The journey back to oz song4/9/2023 ![]() It features Liza Minnelli voicing Dorothy (played in the 1939 film by her mother Judy Garland, and in what would have been her first major role had the film been released as originally intended). ![]() It was only after the Filmation studio had made profits on their numerous television series that it was able to finish the project, copyrighted 1971, released in 1972 in the UK and 1974 in the U.S. she performs the act that is supposed to take her back home only to find out that it was all a dream.The movie began production in 1962, but ran out of money and was halted for nearly eight years. she shares a sweet/intimate moment with that ONE character, remarking on how much she will miss them. with the lessons she's learned imprinted on her heart, she bids her newfound friends farewell in a bittersweet moment. she goes on to defeat the "evil one" of the realm. throughout her journey in this fantastical realm, she learns the importance of friendship and being yourself. in an attempt to find her way home, she is tasked with defeating the "evil one" in order to earn the right of passage home. she finds her way to said character and discovers that they are unfit to bring her home for one reason or another. after asking how she is to return home, she is repeatedly told that she needs to find a certain ruling character. the young girl is adamant to go home despite her growing attachment to her friends-one of which she is closer to than the rest of them. also, there are two magical women who represent good and evil. in this realm, said girl makes a group of unlikely friends, who she has a deep connection to and feels that she somehow already knows them. It is a brilliant re-using of the original book!Īfter falling a great distance, a young girl finds herself in fantastical world that is utterly unlike the one she has grown up in. But in this movie, the mices logically make the elephants afraid, since everyone knows elephants are afraid of mice. It also allows to reuse one of the most troublesome plot points of the Land of Oz: in the book, the heroes use mices to defeat the army occupying the Emerald City because they are a bunch of *girls* and *girls* are of course afraid of mices. These are the kind of fantastic picutres and imagery an Oz movie need. It feels strongly Ozian (elephants are quite common in Oz), and it allows for many wonderful pictures - Mombi riding the elephant at the head of the stampede, for exemple or my favorite picture, Mombi "cooking" the elephants in a pot from which wriggle all the elephants trunk like tentacles or snakes, in fact Dorothy thinks they are snakes and the crow adds mischievously "They're not quite cooked up yet". She is well "played" if I may say, but even more than that, it is her master plan that really makes this movie.īecause you see, Mombi's plan is to attack Oz with an army of green elephants created by magic. And yet she manages to be a very entertaining villain: the scene where she thinks of all the things she could inflict to the travelers, walls of fire and floods, is fascinating, for example. On one side, yes, she disappoints a bit as a villain - she is your traditional fairy-tale witch (and even said to be the "cousin" of the Wicked Witch of the West, to reinforce the idea of witches being one big family), she has a pet talking crow that never reappears, her design isn't inventive at all, and she lives in a house that can't be more cliché. The other big plus of this movie is Mombi. Pumpkinhead and the Sawhorse for exemple are really good sidekick characters, lovable and funny (not like Dorothy, who's just as blend). As a result the story feels a bit too simplistic at time, and the movie too long - they padded it with songs and dreaming sequences and flashbacks a bit too much.īut this movie has some good things to it, I will admit. ![]() Also no Wogglebug, and the Sawhorse is now a merry-go-round horse lost in Oz (according to my research this was due to having the Sawhorse being mixed up with a character from "Merry-go-Round in Oz", the last of the Famous Forty. Especially given that, for exemple the main villain here, Mombi, looks like your typical, traditional fairy-tale witch, (and they also completely changed Glinda's design, for whatever reason).Īs I said earlier it is basically The Marvelous Land of Oz, but without Tip/Ozma and without Jinjur, just Mombi and Pumpkinhead (that is now Mombi's servant, kind of replacing Tip). ![]() And a lot of the backgrounds look a lot like they would fit in Sleeping Beauty.īut as a result it feels more like a Disney movie-rip off than an Ozian adaptation. The long dreaming/hallucination sequences with music reminds one of the Pink Elephants of Dumbo, or of the many early Disney animated shorts. When Dorothy arrives in Oz, the movie becomes eerily similar to Alice in Wonderland. It doesn't feel like an Oz movie honestly. I think this overdose of song is explained by another flaw of this movie. ![]()
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