The Pagemaster (1994)

"Just because something is a part of my childhood," writes Tommy Nelson on IMDb, "doesn't mean it's good." I must somewhat guiltily admit that I agree with Tommy. The Pagemaster was one of the movies of my sunny Cambridgeshire-based '90s childhood, with basically everybody I knew owning a copy on VHS, and all of us watching it, joyously and frequently. My copy had a Making Of featurette after the movie, which I would watch, fascinated. My stepmother would ask why the hell I wanted to watch that, and I would tell her because I wanted to know how they did it. She said, "well with artists and computers, of course", as if that were the extent of the effort involved. It was the need to know the secrets of the movie industry as a young child that really made the critic I am today.

I still own a functioning VHS player, for those few tapes which do not exist on DVD. To my absolute (and completely unexaggerated) horror, there has never been a UK DVD release, and the best I can get is a Region 1 import, or a Blu Ray, which I have no means of viewing. But the other day, a friend cleared out a bunch of her now grown-up kids' old videos for my daughter, and what the hell was among them? Yes, one of the top 10 movies of the '90s years of my childhood! (and that will surely become an article on here in due course!) So yesterday, my daughter and I sat down to watch it together. And I ended up noticing several things about it that I never saw as a child. Not bad things, necessarily, but some really leapt out at me.

For example, the movie is only an hour long. When you consider the then-advanced technology, big name stars and voice artists... it cost 27 million fucking dollars to make! And sure, three mere years after that smarmy git James Cameron broke new f/x barriers with the epic Terminator 2: Judgement Day, it's nothing terribly special. But it was a lot for its time, especially when you take into account the meagre box office performance of $13 million (yet, I suspect, the video - and video game - sales must have brought it closer to profit). So it's interesting that all of these resources would produce only an hour's worth of material.

Look at that little face!

But I primarily digress; let's get to the plot. Macaulay Culkin (who I only yesterday realised was a very cute kid) plays Richard Tyler, a bespectacled, paranoid little geek, who is obsessed with accidents, and the statistics that protect him from them. His bedroom is adorned with homemade 'No Smoking' and 'High Voltage' signs, earthquake survival kits and fire extinguishers... it's bordering on darkly humorous. But in reality, it's sad that a kid is already so haunted by fears that shouldn't have crept up on him for another ten years or so. So this is established as the situation that will be rectified by whatever adventure he happens upon. His poor parents desperately try to encourage their son to take the most banal of chances, like climbing the ladder of the treehouse his Pop (Ed Begley Jr.) is building him, and sending him to the hardware store for a pound of nails.

Suiting up in reflective jacket and motorcycle helmet like a knight going to battle, Richard mounts his trusty pimped-up Safety Cycle, complete with tall warning flags, windshield and double headlights, and heads out. Thing alert: when Pop sends Richard out to get the nails, it is a bright and sunny day, and when he actually heads out, it is almost dark outside, and storm clouds are brewing...how long did it take him to get kitted up? Anywho, Richard heads cautiously off, gets caught in a storm, and flees to the nearest building -- an ornate old library that looks more like one of the big museums in London. It is the library of dreams, with massive high ceilings and dark marble pillars and cases of leather and gold bound books reaching up out of view. Here he is met by eccentric-as-ever Christopher Lloyd as Mr Dewey, who has a "talent for guessing what people need", so perhaps could have done financially better in Deuce Bigalow's gig.

Whilst looking through the vast, maze-like bookcases for the public telephone, Richard comes across a wild mural on the dome of the ceiling, depicting several classic literary character, and the wizard-like, robed Pagemaster (Dewey's alter-ego). The kid slips on the wet floor and knocks himself unconscious, waking up to great globs and geisers of paint gushing down from the ceiling to form a giant CGI dragon, which consumes him and transforms him into an illustration in the book world. Here, he is instructed by the Pagemaster to pass three tests of Horror, Adventure and Fantasy, before he can find his way home, each of these genres materialising as anthropomorphic books, brilliantly voiced by Frank Welker, Patrick Stewart and Whoopi Goldberg respectively.

Whaddaya know?! I found a pic that demonstrates the terror!

From here to five minutes from the end, Richard and his friends run through incredibly short episodes with the classic literary characters, who are each depicted as very one-dimensional villains -- nothing more than a menacing obstacle to temporarily delay Richard's progress back home. However, they are all unusually dark. The entire picture is, more so in imagery than in theme. Colours are dark greys and greens, and there are a couple of images that still haunt me to this day. I actually regretted, at these points and others, showing it to my five year old. What a stupid bugger, I thought. The shot that takes the cake, is when Jekyll transforms into the hideous Hyde, coming straight up to the 'camera' with his hands concealing his face, and suddenly whipping his hands away, scr
eaming his name and giving the poor kids in the audience a full-screen close-up of his truly hideous face, and their parents a haemmorage-inducing earful of that shrill scream-pitch that only youngsters can reach. The close runner-up is during the friends' tackle with Captain Ahab in the middle of the ocean. Moby Dick, here depicted impossibly large and fierce in the eyes, charges their boat vertically, and shown from a bird's eye view, thundering imminently upwards towards them and chomping the boat to toothpicks.

The dark visuals and themes of the movie mentioned, another Thing pops up: the skies in the Pagemaster's world have an uncanny knack for turning dark green or red the instant the latest villain rolls up to be slain. And that's the other thing... these villains are in the habit of disappearing without actually being slain. Moby Dick savages the boat, and is never seen again. So what, did he just get bored and swim away? Surely he's still very much in the area. What does the evasive nature of these villains' pursuits teach Richard? Because this is, of course, the classic Wizard of Oz format, with a youngster with life lessons to learn being swept up in some fantastical journey away from their comfort zone and befriending three characters who will help them reach the correct realisations. Labyrinth adopted the same format, as have many, far less superior family pictures.

So what is Richard supposed to learn from this, quite frankly terrifying, ordeal? The animated portion of the movie's swift conclusion seems to summarise that he needed to learn to be brave. What did books, or reading, have to do with this lesson?... *cricket chirp*.... *tumble weed*...
And why exactly did he need to learn this? I suppose his neurosis wasn't completely healthy for a kid so young, but Roger Ebert rather correctly points out that the lesson here is that Richard needs to toughen up, take it like a man...he is basically trained to be a marine. And all with literature providing a false facade for the lesson. I almost scold myself for being so fucking cynical about a movie that brought so much excitement to my young life, but in a proper, grown-up review of a family film, the truth can hurt.

On the odd occasion, I have come across my hero Ebert dismally slating one of my favourite movies. The Lost Boys was a good example. The Pagemaster is another. One of the many phenomena to occur when you watch certain movies with frequency from childhood into adulthood, is that you come to realise that just because something has sentimental and nostalgic value, does not make it artistically rich or masterfully created; although The Lost Boys is very much both of these things, The Pagemaster is not. And it's often difficult when you hit the wall of maturity, when you see the product through adult eyes, which are lensed by knowledge of life and reality and common sense. One may be inclined to feel sadness, disappointment, emptiness as a result of this phenomena. Thankfully, I have learned to separate the quality from the nostalgic, and so, all these years later, can still enjoy The Pagemaster, and feel like I'm five again, whilst acknowledging with myself that it's not a well made movie.