In honor of an older Alice returning to Wonderland (or Underland, as the case may be) in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, I've tasked the Netflix delivery dog with fetching me Return to Oz. In this "children's" film, Dorothy has developed a psychosis from her verbal diarrhea about her visit to Oz and must undergo shock therapy in order to become a regular little girl without an imagination. Thankfully, she drowns instead. Upon her drowning, she returns to Oz and meets some new friends in order to destroy the Emerald City.
The decision to incorporate (and thus possibly introduce to a young audience) a technique that still haunts the psychiatric community because of its barbarity seems like an odd one, to say the least. What results is a film that should be a bigger hit to the drug crowd than the original coupled with Dark Side of the Moon. It's a little like Labyrinth if it had been cross-pollenated with Dark Crystal in The Neverending Story's poppy fields and snorted with a healthy dash of Willy Wonka's river tunnel.
Thankfully, viewing this film raises some pertinent questions: Was there an R2D2 clone in the Oz books? Did George Lucas sign off on that? What are the ethical implications of bringing a mishmash of inanimate objects to life (with a jar full of the Powder of Life) and then watching as they fall apart due to your negligence when assembling them?
Listen, I hate movies that are so safe that they hit every trope in Hollywood's playbook and close with the flowery description of how everything worked out fine for everyone (in case there isn't a sequel). At the same time, there are certain expectations you bring to genre's of film that simply cannot be tossed willy-nilly in favor of "experimentation." I don't want every movie be Luke Skywalker becoming a Jedi, but there is a certain truth that is only accentuated by provocatively subverting it. What I'm talking about is the amalgamation of a number of disparate elements that probably should come together in a specific fashion. Music, success, failure, main character traits - these things all interconnect in a specific way when we see certain types of films. The "children's" genre is no different. It must (as one line of thinking goes) avoid certain elements of life that parents of its time would find especially objectionable and incorporate elements which parents would like their children to hold in esteem and aspire to. If those elements shift as time passes, the films must reflect that, right?
Maybe this film (and by extension Where the Wild Things Are) just means that we are a bit further down Wonka's river tunnel than our parents were - that we've opened our minds to the real weirdness that being a child involves and we wish we could be a part of that again.
Sounds about right to me.
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