THE WITCHES
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Jim Henson's last film is a charming modern fairy tale of a boy foiling a plot by the witches of England. It captures some of the fun horror of traditional fairy tales. Unfortunately, it loses some of its inspiration about mid-film. The story would be ideally suited to animation and doing it in live action is an impressive if not altogether necessary feat. Rating: low +2.
The perfect medium for showing imaginative images visually is animation. With animation, if you can visualize it, you can put it on a screen. 1973's FANTASTIC PLANET, while lacking in story values, may well be the most visually imaginative science fiction film ever made. Unfortunately for animated fantasy, STAR WARS came out four years later and showed that imaginative live action was coming of age and animated fantasy became a sideshow. Only the Japanese seem to recognize the possibilities of animation as a medium for fantasy, and even in Japan fantastic animation is falling short of the real potential of the medium. In the United States and Europe audiences want live action even if it is at the expense of imagination. Films such as BATMAN and DICK TRACY are trying to impress the world with how well they can overcome problems that would not even arise with animation. DICK TRACY was able to make some expensive boxoffice stars really look much like the comic strip characters. BATMAN was less successful visually in making Jack Nicholson look like the Joker. Both of these films could have had better stories and looked absolutely perfect had they been animated, but they would have died at the boxoffice. Audiences really want live action and are quite willing to sacrifice story values and imagination for the thrill of seeing things done in live action.
THE WITCHES is a fine new live-action fantasy film that almost matches in imagination and charm what Walt Disney was able to do with animation back in the 1940s.
Fairy tales are not all sweetness and fun, and they are not just for children. Most fairy tales are horror stories told on a level that all ages can appreciate them. And that is just what THE WITCHES is. From the very beginning this film lays down some blood-curdling folklore about witches. Some of it is really the stuff paranoia is made of. Witches can live right next door, they smell children from great distances, they have no toes. Take note, those of you who feel children must be protected from the sort of scary stories that children have been raised on from time immemorial. The stories are told to young Luke (played by Jasen Fisher) by his Norwegian grandmother (played by Swedish actor/director Mai Zettering) and it is a good thing she told him. He shortly has to fight a convocation of the witches of England in their plot to turn all English children into mice. And shortly is how he has to fight them, since he is one of the first two children turned into mice.
Jim Henson used his Muppet technology to portray the mouse Luke when he does something non-mouselike. When a trained mouse can be used, it is. The problem there is that the Muppet mouse has a cute face that the real mouse apparently found very difficult to mimic. The combining of realistic mouse movements with a humanlike personality for the mouse would be, of course, much simpler for Disney to do in animation than it was for Henson to do in live action, and the result would have been much more successful. The makeup for the witches is similarly nicely executed. Anjelica Huston's Grand High Witch makeup fails to convince totally that this is really the face of a living being, but it is well-detailed.
THE WITCHES is, and is likely to remain, Nicholas Roeg's only children's film. (He claims he made it for his own newly-born child.) Allan Scott's script, based on the novel by Roald Dahl, raises some gooseflesh early on, but loses much of its power to chill once Luke is a cute mouse and the story concentrates more on his mission than on the horror of the witches. Scott also manages to throw in some double entendres clearly not intended for the younger audience. In smaller roles there is Rowan Atkinson (television's Black Adder) as a hotel manager clearly of the Basil Fawlty style. Bill Peterson (Dickie Bird in Bill Forsyte's COMFORT AND JOY) plays the father of a mouse who once was a gluttonous child.
It would be unfair to down-rate this film because it is not doing anything to advance animated film. The film as it stands *is* charming and works (at least generally) in live action. It is a nice fantasy and deserves some credit for not aiming specifically at a youth or teenage market. It is just a decent fantasy film that is there for whatever audience it finds. I rate it a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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