Review of The Pagemaster (1994) by Gareth R — 06 Dec 2010

Depending how you look at it, The Pagemaster either has lots of potential sadly wasted, or it could never have worked in the first place. One thing we can probably agree on, though, is that it doesn't work.

It's the story of Richard Tyler (Macauley Culkin), a safety-and-statistics-obsessed little boy who is afraid of heights, along with pretty much everything else. Lost on an errand for his Dad, Richard winds up in the local library, and after slipping and falling unconscious he finds himself in a cartoon world of books and stories.

The moral is pretty obvious: You shouldn't be afraid to take risks, and reading is good. They're both worthwhile points. But having a good point and illustrating it properly are different things.

First off, Richard is obsessively safety-conscious. In what way does that prohibit him from doing lots of reading? Considering he's basically afraid to leave the house, isn't it quite likely he reads a lot, since you don't have to personally leave the house to get hold of a book? Anyway, we know he reads plenty of non-fiction, or he wouldn't have all those statistics to hand. Isn't he just the sort of person who would live vicariously through fiction rather than go out and do things for himself?

The whole moral of Richard learning to read adventure, fantasy and horror books makes no basic sense, especially since there's no correlation between reading a lot of great books and living your life a bit more dangerously. You can enjoy the hell out of Treasure Island and still get claustrophobia.

But that's just the icing on the cake. The real problem is what The Pagemaster says about the actual books.

Richard is introduced, for the first time, to such things as Adventure, Horror and Fantasy. This means we get glimpses into Jekyll & Hyde, Treasure Island, Moby Dick and a scant few other examples the animators thought it would be easy to draw. These glimpses offer weak, unimaginative summaries of each story. There's no particular lesson learned from each one, and they're not strung together into a particular narrative: the whole thing is just a quest to get the hell out of the library. (Another mixed message, there. Is escaping from the world of literature really what Richard needs to do? Wasn't he supposed to get immersed in it?).

Your kids will learn nothing from these half-arsed Reader's Digest versions of classics, and you'll get nothing out of the journey besides a vague shrug of recognition. You've heard all these stories before, done properly, mostly by Disney. (Who, by the way, may want a word about copyright infringement.).

It certainly doesn't help that the world of literature is imagined as a cartoon, which may inadvertently suggest to young minds that the real purpose of the whole exercise is to go watch more cartoons. How much more memorable would the film be if it didn't skew off into a cheap cartoon, and all this stuff had to come to actual, three-dimensional life? (And about that cheapness: the animation is washed-out and bland, and the only spikes of imagination come from vigorously ripping off famous Disney movies.).

It's basically a Message Movie, where the message is confusingly compromised. It's about taking a trip through the world of literature, in such a way that nothing is learned, very little excitement is had and no one, at any point, reads. It is very, very pointless.

On the plus side, it's not as awful as it could have been. There are a couple of embarrassingly bad songs dotted around, but hey, there could have been more of them. Macauley Culkin doesn't have much work to do as his own animated counterpart - seriously, a live action movie would have been better for everyone - but at least Patrick Stewart is in it, walking away with the entire movie as a crusty, pirate-themed book called Adventure. Guest support is generally good, but fatally limited: Leonard Nimoy makes a decent Dr Jekyll, but he's only in it for, what, two minutes? Ditto everyone else. Even Christopher Lloyd, as the titular magic character who makes all of this happen, is basically in two scenes. You spend the whole movie skipping vaguely from one scenario to another, waiting for the story to properly start.

This is one of those movies where a discussion of plus points inevitably slips into a list of complaints, so for The Pagemaster's sake, I'll stop now. Skip it. Go read a book.