Phantom Tollbooth 1969 Review

Is this film awful?

No.

It should have been an excellent film.

The book by Norton Juster is a clever allegory creating a novel out of fanicful wordplay.  So I want a movie that is nearly as good as the book. This doesn't come close.

  MGM spent a few dollars on it (animated movies are never cheap) and hired one of the best, Chuck Jones, to direct it. He's one of the legendary animation directors who brought his own distinct style and grace to the Warner Brothers cartoons he was associated with (Bugs, Daffy, etc.). He also helped create the Roadrunner series. MGM let Chuck assemble perhaps the best living cartoon voice masters in the business... people like Mel Blanc, Dawes Butler Hans Conreid and June (Rocket J. Squirrel) Foray to work on this movie.

But the voices and the characters aren't cast well.    Milo's companion, the watchdog Tock should not have the voice of a wise old man, but Tock does. The look of the film is barely one step above the Hanna - Barbara Saturday Morning cartoons of the late 60's. That's a real disappointment too. Butch (Eddie Munster) Patrick isn't the best choice to play Milo either. The bad songs that were added are instantly forgettable.

There's a couple of interesting conceived, almost Psychadelic sequences. Unfortunately they barely touch on Yellow Submarine or Peter Max territory and look particularly lame and uninspiringly safe today. Too bad they didn't go further with it.

It's not an awful film. It at times captures some of the cleverness of the book and does follow the book fairly closely in an utterly uninspired Cliff Notes fashion.

It begins with a live-action sequence but does not establish Milo's boredom. It does however try to bore the audience with a couple of unnecessary and extremely bland songs. Then the film switches to animation. It does not seem possible that one can say the voice over work of brilliant artists like Mel Blanc and Dawes Butler are all wrong for a film-- but they are.

In the book, the characters Milo meets are nothing like Bugs, or Daffy, or Elmer, or Yogi, or Wally Gator, or Quick Draw McDraw, and so when the characters speak with voices that have traces of these in them, it ruins the originality of the material. The gimmick of live action to animation makes the film seem like a mild derivation of Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz. However it's pacing is like that of a second rate sit com. The book is so full of clever word play and silly puns the film hardly needed to slow down and make sure that everyone realized how clever it was. The book is full of so many important lessons and quickly stated wisdom, it isn't necessary for the film to slow down and become preachy. But it does. The film also didn't needed the awful songs it decided to grace us with. The whimsical grace the book captured was not captured by the film. Not even close.

I hate the film because I know there are a lot of people who have seen the film, and have decided they do not need to read the book because they saw the film. They should read the book.

Perhaps someday, the book will get the movie it deserves. Perhaps it will be embraced by the type of talented film-makers who over the years have turned Roald Dahl's books into above average films such as Matilda, The Witches, James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, etc. etc.

The Phantom Tollbooth film however does not do the book justice. It should have worked much better than it did. The people who made it, obviously did not truly love the material as millions have come to do who have read the book. In fact Chuck Jones' forte' is with material such as the Roadrunner which are brilliant updated silent comedies, full of slapstick humor. Phantom Tollbooth doesn't offer many opportunities for slapstick and visual humor and Jones does not try to find any.

The Phantom Tollbooth  1969  Direced by Chuck Jones