Winsor McKay was one of the standout comic artists in the early 20th century, with his weekly comic "Little Nemo in Slumberland". Each week he turned out a full page, and the drawings were lush and complicated. It ran from 1905 to 1914 in its original run.

Originally it was about the dreams of a boy named Nemo, who visited a place called Slumberland every night. And "surreal" doesn't begin to do it justice.

McKay was also a pioneer of drawn animation. He created a character called "Gertie the Dinosaur" and wowed audiences by standing on the stage in front of the movie screen and seemingly interacting with Gertie in real time. And McKay himself did a short animation of Little Nemo in 1911. (They animated about 2 minutes, and fleshed it out to a 10 minute feature with other material. The animation starts at 7:30.)

So it's appropriate that Little Nemo should end up an animated movie. The only concern, really, is, "Did they butcher it? Did they do it right?"

This was a big budget movie created in 1989 by a combined team from Japan and the US, and a bit of France.

My first reaction was astonishment, just from reading the credits. The story was written by Moebius. Chris Columbus helped with the script. (You may remember him as the guy who directed the first two Harry Potter movies.) And the "Concept for screen" credit goes to Ray Bradbury. The music was performed by the London Symphony. ANN says it cost ¥3.3 billion.

It's interesting how I keep recognizing names. Another I spotted was Brian Froud, who worked on "Labyrinth" with Jim Henson. Well, I have to look at something. The credits run almost three minutes and consist only of white text on a colored background. ...snore...

So is it true to McKay? Sadly, not really. The character designs owe more to emulation of Chuck Jones and Walt Disney than to McKay, and the Nemo character doesn't really act much like I recall the original acting. (You can see the original characters at the Wikipedia article.)

I suppose it was necessary to make some concessions to the different medium, but it's still a shame. Did they really need to give Nemo a cute animal sidekick? A flying squirrel named Icarus. There was never anything like that in the original.

And half an hour into it, I find myself wanting to start skipping. This is a real disappointment.

There's a brillliant sequence at the very beginning, pretty much a dream that turns into a nightmare, at the beginning. The rest of it? It's like someone read a third-party description of McKay's work and decided to do something a bit like it.

Dreams have a logic all their own. Things change in a dream; what you look at may have morphed from a moment before when you looked at it. McKay handled that beautifully in the original comic, but at least so far they've chucked that aspect of it entirely. That was the core of the story!

And Flip, from what we've seen of him, is an entirely different character. Where's the "Wake Up!" sign?

And then we get to the princess. And she's completely unrecognizable. They discarded the original character completely and started from scratch.

I stepped through the rest of it, and it was quite pedestrian. It wasn't "Little Nemo in Slumberland". The part that runs from 03:00 to 07:30 is brilliant. The rest is a complete waste of time. Not recommended.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Mystery Meat at 06:10 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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