Review of The Pagemaster

Why is the movie telling kids to read more? Wouldn't that hurt your movie profit if all the children are reading books rather than watching your mediocre movie? I guess, I know why this movie bomb when it came out. Still, to me, personally. This movie isn't half bad. It's pretty OK to me. Take a look, it's in a book! Reading rainbow starts out, oops I meant, Page master starts out with ten year old Richard Tyler (Macaulay Culkin) who fears everything. By everything, I meant everything. He doesn't seem like not a real life character anyways due to his overused of statistics and encyclopedia size facts that come out of nowhere. I don't know why the movie choice Richard to be the main character, because he's probably had read some kind of book before. He had to get find those facts somewhere. He's already a book worm, but the movie is making him look like he never read a book before. One day, Richard gets caught in a harsh thunderstorm on a bike trip and takes shelter in a library. Here, he is met by Mr. Dewey (Christopher Lloyd), an eccentric librarian who tries to find a book for Richard and gives him a library card. Christopher Lloyd over acts and is somewhat creepy in this scene. Richard wanders off and finds a large rotunda painted with classic fictional characters that he supposing don't know of. Richard slips on some water that had dripped from his coat and falls down, hitting his head and knocking him unconscious. He awakens and finds the rotunda paintings melting, forming a wave of color that transforms him and the library into illustrations. This is where Director Jon Johnston ends, and directors of the animation parts, Pixote Hunt and Glenn Chaika start. Richard is approached by the Pagemaster (Also Christopher Lloyd) who sends him on a journey into the fiction section to find the "exit". It's funny how the Page Master puts Richard in life threating danger just to prove a point that he has courage in him. It's like putting a young baby in a lion cage and tell it to grow up. It's not like reading will make you brave, anyways. Only survivoring through those life threating events can do that. Reading about interesting characters in books isn't truly living, folks. Being a interesting character in real life and living through something is truly living. Along the way, Richard befriends three anthropomorphic books: Adventure (Patrick Stewart), a swashbuckling pirate like book; Fantasy (Whoopi Goldberg), a sassy but caring fairy tale book; and Horror (Frank Welker), a fearful "hunchbook" with a misshapen spine. I'm surprise that Sci-Fiction wasn't part of the group since a lot of children, I know. Read that. I guess nobody heard of that genre in Richard's world. At less, they didn't jump into young adult novels like Twilight. That would be horrible. The three agree to help Richard to find his way out if he checks them out with his library card. Together, the quartet encounter classic fictional characters and worlds on their way to the exit. I like how they try to put as much literature works into the film, but I have to question that most of the works they did put in, aren't technically for children. Example: the Hounds of Baskervilles has one of the hardest reading levels of all, due to its large amount of vocabulary, use of the English language, and large amounts of geographic and science facts. Not only that, it has a large amount of drug use, sex, and violence that isn't suite for children. Moby Dick wasn't written for children at all as well due to Melville employs stylized language, symbolism, slang language and the metaphor to explore numerous complex themes that would be way too complex for the normal ten year old first time reader. Still I like the fact, that they meet Dr. Jekyll (Leonard Nimoy) from the book Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Then Long John Silver (Jim Cummings) from Treasure Island. It's sad to say that both those classic animation characters are nothing like the literature in which they came from. Example: Dr. Jekyll, for example, isn't creepy and homicidal. He's just a scientist addicted to a potion that frees him from his uptight persona. It's only Mr. Hyde that acts upon crude action. It's ironic and hypocritical that the movie writer tries to use classic literary characters to make kids read books when the writer himself didn't read the books either. The characters were brief and unexplained, but also inaccurate. I do like how the majority of the cast has appeared in some form or another on Star Trek. The animation was pretty well. The paint dragon was badass for when this was made. If you look close, you'll find out that in the worlds are practically everything is made out of books. The rocks, the stairs, the houses. It's a nice little detail which the animators inserted. I love the soundtrack by James Horner. I thought the music in here was fantastic and often use in other film trailers and commercials. I find it weird that a movie is telling children to read, rather than schools or even the parents. I think the best way to get children to read is to turn off the television and read to them. Then allow them to read to you. Simple like that. You don't need this mess. movie to do that.