fair pass at the book; I'd like to see these people think about THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD someday if they can make a film that doesn't even suggest playing to children. I've never quite understood why tSoN got to play regular schedules, while this was almost immediately relegated to kiddie matinees---even with the dilutions it's less pointed to kids than tSoN. I suppose that was the problem; films without a very specific market/category have a hard time in this country. This was my choice for the Hugo (SF award, fan-voted) last year and it didn't even get nominated because it was so badly distributed. CHip Arpa: CJH@CCA-UNIX Usenet: ...!decvax!cca!cjh