Movie #509: The Pagemaster

The Pagemaster is a mostly-animated movie starring Macaulay Culkin, Christopher Lloyd, Frank Welker, Whoopi Goldberg, Patrick Stewart, Ed Begley Jr., and Leonard Nimoy. It's kind of a mess.

Richard (Culkin) is a little boy who's afraid of everything and knows the stats on where accidents happens, but not enough to know that if 8% of accidents involve ladders and 3% involve trees, that doesn't mean if you're up a tree on a ladder you have an 11% chance of having an accident. He winds up biking to a store at his father's (Begley Jr.) insistence, gets caught in a storm, and winds up in a fucking magnificent library run by Mr. Dewey (Lloyd).

Richard slips and falls and winds up a cartoon, and goes on an adventure through the genres of Adventure, Fantasy, and Horror, accompanied by personifications of those genres as fat books (voiced by Stewart, Goldberg, and Welker, respectively). He eventually defeats a dragon and goes home with the books in the real world, and is now brave.

OK. So, what I find sad about this movie is that it's got some potential, but it's a hot mess. For one thing, the central thrust of the movie seems like it should be "reading is a good thing," but that doesn't really link up with Richard's arc, which is not just that he's a coward but that he's so wrapped up in statistics that he doesn't like to try anything. But it seems like someone who knows all these stats read them somewhere (this is 1994, it's not like he read them on Wiki), and Richard comes off like a nerdy, bookish kid.

And then, there's the weird-ass portrayal of the genres. Horror is dumb and cowardly, Fantasy is sassy and Whoopi, and Adventure is a pirate caricature. There's nothing in any of the characters that actually addresses these genres, how they differ, or why they're cool, just a bunch of weak book puns. Likewise, there's some rivalry between them, but it's never given any depth other than Fantasy and Adventure snarking at each other. The decision to make Horror a dimwitted character, too, who just wants a happy ending doesn't make any damn sense.

I dunno. There are very occasional moments of cleverness, but even they're more like "oh, that could have been clever in the hands of a better screenwriter". Mostly I think this was an excuse to cash in on the Culkin fever spawned by Home Alone.

My Grade: F
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT

Next up: Pale Rider