Review of Moonwalker (1988) by Timm S — 27 May 2014

The first thing you gotta do when talking about Moonwalker is accept the fact that there's no story, it's just a compilation of short films, concert footage, and music videos all starring Michael Jackson.

Once you get there it's easy to realize that this is a pretty cool movie, but also kind of a mixed bag. The film starts with some good old fashioned concert footage, then goes into a short based around Michael's career, which is neat, but isn't anything we haven't seen before in greater detail.

After that we go into another short starring a group of kids remaking the Bad music video, nothing special, but it's fun to see them act out the famous sequences. Once we get through those two segments is where the movie really gets going.

We have one where Michael is being chased by a legion of crazy fans, created in claymation by the excellent Will Vinton, through a movie studio, and ending with him dancing with a stop motion rabbit version of himself.

It's some strange, quirky insanity that really makes Moonwalker what it is. The madness continues into another video about Michael's tabloids that's filled to the brim with monty python like animations and odd visuals.

This is my personal favorite part and seems right in places with the likes of Thriller and Bad's famous videos. Now there's the final part, the most famous, detailing the story of Michael's bouts with a drug dealer in an attempt to save some kids.

This has some great moments, like the amazingly awesome Smooth Criminal video and Robo-Jackson, and the rest, while not up to the level of those mentioned scenes, are still pretty decent. The picture then ends with some more concert footage that closes the plot of the last short.

Overall Moonwalker has some good and has some, well, not so good, but the lesser's bearable and the good is definitely worth a watch, especially if you're a big fan of Michael Jackson.