Return to Oz
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| Return to Oz | |
|---|---|
 DVD cover |
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| Directed by | Walter Murch |
| Produced by | Paul Maslansky |
| Written by | L. Frank Baum (novels) Gill Dennis Walter Murch |
| Starring | Fairuza Balk Nicol Williamson Jean Marsh Piper Laurie Matt Clark |
| Music by | David Shire |
| Cinematography | David Watkin Freddie Francis |
| Editing by | Leslie Hodgson |
| Distributed by | Buena Vista Pictures |
| Release date(s) | June 21, 1985 (USA) |
| Running time | 113 min. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $25,000,000 |
| Preceded by | The Wizard of Oz |
| Followed by | Lost in Oz |
| IMDb profile | |
The 1985 film Return to Oz is a motion picture arguably created as an unofficial sequel to The Wizard of Oz. It was made by Walt Disney Pictures, but has no approval by MGM, the company that made the classic 1939 film. However, no approval was necessary since all of the Oz Books were in the Public Domain. The film was directed by Walter Murch.
The film was not well received by the box office, but gained generally positive reviews from critics. Perhaps the reason for the film underperforming at the box office was that most viewers' prior assumptions about Oz were based on the MGM film; however, it has become a cult classic to many adults and children, and has earned high VHS and DVD rentals and sales.
Contents |
[edit] Plot
The movie's plot is a combination of L. Frank Baum's novels Ozma of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz, which were written as sequels to the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Dorothy (played by Fairuza Balk) cannot stop thinking about the Land of Oz and her friends the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion. One night Dorothy sees a shooting star, and the next morning, while checking for eggs from the hen Billina, Dorothy comes across a key that appears to be from Oz. Dorothy shows the key to her aunt while adamantly proclaiming its origins. Her worried aunt takes Dorothy to a doctor who wishes to "cure" her of her dreams and delusions by using electro-shock therapy. During the consultation, Dorothy sees another girl's reflection in a mirror in the doctor's office. Dorothy is left in the care of the doctor and his sadistic nurse. That night, when Dorothy is scheduled to undergo her therapy, there is a violent storm. As the medical staff is preparing Dorothy, the electricity goes out, and she is left alone as the doctor and his nurse go to check the hospital's generator. While they are gone, Dorothy is freed by the mysterious girl she had seen earlier, and together they escape from the hospital. The doctor and nurse return to find Dorothy missing, and begin to hunt for her throughout the clinic and surrounding grounds. Fleeing the nurse in the storm, Dorothy and her companion fall into the violent waters of the river nearby. The mysterious girl helps Dorothy pull herself up onto a wooden box, Dorothy tries to pull the girl up from her ankles but her shoes fall off and the girl appears to drown, Dorothy throws the girls shoes at the river bank and then faints while floating down the river.
Dorothy awakes to find the floodwaters gone and the wooden box stranded at the edge of the Deadly Desert. She also discovers that Billina the hen, who has suddenly developed the power of speech, is a fellow passenger. Making their way to safer ground, they pick something to eat from a lunch-pail tree. Dorothy guesses that they have somehow found their way back to Oz, because lunch pails don't normally grow on trees and animals like Billina don't talk. From there, Dorothy finds the remnants of her old house and the Yellow Brick Road, which appears to have fallen into disrepair. They follow the road to the Emerald City, which is equally derelict and populated by stone statues of its former residents, including the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion. They come across a message scrawled on the city walls: "BEWARE THE WHEELERS!" Soon the pair meets these gaudily-dressed, loudly-yelling creatures, who have wheels instead of hands and feet. Dorothy and Billina flee down an apparently blind alley to escape the Wheelers. At its end they find a concealed door. Using the key Dorothy found on the farm in Kansas, they open the door and find Tik-Tok, a round copper mechanical man whom they activate with a wind-up mechanism. Tik-Tok tells Dorothy that he was left there by the Scarecrow to wait for her when the populace began turning to stone. Tik-Tok defends them from the Wheelers, and forces the head Wheeler to lead them to the royal residence, where the head-exchanging Mombi (a composite of two characters from the books: Princess Langwidere and the witch Mombi) lives. Mombi tells Dorothy that the Nome King took the Scarecrow and all the emeralds from the Emerald City back to his mountain and turned everyone else to stone. She then imprisons Dorothy and Billina in one of the castle's towers, planning to take Dorothy's head as her 32nd (Mombi already has 31 heads that she can alternate, the 31st being her original head). Tik-Tok attempts to save Dorothy, but his clockwork action runs down, rendering him unable to move. In the tower, Dorothy meets a talking dummy named Jack Pumpkinhead. After Jack tells her about his origins, and how he was brought to life with a magical "Powder of Life" (-You sprinkle it over something, and the thing comes to life-), Dorothy devises a plan to escape from Mombi's castle.
Dorothy, Billina, and Jack manage to free themselves from the tower and make their way to where Tik-Tok stands frozen. They wind up Tik-Tok again, and Dorothy goes to get Mombi's ruby key in order to steal the Powder of Life, which Mombi keeps in the cabinet of Head 31. In the meantime, Jack and Tik-Tok go back to the tower to build Gump out of sofas, palm fronds, and a stuffed Gump's head. Dorothy successfully obtains the ruby key from around Mombi's wrist as she is sleeping, but as she takes the powder from the cabinet, Dorothy accidentally wakes up Head 31. This wakes up Mombi's body (who was sleeping headless) and the other 30 heads. Dorothy takes the powder and runs back to the tower. When she arrives, she finds that the others have not yet finished building the Gump: Tik-Tok's think-works ran out, and his nonsensical directions disrupted the construction process. Dorothy re-winds Tik-Tok, and he and Jack hurriedly finish the Gump as Dorothy sprinkles it with the powder. When Dorothy utters the magical words, "Weaugh, Teaugh, Peaugh" written on the label, the Gump awakens. Just as Mombi arrives in the tower, the Gump flies away.
As they fly toward the Nome King's mountain, the Wheelers follow them on the ground below, but are forced to stop when they reach the Deadly Desert. The hastily-built Gump falls apart in mid-air and crash-lands on the Nome King's mountain. Remembering that the Wheelers had told them the Nome King did not allow chickens in Oz, they decide to hide Billina inside Jack's pumpkin head. The Nome King soon becomes aware of Dorothy's presence. Though initially afraid of her power, he soon decides that she is not very dangerous at all. His laughter causes an avalanche on the mountainside, and a hole opens through which Dorothy, Jack, Billina, Tik-Tok, and the Gump fall. When they reach the bottom, they find the Scarecrow there, but he instantly vanishes. The Nome King explains that he has transformed the Scarecrow into an ornament. He then challenges Dorothy and her friends to a game in which he allows each of them to see his ornament collection and guess three times (by placing their hand on an ornament and saying, "Oz") which is the Scarecrow. They agree to the rules, and the Gump is the first to enter the room. When he is unable to find the Scarecrow after three guesses, the Gump is turned into an ornament himself--a rule the Nome King failed to mention beforehand. Tik-Tok, Jack Pumpkinhead, and Billina enter the ornament room one at a time, and none return.
The more people he transforms into ornaments, the more human the Nome King appears to become. Dorothy begins feeling drained, The Nome King mentions Dorothy's plain black shoes and asks her if she "would rather be wearing these" and shows Dorothy that he now possesses the Ruby Slippers (which fell from Dorothy's feet when she left Oz the last time), and used them to conquer the Emerald City. He justifies his actions by stating that all the emeralds in the city originally belonged to him anyway and were stolen by the Scarecrow and the people of Emerald City. In the meantime, Mombi arrives at the Nome King's mountain in order to warn him that Dorothy is coming. The Nome King is informed by a servant that Tik-Tok has stopped guessing and is just standing motionless. Dorothy assumes he has wound down, so the Nome King allows her to enter, wind him up, and then take her turn at guessing after he does. Dorothy enters the ornament room to find that Tik-Tok has not actually wound down but was hoping Dorothy would think so and enter to find him. He reasons that, if his last guess fails, Dorothy will see what sort of ornament he turns into and be better prepared to guess herself. Tik-Tok fails his final guess but Dorothy is unable to determine what he has been changed into. Dorothy makes two failed guesses but is able to find the Scarecrow on her last guess. Realizing that the Nome King has enchanted them all into objects colored green, Dorothy and the Scarecrow manage to find and rescue the others.
Realizing that Dorothy has solved the riddle, the Nome King traps Mombi in a cage and begins to cave in the ornament room. Dorothy and her friends are blocked into the room by the Nome King's minions. He picks up Jack and holds him upside-down over his mouth, threatening to eat him. The terrified Billina, hidden inside Jack's head, lays an egg, which falls into the Nome King's throat. This destroys the Nome King, as eggs are poisonous to Nomes. Dorothy finds the Ruby Slippers in some rubble, she kicks off her normal shoes which are lost in the rubble and puts the slippers on, she uses them to wish, "All of us from Oz to return there safely, and for the Emerald City, and all the people in it to be restored to life." This is accomplished, with the party from Oz (including the captive Mombi) arriving on the hillside above the restored Emerald City. During the victory celebration, the citizens of Oz ask Dorothy to be their Queen. Dorothy regretfully declines their offer, telling them she must go back home. As Dorothy says, "I wish I could be in both places at the same time," the Ruby Slippers reveal behind her a girl in a mirror who is not Dorothy's reflection. The girl is actually Ozma, the rightful ruler of Oz, and the girl who freed Dorothy from the hospital. She had been trapped in the mirror by Mombi on the Nome King's orders. Dorothy hands over the Ruby Slippers to Ozma and asks her to wish her back home. Ozma agrees, but with one condition: that Ozma may visit Dorothy from time to time, and that if Dorothy ever wants to come back to Oz, Ozma will make it so. Ozma then clicks her heels three times, and Dorothy is spirited away with no time to say goodbye to all her friends.
Soon afterward, Dorothy awakes in Kansas, she sees that she is barefoot, Toto and her aunt and uncle then find her. She finds out that the clinic caught fire during the storm, and the doctor was killed while attempting to save his machines. Just then, a paddy-wagon passes by with the sadistic nurse behind bars. When Dorothy gets home, she goes straight to her mirror and says Ozma's name while touching it. She is able to see Ozma, along with Billina (who stayed in Oz). When Dorothy begins to tell Aunt Em about this, Ozma tells her she should keep it a secret. The film ends with Dorothy and Toto heading outside to play in the yard.
[edit] Comparisons with The Wizard of Oz
Return to Oz is often referred to as a sequel to the 1939 Wizard of Oz, but this is only partly true. Some ties to the 1939 MGM musical were deliberately kept. The silver shoes in the Baum story remain ruby slippers in Return to Oz as they had been in the MGM film. Also, the MGM movie's concept of Dorothy imagining Oz based on people she knows in the real world - which is not present in the original story - is mostly kept intact in Return to Oz. However, this is where the similarities end.
Besides being more realistic, considerably darker and not a musical, the movie is overall truer to the original concept of Oz as described in Baum's books. Certain key elements of the books, such as the Tin Woodsman's name, which was shortened to "Tin Man" for the 1939 film, as well as his back story, which isn't even mentioned in the original, are restored. Also, Fairuza Balk was nine during the filming of Return to Oz, which is much closer to the age of Dorothy in the books than that of Judy Garland, who was 16 when she starred in The Wizard of Oz. The movie is also full of disturbing situations and scenes of violence. Although this is one of the chief complaints from those unfamiliar with the books, this is again truer to Baum's vision: it was common for the books to contain such scenes, although they were arguably more whimsical than scary.
Oddly, Glinda the Good Witch is absent from the film. She plays a major role in the 1939 movie, and almost all the books. In Ozma of Oz, she gives Ozma a magic carpet on which to cross the deadly desert.
Many Baum concepts not from the Land of Oz or Ozma of Oz do appear in the film:
- The Patchwork Girl, The Shaggy Man, Polychrome the Rainbow's Daughter, The Frogman, Tommy Kwikstep, The Braided Man and Ojo are all background characters in the final scene. Arguably, Jellia Jam, General Jinjur and the Captain of the Guard are in the scene too.
- The unsuccessful attempt by the Nome King to invade the Emerald City by tunnel occurs in The Emerald City of Oz.
- Although maps of Oz vary, especially the east/west controversy, it is possible that Dorothy lost her shoes "in flight" over the Nome king's domain after her first visit. If the tornado approached Oz from the east it is possible that is the direction to which Dorothy returned to Kansas. In Baum's Oz Canon, the silver shoes were destroyed by Dorothy's passage over the Deadly Desert. The Nome King possessed a Magic Belt that Ozma later obtained and used for most of the purposes to which the ruby slippers were applied in the movie.
- Uncle Henry and Aunt Em's financial woes (the loss of the house due to the tornado and the bank foreclosing on the farm) are a strong theme in The Emerald City of Oz.
- The "Powder of Life", rampant in many books, is manufactured in The Patchwork Girl of Oz
- The Nome King kidnapping someone by means of a seemingly-endless tunnel through the center of the earth takes place in Tik-Tok of Oz.
- The Nome King's plot to become human is only mildly approached in "The Magic of Oz".
- The Wizard of Oz, Toto is Cairn Terrier. Here, he is a border terrier.
[edit] Reception
The movie was expensive to make and went overbudget, and did poorly in theaters. The PG rating was likely a major cause of the poor box-office performance. Many critics denounced the film as too disturbing or scary for young children. However, other critics including Harlan Ellison praised the film for its originality and visuals. It is still referred to as being "ahead of its time" in terms of quality and special effects.
Viewers unfamiliar with the Oz books found the characters and scenes to be bizarre and unfamiliar, since few characters from the first film appear other than Dorothy. The Scarecrow makes only a brief appearance with limited dialogue; the Cowardly Lion and Tin Woodman are seen but don't have speaking parts.
Considering how terrifying many elements of the 1939 film were to previous generations, many critics and viewers seem to have misremembered it as presenting Oz as a fairyland. Baum's original goal had been to create Oz as a world having both paradisical and frightening features, and Return to Oz is perhaps closer to his original vision.
According to Harlan Ellison in his book Harlan Ellison's Watching, the studio deliberately sabotaged the film's success. Since they consider the film "underrated" or "underappreciated", they discouraged positive reviews, minimised advertising and limited its theatrical release to less than a week. At the time of its release, Ellison published a review in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, urging readers to "go see it, before it disappears". He describes the reasons for dumping this film as having to do with the 1984 shakeup in Disney management, in which the new man, (Michael Eisner), may have wished to justify his presence by making his predecessor's efforts appear inept. He believed the film would have succeeded had viewers been allowed to see it.
Despite the film's poor reception, it was not forgotten by Walt Disney Imagineering. The film's interpretation of Oz is featured in the Storybook Land Canal Boats attraction at Disneyland Resort Paris.
Thanks to video cassette and DVD, today Return to Oz is now a cult classic. Fans brought up with Lord of the Rings and Star Wars say they like it better than MGM's classic film.
[edit] Trivia
- Fairuza Balk did all her own stunts
- The ruby slippers in this film were intended to be pumps like in the original, however Fairuza Balk found them uncomfortable, so as her black shoes were no longer needed, they painted them red.
- Fairuza Balk had a problem with shoes during filming. She found Dorothy's black shoes uncomfortable and when she thought the camera couldn't see her feet she slipped them off and continued barefoot. In 2004, she returned to the Ornament room and said "I can go in this room wearing shoes now!"[citation needed]
- The pair of slippers made for Dorothy had a special glue constantly sprayed on them to keep the rubies in place. Fairuza Balk kept playing with her feet; kicking her heels, dipping, dangling on her toes etc. that the rubies kept falling off, the crew got so impatient they took them off her feet in between takes.
[edit] Cultural influence
In 2005, American pop band Scissor Sisters, fans of the film, published an unreleased single on their debut album, Scissor Sisters, called "Return To Oz." Although the song actually pertains to the effects of methamphetamine (crystal meth), it contains many of the images and themes covered in the film (as well as referencing the Skeksis from the Jim Henson film, The Dark Crystal).
[edit] Awards
Received an Academy Award nomination for "Best Visual Effects."
[edit] External links
- Return to Oz : The Unofficial Site - A site devoted to the 1985 movie Return to Oz in all aspects, includes pictures, interviews, behind the scenes, collectibles, and more!
- Returning To Oz: An Audio Documentary On Walt Disney Pictures "Return To Oz" - An online Internet radio show, on the history and behind the scenes look of the classic 1985 Disney movie, "Return To Oz" and the MGM 1939 movie, THE WIZARD OF OZ. First 13 episodes devoted to "RETURN TO OZ". Produced & Hosted by Aaron Pacentine of VideosForFamily.com and Celia Foster, among others.
- Return To Oz at the Internet Movie Database
