The Pagemaster (1994) * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
THE PAGEMASTER is the oddest film aimed at children I've ever seen. It makes a number of gigantic errors in judgment -- not the least of which is that it has the unsubtle subtext of reading as being a chore to be risen to. It's a depressing and blatantly manipulative movie at its heart, although it obviously wants to be anything but.
The movie opens interestingly enough. Macaulay Culkin is featured as a kid who is paralyzed by fear of -- well, everything, from the look of it. He's memorized reams of accident statistics and keeps emergency provisions of all kinds in his room (which gives rise to one of the movie's few genuine laughs). One day he blunders into a mysterious library, and after some mishaps, manages to get himself projected into various animated versions of several classic books.
This is where the first of the errors in judgment come in: instead of trying to woo the audience with the subtexts or emotional content of those books ("Moby Dick" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" among them), they get turned into cheap arcade-game attacks on the senses. The movie is not interested in reading, or the stories, per se -- or even in the kid's plight, really. It's just an excuse to throw us into one animated headrush after another -- and, presumably, to unload PAGEMASTER toys of one variety or another.
Even the animation doesn't hold up. Shows like "South Park" and "Beavis and Butthead" (and their attendant spinoffs) don't have Disney-level animation, but they use smart writing and clever direction to more than make up for it. They are no more than they need to be. THE PAGEMASTER badly wants to be an eyeful of the Disney variety, but looks dim and unclear, done in haste.
How do movies like this get made? The whole thing probably sounded like such a nice IDEA that nobody paid much attention to the way it was being embodied. Didn't anyone stop and wonder, what an unrepentant piece of cynicism this is, trying to sell kids on books and reading through the same strategies as mindless action movies and electronic games? I have nothing against video games -- just that books and video games are apples and oranges, and this movie should have known better than to blatantly confuse the two.
I also resented the way the kid's emotional problems are used for a cheap payoff. At the end of the movie, he's basically learned to suck in his gut and take it all like a man. Allegedly, the movie is propaganda in favor of kids picking up books, but after something like THE PAGEMASTER, they're more likely to feel insulted than inspired. The best way to get kids interested in books is to read to them, and let them pick up the habit naturally, instead of subjecting them to cynical concoctions like this.
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