Latest Updates - Moses Gunn

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Comment by Magic Marmalade:

Still completely wonderful!

I have not seen this since I was made to go and see it at the cinema with my mum's co-worker, who took me and her - as it turned out - not only sickly, but terminally ill son when it came out...

(Let's see... I would have been nine years old at the time)

... And as if this fact was not bummer enough, there are some emotionally stretching moments here that for children of that age, as anyone already familiar with this movie will know, can be devastating to younger hearts and minds.

And for both of these reasons, I've wilfully avoided watching it since.

But now, as the nights draw in, and I feel exhausted watching new (to me, at least) movies, I feel I'm in the season where I need a little nostalgia, and something cosy and familiar, as well as being prompted by the urge to see if itwould still "get me" the way it it did first time around.

And while I do come to this now, with adult mind and soul, a little more objectively, this wonderful, magical fable of the relationship between fantasy and reality has lost none of it's imaginative potency, and still elicited a tear or two... or maybe there was just something in my eye.

While one particularly devastating scene (You know the one!) didn't quite reduce me to a blubbering mess the way it did when I was nine, it still made me go: "Ooh, that's a bit heavy to handle for kids!".

But the tale of a magical book, discovered by a bullied child who has lost his mother, and can't connect, or be sympathised with by his matter of fact father, and which causes him to escape into the world of magical fantasy still resonates to this day... more so, perhaps, in such all too real times as these.

Great practical effects, animatronics, and puppetry, well shot, and the story well told, in the finest traditions of the most earnest, un-cynical and non-meta fairy-tales of old, and time immemorial, still help to push aside the self referential, cynical , or all too real times in which we live.

So if, like me, you may be older now, or not having seen this for a good long spell, or think, even, that maybe you've grown out of this kind of thing a long time since... I'd urge you to revisit it again, perhaps for old time's sake, or even Auld Lang Sine.

Consider it a guilty pleasure, or even a much needed, long neglected treat.

Go on!... you deserve it! :)

(It maybe that you need it too :)