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Streaming Return to Oz Online.
Movie Title: Return to Oz Return to Oz is available for streaming or downloading. |
I saw this film at its premiere in Seattle (The Emerald City) in 1985. I had read the Oz books for years (including the then-elusive non-Baum books written after his death) and always loved the mix of concern, whismy, and enchantment in the books.
I grew up (like every other person in America) with memories of the 1939 musical–but even as a kid I hated the fact that the MGM musical messed so mighty with the unsafe and plain aspects of Oz, turning everything into a candy-coated Technicolor dream.
Thus, when I finally saw RETURN TO OZ (based on two books, OZMA of OZ and THE LAND of OZ), I realized that the filmmakers had actually sat down and read the books. Gone were the delighted go-lucky images of a very proper position (was Judy Garland’s Dorothy ever truly in effort?!? ) and in its site was a fairyland burly of shaded dreams, scary villains, and entirely current characters. And yet, most of America kept asking, “Where’s the Munchkins? “
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In fact, the film critic for our local paper so trashed the film on its release that I (as a lowly high school sophomore) wrote him a detailed letter explaining what he had missed in the film by spending all his time comparing it to the MGM film. He (like most of America) missed some fantastic moments: Fairuza Balk’s film debut as a staunch, valorous, and sometimes haunted minute girl being called on to establish an entire country from extinction, the Oscar-nominated special effects that brought to life characters that had only existed on paper (like Tik-Tok, Jack Pumpkinhead, and the Nomes), and the sizable performances by British actors Nicol Williamson and Jean March as the villains.
Walter Murch and his team got everything honest with this one, even down to character design: ogle at how closely the Oz chracters (Tik-Tok, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman, etc.) match the diagram they looked in John R. Neil’s illustrations; listen to the astounding glean unruffled by David Shire, bulky of life, brilliance, and haunting motifs (the opening credit sequence alone gives chills) ; and the expend of Will Vinton’s Claymation (of California Raisins fame) to bring the rock-based Nomes to life.
Unfairly dumped by Disney in the ensuing years (to the point that this DVD version isn’t even released by them), the film is only now being rediscovered by people who savor grand fantasy, gargantuan filmmaking, and who truly admire to scrutinize OZ on veil.
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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
The big film editor walter Murch got the chance in the early Eighties to obtain a spectacular film compressing the first two sequels to THE Improbable WIZARD OF OZ, THE MAGICAL LAND OF OZ and OZMA OF OZ, as a tribute to the Baum books he loved. The film was a celebrated flop, given that almost everyone who took their children to it expected it to be a sequel to the noted M-G-M film version of 1939. (In Murch’s version, there are no songs and the carryover characters from the first film–Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion—look like the unusual illustrations of them by John Neill and W. W. Denslow rather than the draw they were portrayed in the 1939 film.) But the film has endured as a cult classic, a master of the film art’s tribute to the books and illustrations he loved from his youth.
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It’s an amazingly attractive film, but it would be insanity to indicate it to little children. It starts out with Uncle Henry and Aunt Em, rebuilding their house and farm from the cyclone, hold Dorothy, who has been speaking of wild stories of cities made of emeralds and scarecrows who talk, to Topeka for electroshock therapy. The asylum they bring her to is a hideous chamber of horrors, and when she escapes it for Oz she is confronted with fantastic other visual terrors, such as the lunatic Wheelers and the Princess Mombi (a variant of both the traditional witch Mombi and the Princess Langwidere from the Oz books), who exchanges fair heads for her body the plot other women change dresses. The scene where Mombi’s headless body chases Dorothy through her chamber of heads (as the other disembodied heads roar in terror) is one of the scariest things I can imagine a child ever viewing.
But this is really a film for adults, and the creepiness of its details add to the archaic viewers’ pleasure. The sets and costumes are spectacular, the cast includes such accomplished actors as Piper Laurie (as Aunt Em), Jean Marsh (Mombi) and Nicol Williamson (the Nome King), and the David Shire rep is one of the most aesthetic film scores ever written–period. As for Dorothy herself, the producers chose such a unusually haunting Dorothy (with helpful multicolored eyes and a sharp plaintive quality to her declare) that the actress, Fairuza Balk, has spun a strong acting career from her early cult fame in this share.