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The leatherbound Life of Attila the Hun
So. This has been a good last couple of days. On Wednesday, I went into New York City for an afternoon with my dear friend who does not have a livejournal. In the evening, we attended the Salon Fantastique reading at KGB, which looked exactly as the name implied: up a vertiginous flight of stairs, lamplit in red reflection from all the Communist posters and flags on the walls, old photographs from the USSR and Emma Goldman staring at herself in the mirror over the bar. And hot as a sauna with all the people already packed inside for the reading, which is why at the intermission I settled myself in the open window that let out onto the fire escape and stayed there until the event was done. The doorway had been like a furnace-mouth. But I got to hear ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nineweaving and yuki_onna read, along with other excellent people whose livejournal names I did not know, and said hello to ellen_kushner and Ellen Datlow, and afterward went out to a stunningly good Chinese restaurant for the kind of meal where nine different dishes get ordered by table osmosis and no one quite knows what all of them are, but it doesn't matter, they're so delicious. And good conversation as well.
I can't tell if it would have been better or worse if I'd been looking at the camera. The subject's fault, not the photographer's.
Because the next train to Boston from Penn Station left from at three in the morning,nineweaving came back to New Haven to stay with me for the night, which gave us the opportunity the next day to visit the crazy sushi of Miya's. For the first time I can remember, its owner-chef Bun Lai was visible behind the counter, and he did not wear a mad scientist's labcoat: nonetheless, he swapped the asparagus in the Wabisabi Salmon for spicy flying fish roe and put apricots in the Mishima Sonata—whose contents already included krill, honey, almond butter, and tempura deep-frying—and on his recommendation I may have a new favorite, the Squiggly Giggly Roll, which involves raw squid, pickled plum, and Japanese basil, and tastes like deep-sea and ultraviolet. The man is insane in the best of ways. Then we hit the Book Trader Café, which seems to have reorganized its shelves to include sections like "Cult," and had a magnificent book haul. Mine were Matthew Sturgis' Aubrey Beardsley: A Life (1999), whose author bears an uncanny resemblance in his dust-jacket photo to one of Beardsley's own creations, and Anthony Minghella's Jim Henson's The Storyteller (1997), whose painted illustrations are drawn from the series right down to John Hurt in his cloak of patches. And she went home, and I went to the library, and in the evening I watched Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) with some friends, one of whom I had gotten the movie for as a birthday gift. And that's what the rest of this entry is about, so run now if that's not your cup of substitutiary locomotion . . .
(Cut for far too much thought on character dynamics. With spoilers, if that matters to you.)
This is not about the differences between the Disney musical and the original novels, Mary Norton's The Magic Bed-Knob (1943) and Bonfires and Broomsticks (1957)—combined in the present omnibus Bed-Knob and Broomstick—although those are substantial and I noticed them much more this time around. The first time I saw Bedknobs and Broomsticks, I was seven or eight in a day camp that showed mostly Disney movies in the afternoons; I tended to ignore these and read unless something caught my attention, which explains why my only memory of Sleeping Beauty (1959) is the wicked fairy's transformation into a dragon and similarly the speed-singing mice in Cinderella (1950). As for Bedknobs and Broomsticks, what I had remembered was the character of Emelius Browne (most likely because he was a spectacular screw-up with a classical name: hello, archetype), and the nonsense-Latin words of the spell for substitutionary locomotion (treguna mekoides trecorum satis dee), and the finale because the presence of attacking Nazis in a children's fantasy adventure had even then caused me to think, "Huh?" And I hadn't seen it since.
So this is the useless way my brain works: I watch a movie musical from the 1970's whose major setpiece is a no-holds-barred game of improvisational football between two teams of cartoon animals and one oft-trampled human referee, whose scenes of magical travel are technicolored like cuttings from the more acid-inspired sequences in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and whose climax involves enchanted suits of armor repelling a German raiding party from the shores of Dorsetshire with slapstick, eerie efficiency—all this, and what I think about afterward is the character dynamics. I think I am just not the target audience for this genre.
For example, I had mostly forgotten* that the plot includes a romance between Miss Eglantine Price (Angela Lansbury) and Emelius Browne (David Tomlinson), and that the romance doesn't feel obligatory. It could have been shoehorned in to give our three orphaned children a stable family unit, but instead it's the sort of unlikely, complementary bonding that surprises both characters and so the audience is a little startled, too. Yes, there's a certain point in the film at which you know their relationship has cemented no matter what plot turns may precipitate themselves, but nothing in the characters' first interactions implies this outcome—Emelius is fulsomely complimentary because he's always looking for an angle, Miss Price is short-temperedly polite and more than once has to turn him into a white rabbit to redirect his attention; she puts up with him because he seems able to lead her to the missing half of the spellbook she wants, while he accompanies her because she can actually make the spells he thought were nonsense work; there is mutual benefit, but hardly love at first sight. Perhaps the same plot rules don't bind middle-aged couples, because this is a romance between a prickly, tenacious spinster** who cooks healthfully and does not find children adorable and has rebuilt her motorcycle to run on sulfur, and a down-at heels, not particularly handsome*** charlatan in a misconceived opera cape who has ultimately no illusions about his own talents and has more talents than he believes. I love this. Romance should be for eccentrics who overlap in the right places, not just protagonistic young couples. And I love that Miss Price does not give up her magic to marry Emelius—when he diffidently makes the suggestion, she laughs at him. No, she explains, it was the day her poisoned dragon's liver arrived in the mail: anyone who felt the way she did about poisoned dragon's liver, she realized then, would never really make a first-rate witch.
Neither do the children bring them together with their touching, irresistible cuteness, because these are not in fact particularly cute children. Apart from suffering a slight case of The Accent That Ate Dick Van Dyke, they mostly sound and behave like real siblings between the ages of six and eleven: slightly feral, more perceptive than the adults around them tend to give credit for, inextricably attached to one another and hardly about to admit it. There's Charlie, the eldest, whose vehement attempts to be tough and sharp and the man of the family are rightly considered by his younger brother and sister to be not even worth arguing him out of. At one point the youngest, Paul, turns out his pockets to reveal the kind of oddments that small children really do collect—a piece of blue glass, some frayed twine, the nail from a horseshoe, and finally the titular bedknob, all of which are treasures to him, someday to come in handy in the most improbable situations. They are not instantly enamored of Miss Price.**** They see immediately through "Professor" Emelius Browne's rather desperate patter. They are not looking for parents—dead so long ago that only Charlie remembers them, a little; their adoptive aunt recently killed in the Blitz—but instead, with something of the same mix of curiosity and advantage that initially holds Miss Price and Emelius together, they consider the situation and determine that these peculiar adults are worth sticking with, because magic is just that cool. By the time the characters plunge into the cartoon sea around the Island of Naboombu, as Emelius discovers to his own surprise that his gallantry toward Miss Price is real, Miss Price realizes after the fact that she has begun to trust him, and the children rather intelligently take no notice of the changes in the emotional temperature and care more about getting the talismanic Star of Astoroth° so that they can return home and find out what the spell inscribed on it actually does, they are functioning more or less as a family. But no one mentions this fact until rather later in the film, because it's not what's important at the moment. All the family bonding is sort of a side effect of the magical adventures and therefore, at least to me, more plausible than the other way around.
There are two parallel scenes along these lines. The first dinner all the characters have together is in Emelius' townhouse, or at least the abandoned townhouse that Emelius has colonized: there is an unexploded bomb in the front yard, so the block has been evacuated and he keeps the curtains drawn all the time so the police won't notice him. It's an amusing and slightly black set-up, but an awkward meal. None of them really fit in that house. The children stare around the well-stocked nursery as though it's alien territory, imagined only from books and films and rumors. Miss Price is simply not impressed, because what she wants is a certain piece of knowledge and fine furnishings won't help her get it. Even Emelius, who for the first time in his life is surrounded by the standards to which he has always wanted to be accustomed, doesn't really belong; it does match his particular brand of hopeless showmanship that he should be camping out in someone else's expensive house, but he's living on borrowed gentility, as it were. Contrast the dinner in Miss Price's house after their return from Naboombu and her first, disorderly experiments with the spell for substitutiary locomotion. Whatever Emelius' other shortcomings, he can cook—and the children find sausages a welcome change from the field-collected greens and elm bark and mysteriously-berried jellies Miss Price is always serving—and in this arena of unexpected competence, dishcloth in hand and one of the aprons that Miss Price never wears tied around his waist, he looks as comfortable as he never did as a shabby street magician. She's despondent over her failure to master the spell; to cheer her up, he juggles apples, not very well, and this too is oddly appropriate. For the first time since they've met him, he's not pretending to be anything other than what he is, and that includes a man who after twenty years' practice can just about keep three apples in the air so long as he isn't distracted. (Alas, he steps on the cat.)
Yes, the movie ends with magical armor kicking Nazi butt, and no sooner have Emelius and Miss Price declared their intentions toward one another than he joins up and promises to return when the war is over, and I am still entirely unable to explain what the Nazis were doing in this story in the first place. (If you wanted to strike fear into the hearts of Britain, would you launch a raid on the West Country?) There's cartoon silliness and physical comedy and the kind of London where dance sequences spontaneously erupt in the streets and I'm not sure that all the film holds together at the same level. It honestly doesn't remind me of Mary Poppins (1964) as much as the reviews had led me to believe, but the score is occasionally too familiar. And I already know that characters are what catch my attention: that a good character in an otherwise mediocre plot is enough to start me thinking. But I think there's something worth thinking about here. If nothing else, it's one of the few Disney films with an entire family, even if they don't start out that way. And "The Age of Not Believing" is damn catchy.
*At least I am consistent: I'd remembered the shape-changing in Splash (1984), not the romantic comedy.
**I imagine the term was still in use in 1940.
***With all respect to David Tomlinson; I think the character is meant to be as un-dashing as possible. He does look better once he loses the opera cape.
****They are, in fact, about to effect an escape from Miss Price's house and make their way back to familiar London when they spot her trying out her new broomstick at night. The bedknob is enchanted for Paul as part of a bargain, that the children will not tell on Miss Price's witchcraft on pain of the magic not working anymore.
°For the record, I still think the history behind the Island of Naboombu—that toward the end of his life, the sorcerer Astoroth experimented magically on animals in order to make them more like humans, until they rebelled and killed him and stole his powers for their own—is a remarkably creepy backdrop to a game of humorously violent animated football.
nineweaving and yuki_onna read, along with other excellent people whose livejournal names I did not know, and said hello to ellen_kushner and Ellen Datlow, and afterward went out to a stunningly good Chinese restaurant for the kind of meal where nine different dishes get ordered by table osmosis and no one quite knows what all of them are, but it doesn't matter, they're so delicious. And good conversation as well. I can't tell if it would have been better or worse if I'd been looking at the camera. The subject's fault, not the photographer's.
Because the next train to Boston from Penn Station left from at three in the morning,
nineweaving came back to New Haven to stay with me for the night, which gave us the opportunity the next day to visit the crazy sushi of Miya's. For the first time I can remember, its owner-chef Bun Lai was visible behind the counter, and he did not wear a mad scientist's labcoat: nonetheless, he swapped the asparagus in the Wabisabi Salmon for spicy flying fish roe and put apricots in the Mishima Sonata—whose contents already included krill, honey, almond butter, and tempura deep-frying—and on his recommendation I may have a new favorite, the Squiggly Giggly Roll, which involves raw squid, pickled plum, and Japanese basil, and tastes like deep-sea and ultraviolet. The man is insane in the best of ways. Then we hit the Book Trader Café, which seems to have reorganized its shelves to include sections like "Cult," and had a magnificent book haul. Mine were Matthew Sturgis' Aubrey Beardsley: A Life (1999), whose author bears an uncanny resemblance in his dust-jacket photo to one of Beardsley's own creations, and Anthony Minghella's Jim Henson's The Storyteller (1997), whose painted illustrations are drawn from the series right down to John Hurt in his cloak of patches. And she went home, and I went to the library, and in the evening I watched Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) with some friends, one of whom I had gotten the movie for as a birthday gift. And that's what the rest of this entry is about, so run now if that's not your cup of substitutiary locomotion . . .(Cut for far too much thought on character dynamics. With spoilers, if that matters to you.)
This is not about the differences between the Disney musical and the original novels, Mary Norton's The Magic Bed-Knob (1943) and Bonfires and Broomsticks (1957)—combined in the present omnibus Bed-Knob and Broomstick—although those are substantial and I noticed them much more this time around. The first time I saw Bedknobs and Broomsticks, I was seven or eight in a day camp that showed mostly Disney movies in the afternoons; I tended to ignore these and read unless something caught my attention, which explains why my only memory of Sleeping Beauty (1959) is the wicked fairy's transformation into a dragon and similarly the speed-singing mice in Cinderella (1950). As for Bedknobs and Broomsticks, what I had remembered was the character of Emelius Browne (most likely because he was a spectacular screw-up with a classical name: hello, archetype), and the nonsense-Latin words of the spell for substitutionary locomotion (treguna mekoides trecorum satis dee), and the finale because the presence of attacking Nazis in a children's fantasy adventure had even then caused me to think, "Huh?" And I hadn't seen it since.
So this is the useless way my brain works: I watch a movie musical from the 1970's whose major setpiece is a no-holds-barred game of improvisational football between two teams of cartoon animals and one oft-trampled human referee, whose scenes of magical travel are technicolored like cuttings from the more acid-inspired sequences in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and whose climax involves enchanted suits of armor repelling a German raiding party from the shores of Dorsetshire with slapstick, eerie efficiency—all this, and what I think about afterward is the character dynamics. I think I am just not the target audience for this genre.
For example, I had mostly forgotten* that the plot includes a romance between Miss Eglantine Price (Angela Lansbury) and Emelius Browne (David Tomlinson), and that the romance doesn't feel obligatory. It could have been shoehorned in to give our three orphaned children a stable family unit, but instead it's the sort of unlikely, complementary bonding that surprises both characters and so the audience is a little startled, too. Yes, there's a certain point in the film at which you know their relationship has cemented no matter what plot turns may precipitate themselves, but nothing in the characters' first interactions implies this outcome—Emelius is fulsomely complimentary because he's always looking for an angle, Miss Price is short-temperedly polite and more than once has to turn him into a white rabbit to redirect his attention; she puts up with him because he seems able to lead her to the missing half of the spellbook she wants, while he accompanies her because she can actually make the spells he thought were nonsense work; there is mutual benefit, but hardly love at first sight. Perhaps the same plot rules don't bind middle-aged couples, because this is a romance between a prickly, tenacious spinster** who cooks healthfully and does not find children adorable and has rebuilt her motorcycle to run on sulfur, and a down-at heels, not particularly handsome*** charlatan in a misconceived opera cape who has ultimately no illusions about his own talents and has more talents than he believes. I love this. Romance should be for eccentrics who overlap in the right places, not just protagonistic young couples. And I love that Miss Price does not give up her magic to marry Emelius—when he diffidently makes the suggestion, she laughs at him. No, she explains, it was the day her poisoned dragon's liver arrived in the mail: anyone who felt the way she did about poisoned dragon's liver, she realized then, would never really make a first-rate witch.
Neither do the children bring them together with their touching, irresistible cuteness, because these are not in fact particularly cute children. Apart from suffering a slight case of The Accent That Ate Dick Van Dyke, they mostly sound and behave like real siblings between the ages of six and eleven: slightly feral, more perceptive than the adults around them tend to give credit for, inextricably attached to one another and hardly about to admit it. There's Charlie, the eldest, whose vehement attempts to be tough and sharp and the man of the family are rightly considered by his younger brother and sister to be not even worth arguing him out of. At one point the youngest, Paul, turns out his pockets to reveal the kind of oddments that small children really do collect—a piece of blue glass, some frayed twine, the nail from a horseshoe, and finally the titular bedknob, all of which are treasures to him, someday to come in handy in the most improbable situations. They are not instantly enamored of Miss Price.**** They see immediately through "Professor" Emelius Browne's rather desperate patter. They are not looking for parents—dead so long ago that only Charlie remembers them, a little; their adoptive aunt recently killed in the Blitz—but instead, with something of the same mix of curiosity and advantage that initially holds Miss Price and Emelius together, they consider the situation and determine that these peculiar adults are worth sticking with, because magic is just that cool. By the time the characters plunge into the cartoon sea around the Island of Naboombu, as Emelius discovers to his own surprise that his gallantry toward Miss Price is real, Miss Price realizes after the fact that she has begun to trust him, and the children rather intelligently take no notice of the changes in the emotional temperature and care more about getting the talismanic Star of Astoroth° so that they can return home and find out what the spell inscribed on it actually does, they are functioning more or less as a family. But no one mentions this fact until rather later in the film, because it's not what's important at the moment. All the family bonding is sort of a side effect of the magical adventures and therefore, at least to me, more plausible than the other way around.
There are two parallel scenes along these lines. The first dinner all the characters have together is in Emelius' townhouse, or at least the abandoned townhouse that Emelius has colonized: there is an unexploded bomb in the front yard, so the block has been evacuated and he keeps the curtains drawn all the time so the police won't notice him. It's an amusing and slightly black set-up, but an awkward meal. None of them really fit in that house. The children stare around the well-stocked nursery as though it's alien territory, imagined only from books and films and rumors. Miss Price is simply not impressed, because what she wants is a certain piece of knowledge and fine furnishings won't help her get it. Even Emelius, who for the first time in his life is surrounded by the standards to which he has always wanted to be accustomed, doesn't really belong; it does match his particular brand of hopeless showmanship that he should be camping out in someone else's expensive house, but he's living on borrowed gentility, as it were. Contrast the dinner in Miss Price's house after their return from Naboombu and her first, disorderly experiments with the spell for substitutiary locomotion. Whatever Emelius' other shortcomings, he can cook—and the children find sausages a welcome change from the field-collected greens and elm bark and mysteriously-berried jellies Miss Price is always serving—and in this arena of unexpected competence, dishcloth in hand and one of the aprons that Miss Price never wears tied around his waist, he looks as comfortable as he never did as a shabby street magician. She's despondent over her failure to master the spell; to cheer her up, he juggles apples, not very well, and this too is oddly appropriate. For the first time since they've met him, he's not pretending to be anything other than what he is, and that includes a man who after twenty years' practice can just about keep three apples in the air so long as he isn't distracted. (Alas, he steps on the cat.)
Yes, the movie ends with magical armor kicking Nazi butt, and no sooner have Emelius and Miss Price declared their intentions toward one another than he joins up and promises to return when the war is over, and I am still entirely unable to explain what the Nazis were doing in this story in the first place. (If you wanted to strike fear into the hearts of Britain, would you launch a raid on the West Country?) There's cartoon silliness and physical comedy and the kind of London where dance sequences spontaneously erupt in the streets and I'm not sure that all the film holds together at the same level. It honestly doesn't remind me of Mary Poppins (1964) as much as the reviews had led me to believe, but the score is occasionally too familiar. And I already know that characters are what catch my attention: that a good character in an otherwise mediocre plot is enough to start me thinking. But I think there's something worth thinking about here. If nothing else, it's one of the few Disney films with an entire family, even if they don't start out that way. And "The Age of Not Believing" is damn catchy.
*At least I am consistent: I'd remembered the shape-changing in Splash (1984), not the romantic comedy.
**I imagine the term was still in use in 1940.
***With all respect to David Tomlinson; I think the character is meant to be as un-dashing as possible. He does look better once he loses the opera cape.
****They are, in fact, about to effect an escape from Miss Price's house and make their way back to familiar London when they spot her trying out her new broomstick at night. The bedknob is enchanted for Paul as part of a bargain, that the children will not tell on Miss Price's witchcraft on pain of the magic not working anymore.
°For the record, I still think the history behind the Island of Naboombu—that toward the end of his life, the sorcerer Astoroth experimented magically on animals in order to make them more like humans, until they rebelled and killed him and stole his powers for their own—is a remarkably creepy backdrop to a game of humorously violent animated football.
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Oh, I love that place! I read there in May 2001.
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You should read there again. : )
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I'd love to. If only there were not so much distance between me and there.
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I do quite like the movie, but I must admit I have never forgiven it for not actually being Bonfires and Broomsticks, which is one of the great English children's-magic books. (The Magic Bedknob was also very good, but she was still working into it then, and I think you can tell.)
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That makes perfect sense. If you have a bomb in the front yard in the first act . . .
The Magic Bedknob was also very good, but she was still working into it then, and I think you can tell.
Honestly, although it was written more than a decade before Bonfire and Broomsticks, The Magic Bed-Knob almost feels like a prequel to me: the set-up to explain how it is that the children and Miss Price can travel back and forth between Emelius Jones' time and their own, because that is a truly interesting story, while the other is sort of Fun Romps With A Traveling Bed. It's like Half Magic versus, I don't know, The Five Children and It. Pace Edward Eager.
From the level of detail I could remember as of two weeks ago when I had neither re-read the books nor re-watched the film, I think I saw Bedknobs and Broomsticks first; certainly I had clearer memories of it. Mostly what I had remembered from The Magic Bed-Knob was a vague image of a frog on a tropical island and from Bonfires and Broomsticks the scene in which Emelius is burning at the stake and the cloak and broom and sword are darting around him. Which is a very good scene, but in my memory it had no plot to go along with it.
And I'm still wary of Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle, so there you go.
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Yes. There's a fine line between alluding to other works because it's inconceivable that the characters themselves wouldn't make the connection—as in Caitlín R. Kiernan's Daughter of Hounds, where it makes sense for eight-year-old Emmie Silvey to liken her experiences to the Chronicles of Narnia: what else should a voracious young reader think of, on finding herself traveling into another world hidden in plain sight?—and alluding to other works as a fan. (Otherwise known as, it's a bad sign when your fondness for another author makes it into Wikipedia as a defining characteristic of your work.) C.S. Lewis also steals from E. Nesbit, but in ways that suggest making use of a tradition rather than proselytizing. And he got to be metatextual about it, too.
but becoming a Real Landmark of that particular genre requires pretending that it hasn't all been done before.
Although then you're in danger of claiming, like J.K. Rowling, that you never read any fantasy as a kid: and therefore being patently unbelievable . . .
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You should. It's reprinted in The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975) which also contains some of my favorite short stories of hers, "Winter's King," "Nine Lives," and "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" in particular. And then tell me what you think.
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Is this in the books? Or God help me do I need to re-watch the movie? I remember being crazy about it as a child, but the only thing I can be fairly sure I remember now is the spooky wonderfulness of the armor becoming animate and marching.
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The books and the movie differ extremely on this point. In Bonfires and Broomsticks, Emelius Jones is a nervous and unsuccessful necromancer living in the reign of Charles II—he inherited the business from his master before he learned that necromancy doesn't work, and lives in perpetual fear that a dissatisfied client will someday turn him in—whom the children bring back to the present day with them. He's easily startled, half in love with Miss Price from the moment they meet, and terrified to admit to her that he doesn't know a single spell that works when she is clearly so delighted to have someone to talk shop with. After a brief idyll in the twentieth century, he is returned to his own time, promptly picked up for witchcraft in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London, and he's about to burn at the stake when Miss Price and the children come back to rescue him. By this point Miss Price has already given up magic, as she feels that it's a way of cheating the universe; in the present day, Emelius asks her to marry him, and together they return to the year 1666.
In Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Emelius Browne is an eminently mediocre street magician in the present day, 1940, who has come into possession of a real spellbook and uses it as the basis for a set of correspondence courses in witchcraft to which Miss Price has been subscribing. (She is also learning magic by correspondence in The Magic Bed-Knob, but it seems to be a legitimate school.) When Miss Price receives notice that the school is closing due to the Blitz, with one lesson left to go—the spell that she originally started the course to learn—she tracks Emelius down in London and is as dismayed to find him "a tenth-rate cheapjack entertainer" as he is stunned to learn that she can work real magic. As it transpires, he only owns half of the book and has simply run out of spells to copy out and mail to Miss Price, but he knows who might have the other half; so starts their quest for the final spell, over the course of which a tentative romance develops between Miss Price and Emelius Browne. In the German raid that the armor repels, however, her witch's workshop is blown up and all her notes lost—she has a terrible memory, so she writes everything down—and so there goes her magic-working. It's when she says that she's not so saddened by it, that she's known for a long time that she would never make a proper witch and Emelius suggests that his arrival might have precipitated her decision, that she laughs. She wouldn't give up her witchcraft for him; it was the ickier components of spellcasting that did it. I can't tell if the movie ends with the two of them married or just in agreement that when he comes back from the war, they will, but there's definitely an understanding.
but the only thing I can be fairly sure I remember now is the spooky wonderfulness of the armor becoming animate and marching.
And chanting the words of the spell that animates them in echoing Gregorian monotony, which is awesome.
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Phew. I don't remember any of that. [thinks: close but no cigar]
Going only from your summaries, this may be a rare case where the Disney is better than the original. The time-travel aspect of the former seems like handwaving (or the usual wet-blanketing, Of course children we know there is no magic in our world really) whereas the Disney, written up now, would be classed as urban fantasy. Interesting!
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What had you remembered?
Going only from your summaries, this may be a rare case where the Disney is better than the original.
Hm. Certainly they are, as you point out, very different genres of story. And once I got over the changes between film and book (I think they are best viewed as similar stories drawn from the same material), I found that I really did like Bonfires and Broomsticks; if I'd encountered the book first as a child, I might well have imprinted on it as I did on The Phoenix and the Carpet or The Magician's Nephew. But as it is, I find the character work in Bedknobs and Broomsticks more complicated and therefore it interests me more. If you ever see it again, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
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Re: KGB: Your description reminds me irresistably of the soiree at the Kropotkys' in Strong Poison...
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. . . Yeah, actually. Hee.
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You look really good--it's the best picture I've seen of you, and now I completely feel I didn't draw you properly.
And I love that Miss Price does not give up her magic to marry Emelius
That is nice. It reminds me of what I didn't like about Bell, Book, and Candle.
They are not looking for parents—dead so long ago that only Charlie remembers them, a little;
Gods, that's what I hated about the new The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe movie--all the child anguish over absent parents. I've never known a kid like that. I went through most of my childhood without a father figure, and I never saw it as a problem. It's a sort of psychological bogeyman that only shallow adults can see.
the sorcerer Astoroth experimented magically on animals in order to make them more like humans, until they rebelled and killed him and stole his powers for their own—is a remarkably creepy backdrop to a game of humorously violent animated football.
Yeah, I think I found that part pretty disturbing as a kid. I think part of it is the disconcerting feeling of the alien cartoon reality thrust on the actually, as you observe, quite credible character dynamics. I mean, instead of just feeling like an unconvincing part of the film, the abject artifice came off as hugely strange. Of course, I haven't seen it since I was a kid, so I may feel differently if I saw it now.
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Heh. Thank you. I would still say that I can recognize my face in Sofa Fay's, and I am immensely flattered by it.
It reminds me of what I didn't like about Bell, Book, and Candle.
Hm. I don't know the film at all: I'm going to assume that she can't keep both her witchcraft and her man? (Well, damn. It's got a terrific cast . . .)
I went through most of my childhood without a father figure, and I never saw it as a problem.
Yeah. It's rather charming that when the children finally declare that Miss Price and Emelius are sort of their parents now, it's the adults who react as though this is momentuous, life-changing news—particularly Emelius, whose first inclination is to bolt before he screws up this unexpected happiness—while the children are just stating what they see as the obvious. Yes, they are upset when Emelius acts on his first inclination and makes for the train station. But this is not because they are without parents again: it's because they have grown fond of him, himself; and the pair that he and Miss Price make. There's a difference.
I think part of it is the disconcerting feeling of the alien cartoon reality thrust on the actually, as you observe, quite credible character dynamics . . . Of course, I haven't seen it since I was a kid, so I may feel differently if I saw it now.
If nothing else, I think it's jarring because there's no real in-story rationale for the sudden shift in medium. When the characters in Mary Poppins find themselves in a cartoon world, it's because they have just jumped into a chalk drawing: we don't expect their surroundings to look photorealistic, because we've just seen Bert sketching them onto the sidewalk. But in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, the sorcerer Astoroth is supposed to have lived and worked in this world, so where is the Island of Naboombu? Miss Price refers to it afterward as existing in another world, and another character mentions that he was never able to find it on any map, but Paul also has a picture book all about the island and its anthropomorphic inhabitants—a retelling of the story of Astoroth, presumably, which proves a reliable guide right down to the individual animals that the characters meet on the island and the words of the spell engraved on the pentagram that the sorcerer himself once wore—so it's hardly an unknown story in this world. I suppose we could be in the same kind of situation as Roger Bacon and John Bellairs' The Face in the Frost, where magical feats attributed to a historical character eventually percolate down into popular consciousness, but that seems too complicated an explanation; even more so the possibility that we are meant to assume that the characters in reality travel into the picture book, which would at least explain the hand-drawn quality of the world around them . . . I think it's just a plot hole. I will admit that this is the first time I've put any thought into the discrepancy, so it's not an immense or a fatal plot hole, but it does mean that I can't find any very good reason for the Island of Naboombu to have been animated other than that the filmmakers couldn't have achieved the same effect in live-action, and that's a little random for my tastes. I don't know. Maybe I'm asking too much of Disney. But I do think the cartoon interlude would be less hugely strange if its cartoon nature were more integrated into the plot. (Did this make sense?)
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Yeah. I saw it a couple years ago, so I don't remember the exact details--I think the deal was that falling in love made a witch human--witches, in the movie reality, not being human to begin with.
Well, damn. It's got a terrific cast . . .
Yeah, and Kim Novak's really cute in it. It wasn't a bad movie, but not overwhelmingly great. The characters behaved like idiots when it was convenient for the plot, but the actors did make up for it a little.
it's because they have grown fond of him, himself; and the pair that he and Miss Price make. There's a difference.
Yes, exactly. I think a lot of writers, like the writers for the Narnia movie, tend to overestimate a child's capacity for sentimentality. I think maybe it's because they get blind-sided by their own sentimentality when they think of their own childhood.
But I do think the cartoon interlude would be less hugely strange if its cartoon nature were more integrated into the plot. (Did this make sense?)
Yes, and you have a point, though I was referring more to the discrepancy between the way the cartoon world worked and the way the live action world worked.
I mean, as a kid, I didn't really give any thought to strangeness of a live-action world randomly colliding with a cartoon world--I just automatically accepted it, I guess, the way kids do. The thing was, was that the laws of comic timing and motivation were different from--broader, faster than--the live action world. My innocent kid eyes just accepted it was the same world, so it worked a bit like a splinter. Like a dream you don't realise is a dream, and Samurai Patrick Stewart shows up at your High School graduation and you're both afraid he's going to kill you, and you're made afraid by the evidence that life is so completely unpredictable, and not bound by consistent laws.
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I need to see Mary Poppins again. Mostly I remember that no matter how dodgy Dick Van Dyke's accent, I loved Bert.