FANTASIA OBSCURA: This Forgotten Animation is a Treat for Eyes But Not So Kind on the Ears
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, what you see is all you’re going to get; that, and not much else…
The Phantom Tollbooth (1970)
Distributed by: MGM
Directed by: Chuck Jones and Abe Levitow (with Dave Monahan doing live action sequences)
You must never feel badly about making mistakes … as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.
- From the book The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Junster
And never has the source material for a film better described the adaptation that came out of it than we have here…
We open pre-credits with long shots of San Francisco. Ultimately, we focus on Garfield Elementary School, where we see Milo (Butch Patrick) sitting in class while various factoids he supposedly got bombarded with echo in his head over the soundtrack. The kid’s face shows great perplexity, to the point of pain, which explains why he seems so detached on his walk home through various neighborhoods of the city…
…including through a few active construction zones; sure, kids could probably go to a lot more places back then than they can now, but really? Around all those heavy machines in operation in a “Hard Hat Required” zone, and no one gets on him for that…?
Milo survives his trip back from school, his body and ennui intact, where he gets a phone call from his friend Ralph (voiced on the receiver by the legendary June Foray). Milo relates to Ralph how he, like a lot of “latchkey kids,” is left to his own devices and bored out of his skull.
It’s a level of detachment that has a hard time surviving the arrival of a large wrapped box that pops into Milo’s apartment, with a convenient pull tab that turns the gift into the titular tollbooth, complete with a little toy car for Milo to drive in.
Not having anything better to do, he gets in the car and drives through the device, which gets him animated. Literally: For most of the rest of the film, we see a version of Milo drawn and animated by Chuck Jones, which Patrick voices.
And soon, our newly animated hero starts on his way to the Castle in the Air, which he almost doesn’t get to thanks to a side trip to the Doldrums.
Thankfully, he’s saved by Tock the Watchdog (voiced by Larry Thor in his last feature work), a dog with a large watch protruding out of his body. He’s there to save Milo from his own carelessness, and helps him get on his way to the Kingdom of Wisdom. Which hasn’t lived up to its billing in a while, as Milo discovers that the realm has been split asunder between Dictionopolis, ruled by two brothers, King Azaz the Unabridged, and Digitopolis, ruled by the Mathmagician (both voiced by Hans Conreid). Both assume that their areas of ownership, words and numbers respectively, are the most important, although Milo points out that both need each other for anything to work properly.
They both give their blessing to Milo’s effort to head to the Castle in the Air, where the Princess of Sweet Rhyme (voiced by Patti Gilbert in her only feature work) and the Princess of Pure Reason (Foray) are held. Their release would bring order back to the realm, but is Milo up to the task of getting past the demons in the Mountains of Ignorance…?
The bigger challenge seems to have been getting the film made to begin with. Junster’s 1961 children’s book – for which he got illustrations from his roommate Jules Feiffer by offering to cook him a few meals in exchange for drawings – was originally supposed to be a book about urban planning for children commissioned by the Ford Foundation. Junster’s patrons didn’t complain when this came out instead to rave reviews, which gave the architect with a side gig as children’s author some cachet at MGM.
In fact, Junster had a prior collaboration with the studio in 1965. An adaptation of his second book, The Dot and the Line, was produced by MGM with a script from Junster and directed by Chuck Jones with Maurice Noble. So ideally, the second collaboration on Tollbooth should have been a lot easier than it ended up being.
Certainly, Jones and the production unit he set up at MGM were ready for anything that could have come up. This period of Jones’ career was defined by his work on the Tom and Jerry cartoons from that decade, as well as How the Grinch Stole Christmas in 1966 for CBS. It was a brilliant time for him and a period that’s well remembered years later by animation fans.
And visually, the film is prime Jones. The angular character lines and knowing smirks on faces that were his trademark during the period are evident throughout the pic, samples of his style that endeared him to many for years to come. The fact that he has a more vibrant color pallet to work with here makes the visuals even more welcoming.
It’s the script and the music, however, that keep things from coming together for the film. The script that Jones did with Sam Rosen proved to be a poor adaptation of the source material. While condensation from a book into a screenplay tends to drop a lot from the work, Milo’s frustration with learning, as explained by Junster, gets lost entirely in the final work. The Milo we see doesn’t seem to have the same motivations as the one in the book; it’s so opaque that the modern viewer might just condemn the kid to a prescription of Ritalin and be done with him!
Likewise, the songs scored by Lee Pockriss, with lyrics for most by Norman Gimbel and Paul Vance, were pretty, well, forgettable. This disconnect between visuals and music is especially apparent in a song from the film entitled, ironically, “Noise”:
The film feels like its dragging no matter what’s going on on screen when the music swells, and no visuals, no matter how grand they are, going to save it here.
These would have been problem enough to get in the film’s way, with a script Juster would belittle when asked about it later on and some poor work by otherwise talented songwriters, but the studio decided there weren’t enough hurdles to overcome. MGM, which was in the process of imploding, gave the film spotty distribution. Despite the movie actually garnishing a few decent reviews, the box office was such a disappointment that MGM gave Jones and the animation unit he brought with him the boot.
Not that it slowed him down any; newly independent, he went on to produce for TV such fare as The Cricket in Times Square and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, which ultimately led Jones back to Warner Brothers for a whole new cycle of animated projects.
One possibility for the bad BO was the tastes of the time. While today’s audiences vigorously pursue Jones’ output, movie goers in 1970 might have wanted more than work that suggested cartoons that could be seen on TV back then. Anyone familiar with his animation during that period could see beats and themes his other TV work at the time had, and had they wanted something closer to the “Disney experience,” even if that wasn’t going to happen any time soon, they were not going to enjoy this film even if MGM made it easy for them to.
It’s a visual treat that shares one thing at least with the source material: Turn down the sound and just use your eyes, and there’s plenty to enjoy here. At least on that front, Jones can claim proudly to have been wrong for the right reasons…
NEXT TIME: There used to be a much thicker line between movies and television, and there was no which way to cross that. One show, however, had one witch way to break those rules…
