Tag Archives: Children’s Film

Capsules

CAPSULE: WINDS OF CHANGE (1979)

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AKA Metamorphoses

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DIRECTED BY: Takashi Masunaga

FEATURING:

PLOT: Five tales loosely based on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”

Still from Winds of Change (1977)

COMMENTS: Masunaga’s debut is a decent, if somewhat clumsy, attempt at a collaboration with Hollywood’s studios. Even if it plays it by the book—this is a children’s film, after all—it remains a hidden gem, making it of some interest for those loving obscure and long-forgotten cartoons.

This anthology, loosely based on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” starts with Peter Ustinov’s pompous voice-over. Ustinov is the only voice in the film—none of the characters speak for themselves. This admittedly cheapens the experience a bit, but in the end it doesn’t prove too distracting. The stories take place in the heaven of Greco-Roman mythology, with a young boy playing a different role in each tale. It may seem unnecessary to have the same character as a different protagonist each time, but works for younger viewers by creating a point of familiarity.

The stories are familiar to older viewers. We have the doomed love affair between Orpheus and Euridice, the campaign of Perseus against Medusa, and the tragedy of Phaethon. Light psychedelia accompanies everything—we are in the seventies, after all —with some segments even recalling “Alice in Wonderland.” With its lush environments full of cute animals as well as eerie secrets, the art style will appeal to fans of Disney’s animated classics. Fantasia (1940) is a point of reference, even if Winds of Change remains mild in comparison. We can’t really talk about dream logic or surreal imagery here; instead, we have a magical realist visual feast with a rich soundtrack on top. Anachronistic pop ballads, classical tunes, and a hint of Africa complement the visuals, creating a sense of phantasmagoria.

Let it be noted that the alternate edit titled Metamorphoses from 1977, with songs by Joan Baez and Mick Jagger, is unavailable.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“In Winds of Change, every little detail is explained to death, and Ustinov provides silly character voices for moments with implied synchronized dialogue. To get a sense of the weird tone this creates, consider the moment when a young adventurer stumbles upon the goddess Diana, then ogles her shapely naked backside while she bathes in a waterfall with help from flittering faeries. Upon discovering her unwanted visitor, Diana turns toward the camera and scowls while Ustinov says, ‘Hell hath no fury like a goddess being peeked at!’ And that’s one of the more coherent moments.”–Peter Hanson, Every 70s Movie

Winds of Change - Five Ancient Greek

Winds of Change – Five Ancient Greek Myths (Animated)

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    Capsules, Miscellanea

    “KRAZEE KIDZ VIDEO PARTY”

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    Let’s get this out of the way first: despite containing five “films” (although one is only 25 minutes long and two others are under an hour), “Krazee Kidz Video Party” is not a box set. There’s no box. There’s no booklet. There are no meaningful special features: a few drive-in “snipes,” ads and intermission notices, serve as the sole extra, unless you consider the option to watch all the features end-to-end in “slumber party mode” a bonus. And—get this—all this content—301 minutes—is crammed onto one (1) disc. Forget 4K transfers: these VHS-y resolutions hover closer to the quarter-K level.

    Needless to say, this collaborative release from Something Weird and American Genre Film Archives isn’t exactly Criterion Collection quality. That does not mean, however, that it is not recommended—highly recommended, in fact, to the right oddballs, many of whom are regular readers of this site. That is because of the quality (can that be the right word?) of the curiosities on display here. True to the title, it’s children’s entertainment at its most deranged: a treasure trove of the cynical subgenre that has come to be known as children’s grindhouse. Well, at least some of it is. The rest of it is just, well, kinda weird—with one legitimate exotic egg hidden inside this dime-store Easter basket.

    Still from The big bad wolf (1957)

    That crackerjack isn’t the set’s first offering, 1957’s The Big Bad Wolf [Der Wolf und die sieben jungen Geißlein, AKA The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats], although this opener sports the highest uncanny valley quotient—which is really saying something in this collection. From the first time Mother Goat appears in her Satanist-adjacent horned mask as a talking crow demands the unseen narrator recite the names of her ritual sacrifices cute kids, you’ll wonder if you’ve stumbled into a badly deteriorated, repurposed short. Ultimately, this German movie (the dubbing was unobtrusive, thanks to the masks worn by 90% of the cast) is more of a live-action cartoon, of the kind Hanna-Barbera would have executed in a crisp 5 minutes, but stretched out to almost an hour’s running time. Still, there is something endearing about this material being played earnestly by adults in inarticulate fuzzy masks. The cast really commits to the bits: the wolf’s involuntary plummet in a wheelbarrow down a very slight incline, for example, goes hard. There are also a couple of memorable moments where the lupine-headed monster interacts with live actors, ruthlessly bullying a grocer and a flour merchant (who fights back with his trademark good). And it ends with a note of genuine horrifying folk surrealism straight from the Grimm Brothers’ source material: the wolf eats six of the seven kids, then, as he sleeps off his meal, the lone survivor slices open his belly (with scissors, but without anesthetic) to save his kin. Overall, it’s a highly watchable oddity, and a nice way to start your marathon of Continue reading “KRAZEE KIDZ VIDEO PARTY” →

    List Candidates

    APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE KINGDOM OF CROOKED MIRRORS (1963)

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    Korolevstvo krivykh zerkal

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    Recommended

    DIRECTED BY: Aleksandr Rou

    FEATURING: Olga Yukina, Tatyana Yukina, Andrey Fayt, Lidiya Vertinskaya, Arkadi Tsinman, Andrei Stapran

    PLOT: A spoiled young girl enters the Land of Mirrors, where she goes on a quest with her mirror twin to rescue a boy imprisoned by the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors and his devious daughter and Toad courtier.

    Still from Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors (1963)

    WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: A colorful explosion of baroque and fantastic conceits that’s a set designer’s dream project, the lavish fantasy Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors never fails to astound with its visual invention (not to mention odd details like the piano-playing monkey). To be properly considered for the Apocrypha, however, we’d like to see an actual restored version rather than the cheapo dubbed Something Weird print currently available. But by all means, keep the English language version as a supplement.

    COMMENTS: In the 1950s and 60s, American producers, desperate for B-inventory to fill the teeming drive-ins, increasingly turned to foreign productions to stock their larders. This was especially true of children’s films: kids are less discriminating moviegoers, just throw some spectacle and slapstick on screen and you can keep them busy for 90 minutes while moms and dads do whatever it is moms and dads do when the kids aren’t paying attention. To meet this market,  plundered Mexico for dime store fairy tales. made inroads into the Soviet Union, re-editing halfway decent movies like the planetary exploration saga Planeta Bur (1962) with newly shot footage into ridiculous cut-n-paste monstrosities such as Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968). More to the point for today’s topic, AIP Pictures acquired 3 respectable folklore-based films from talented Soviet director Aleksandr Ptushko and desecrated them with shoddy editing and bad dubbing (in the case of Sadko, they turned the eponymous Russian hero into “Sinbad,” trying to fool viewers into thinking they were seeing a Ray Harryhausen epic.) These AIP knockoffs were so cheap and weird that they became popular entries in the canon.

    Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors falls loosely into this genre, with one difference: although a dubbed version of this Soviet variation on “Through the Looking Glass” was prepared, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence it screened in the USA. The American version was copyrighted by Walter Manley Enterprises, a company whose only other known contribution to cinema history are a series of compilations of the Japanese superhero series “Starman” that they edited together into semi-coherent feature films for the television market. Kingdom may have seen a few televised screenings after midnight or Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE KINGDOM OF CROOKED MIRRORS (1963) →

    Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE POLAR EXPRESS (2004)

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    Beware

    DIRECTED BY: Robert Zemeckis

    FEATURING: , Nona Gaye, , Michael Jeter, Peter Scolari, Daryl Sabara

    PLOT: A boy on the verge of abandoning his belief in Santa Claus is visited by a magical train that whisks him away to the North Pole, but the journey is filled with perilous diversions.

    Still from "The Polar Express" (2024)

    COMMENTS: There are two characteristics define Robert Zemeckis’ career: an eagerness to push the boundaries of visual effects technology, and an affection for frenetic, breakneck action. Sometimes the pendulum swings more in one direction than the other, but every now and then a Who Framed Roger Rabbit comes along to provide a healthy dose of both. So on the one hand, it is utterly unsurprising that Zemeckis would be captivated by the boundless potential of motion-capture CGI animation to deliver the kind of non-stop, eye-popping visuals that have always been impossible to realize in live action. On the other hand, it’s completely baffling that the property with which he would christen this new era would be the Caldecott award-winning children’s classic “The Polar Express.”

    In fairness, it’s not a mystery that someone would come along to take a stab at turning this small book into a big motion picture. After all, Chris Van Allsburg draws cinematically. His page-wide illustrations capture action and emotion in an artistic splurge, summing up minutes of action and dialogue in single images, like oil pastel versions of Cindy Sherman photos. Building out from those lush Van Allsburg drawings probably felt instinctive, far more than other children’s book adaptations that expanded waaaaay beyond their source material, often to their detriment. There’s something very sweaty about the way absolutely nothing goes right for our Hero children, ladling on complications to make everything so much more EXCITING; but that’s not even the film’s greatest drawback. Rather, the problems arise when Zemeckis deploys his fantastic tech, which he has so often done in service of his story: shoehorning Forrest Gump into history, for example, or placing viewers in an impossible perch above Philippe Petit in The Walk. Here, though, the story is buried in spectacle, and repeated efforts to pad out the characters and give them more heft only make the spectacle push back harder. In The Polar Express, CGI beats Van Allsburg’s book into submission.

    The movie wants to bedazzle you into a state of exhaustion. A raucous dance number in which flat-faced acrobats ricochet off the ceiling while singing the virtues of hot chocolate is aimed more at demonstrating the physics-defying capabilities of the technology than actually enchanting the children on the train. It’s immediately followed by the extended journey of a wayward train ticket, which takes a rollicking tour outside of the locomotive, floating through a pack of snarling wolves, flitting through a snowy forest, nearly becoming dinner for a flock of newly hatched eagles, before finally returning to the train compartment, all in an elaborate one-take that is Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE POLAR EXPRESS (2004) →

    It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

    APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FUN IN BALLOON LAND (1965)

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    Beware

    DIRECTED BY: Joseph M. Sonneborn, Jr.

    FEATURING: Balloons, marching bands, parade floats, clowns, and more balloons

    PLOT: During an especially drowsy storytime, a boy has dreams about large parade balloons that cavort and loom over him; we then see the balloons in their natural habitat, the 1964 Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia, with play-by-play from a possibly inebriated narrator.

    WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Exhibit A in the case for advertising’s malign influence, this hour-long promo for parade balloons is both horror show and monument to boredom. Viewed through the ironic shades of nostalgia, it’s gleefully ignorant, but as a relic of its era, it’s a searing indictment of the utterly misguided definition of “fun” among the City of Brotherly Love’s cultural elite.

    Still from Fun in Balloonland (1965)

    COMMENTS: Perhaps you started your day today with a viewing of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a hours-long march of giant helium balloons, high school bands, and uncomfortably cold Broadway performers hiking through the streets of Manhattan. They (and you) are partaking in a tradition that goes back to 1924, but that’s not even the oldest Thanksgiving street party there is. That crown is held by Philadelphia’s parade, created by Macy’s rival Gimbel’s back in 1920. So it’s more than appropriate to turn our gaze toward that venerable Turkey Day bastion, and see how it inadvertently spawned a turkey of a very different kind.

    Fun in Balloon Land wastes no time in delivering off-putting weirdness with the shockingly atonal theme song, sung by a man backed by a group of faux-enthusiastic children and the world’s saddest roller-rink organ. Through slant rhymes and methodical destruction of meter, the “tune” previews attractions to come like the Marrying Turkey, suggests that a teddy bear has fallen arches, and just generally shreds the auditory nerve. Already, we’re off balance before we’ve even seen the opening credit for “Giant Balloon Parades Inc. Presents,” a declaration that doesn’t augur well for artistic achievement.

    The film kicks off in earnest with the sleepytime dream of Sonny (whose name we won’t learn until the last 10 minutes of the film), who rises from bed to stand in the corner of a book of fairy tales like a punished child and starts imaging a series of locales that correspond perfectly with Giant Balloon Parades, Inc.’s product line, including an undersea kingdom, a farm, and a culturally insensitive Old West. Sometimes these scenes are accompanied by amateur dances, but occasionally the film gets ambitious and tries to tell a story, as when the boy dons a gold lamé diaper and blows off a couple of Philly-accented mermaids. The “magic” of the balloons is meant to be self-evident, so there’s no attempt to reference any actual fairy tales or stories of adventure; they’re just generic milieus. All of this Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FUN IN BALLOON LAND (1965) →