The Phantom Tollbooth 1969
director: Chuck Jones Abe Levitow David Monahan
Genre
Category
Country
United States
Cast
Synopsis
It's an Alphabeautiful Mathemagical Musical Movie!
Hot on the heels of MGM/UA's hugely popular series of cartoon caper featuring Tom and Jerry comes the studio's first full-length feature cartoon. A bored little boy, who initially pops up on the screen in live action, is magically transformed into a cartoon character when he drives his toy car into an animated wonderland. Based on Norton Juster's book, creators Chuck Jones, Abe Levitow and Les Goldman let their imaginations run wild in this engaging little tale of the small boy's adventures amongst the weird and the wonderful.
Hot on the heels of MGM/UA's hugely popular series of cartoon caper featuring Tom and Jerry comes the studio's first full-length feature cartoon. A bored little boy, who initially pops up on the screen in live action, is magically transformed into a cartoon character when he drives his toy car into an animated wonderland. Based on Norton Juster's book, creators Chuck Jones, Abe Levitow and Les Goldman let their imaginations run wild in this engaging little tale of the small boy's adventures amongst the weird and the wonderful.
Formats
Average User Rating: 2 Vote(s)
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 Not Available | Purchase this movie on DVD! |  Not Available |
| Distributor | MGM/UA |
| Catalogue Number | UMV10155 |
| Release Series | |
| Release Date | July 1983 |
| Duration: | 85m 19s |
| Printed Classification | |
| Notes |
User Reviews:
I really wanted to like this one. Chuck Jones is an animation legend, responsible for some of the funniest cartoons of all time, but by the mid-sixties his magic touch seemed to desert him. [i]How the Grinch Stole Christmas[/i] was great, of course, but his stewardship of the last batch of Tom and Jerry cartoons... lovely to look at, and a definite improvement over the Gene Deitch-directed penny-scraping shorts that preceded them, but not remotely funny. [i]The Phantom Tollbooth[/i] finds Jones firmly stuck in neutral, bringing a sketchy, rather bland children's television style to Norton Juster's celebrated novella, and coming over all solemn and preachy into the bargain. Naturally, given the timeframe, it's trippy and experimental, but when you've got Chuck Jones at the helm and some of the characters look like they were hurriedly scribbled in the back of a school exercise book during a dreary maths lesson, you have to wonder if all that experimentation was necessarily a good thing. Mel Blanc, Toontown's greatest ever voice, brings a dash of humour to the proceedings, but the songs are bland and youngsters are more likely to be bored than enthralled. Oh, and the paranoid Officer Shortshrift was 'homaged' (that's a polite way of putting it) by the makers of [i]Jamie and the Magic Torch[/i] with their Officer Gotcha character.