Day 94 - 4/4/09 - Movie #92
BEFORE: I'm going to take a quick break from my Billy Bob festival - TCM ran a tribute to Chuck Jones that included the animated version of one of my favorite childhood books - I've tried to watch it before but lost interest...
THE PLOT: Milo is a boy who is bored with life. One day he comes home to find a toll booth in his room. Having nothing better to do, he gets in his toy car and drives through - only to emerge in a world full of adventure.
AFTER: It's not just that a movie has difficulty living up to a book, but if it doesn't follow the TONE of the book, it can bother me. The book version of this story was clever, like a more modern "Alice in Wonderland" - but this animated version manages to be preachy and talk down to kids as well. In the late 1960's, it seems like it was important to teach kids how to learn "properly", not waste their time, eat their vegetables, love all races, blah blah. Ask a kid, I never needed adults to tell me HOW to learn, I just did it. The parts of this film that aren't preachy are just silly, with hyper sound effects and stupid nonsense, and the book's message got lost in the shuffle. The movie ends up being entertaining, something of a cross between "The Wizard of Oz" and "Yellow Submarine" - but let's not fool kids into thinking that if they do their homework or use their imagination to entertain themselves on a boring day, that it will end up changing the world in a noticable way.
RATING: 5 out of 10 digits (or letters)
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