Unlike, apparently, most moviegoers in the 1990s, I found the original “Lion King” to be far too saccharine for my tastes. A fairly bland character makes a bad decision, briefly gets mixed up with some interesting outcasts, the clock whirls forward through all that stuff, and then he goes back to fix his mistake. While I’m no fan of “Hamlet,” I felt “The Lion King” really robbed the story of much of the drama it could, and should, have had. And, frankly, I was irritated that Timon and Pumbaa got so little screen time.
“The Lion King 1 1/2
” to the rescue. Not only do we get to see Simba’s time with the duo in more detail, we get to see all of “The Lion King” through Timon’s much more cynical eyes, and the story improves for the retelling. The creators of this sequel clearly like the original movie, which is interwoven or sometimes literally used in the background of new shots, but they’re also well aware of its cornier elements, and Timon is as well.
The conceit of having Timon and Pumbaa watch their own version of events on a giant television screen (seen in silhouette, “Mystery Science Theater 3000” style) is great, and allows for them to comment on the action, make fun of overly dramatic elements (“What’s up with that running, if you can call that running?” Timon asks of Pumbaa’s dramatic slow motion race through desert sand) and act as audience surrogates when they buzz through the boring stuff. It’s simple, but effective, and embodies the sly, sarcastic sense of the filmmakers. Set pieces from the original film are turned on their ear (“Everything the light touches … belongs to someone else.”) or gleefully skewered (“Oh, great timing, omniscient monkey!”).
The story of this sequel is a fairly classic Disney story, of the misfit character who doesn’t fit in with the social norms of his environment, and sets out on an adventure that both makes him a hero and redefines his relationship to his community. In this case, it’s Timon, who isn’t the nervous wreck the other meerkats all are, nor, unfortunately, nearly as competent at any of the skills they think are important (i.e. tunneling and watching out for marauding hyenas). In the course of his journey to find a place where he won’t have to hide underground, he encounters the flatulent Pumbaa, who is recast as part embarassing uncle, part smelly family dog, with well-observed bits brought out by both the animators and performer.
While children, especially little boys, will enjoy the gross-out humor (of which there is relatively little), for the most part, “The Lion King 1 1/2” is an adult film, and perhaps the first post-modern Disney movie, commenting on another Disney movie with the leading characters explicitly observing and analyzing the original events. Of course, for those looking for lots of more of what the original movie offered, they’ll be disappointed — the story is slight, the song-and-dance number is lightweight and very silly and the lions are, frankly, something of an afterthought — but for those of us who thought the original needed a little more bitter with the sweet, this new film is a delight.
Strongly recommended for Disney fans who prefer their cartoons a little less sugary sweet, and a little more tart and sour instead.
I grew up reading L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels and have also always loved villain-centered stories, whether it was “Grendel” or the Flashman novels. So when I spotted “Wicked” in my local bookstore, it looked like this novel was written just for me. The map inside and the first few pages made it clear that, while author Gregory Maguire might be taking some liberties with what readers think they know about Oz, he was doing so within the context of the Oz lore that Baum set forth a century ago. In other words, this was to be an Oz novel for adults.
Unfortunately, that’s not what was actually delivered. “Wicked” is an Oz novel, but it’s a novel intended to impress people like John Updike and the “New Yorker” editors. It’s one thing to have literary ambitions – frankly, too few American writers bother with writing works of substance or quality in this blockbuster-minded world – but it’s another to sabotage your own storytelling for the sake of lending the appearance of extra literary weight to a novel already sufficiently weighty; it’s gilding the lily, and slowing the novel needlessly.
The story of Elphaba and the (mostly) bloodless political and cultural revolutions Oz is going through leading up to “The Wizard of Oz” is one rich with ideas, social, political and religious. But first time novelist Maguire appears afraid to leave all this out in the open, in the milieu of a fantasy or children’s novel. Instead, he approaches everything in a roundabout fashion, hinting at things, obscuring characters’ intentions and behavior, and even making the main plot thread difficult to puzzle out at times. I don’t dislike such things normally: Franz Kafka’s “The Castle,” Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” are all favorite stories, and all use the technique to stunning effect. But in those cases, the obfuscation was an integral part of the work, whether it be the (probable) madness of the latter two or the baffling and mysterious bureaucracy of the former. But here, Maguire’s elliptical writing style is, with one exception, something thrust upon fairly straightforward events, not a natural consequence of them. (The single exception is a mysterious encounter at Shiz, the school where the future witches of the east, west and north are all students – their possible indoctrination as sleeper agents of someone attempting to manipulate the course of Ozian politics is creepy and effective, and the girls being put under a spell and/or hypnotized makes the vagueness of this passage work to great effect.)
This is all especially frustrating as Maguire’s storytelling – when he gets out of his own way – is excellent, and the basic framework of the novel is currently the toast of Broadway, in the Grammy-nominated musical version of “Wicked.” While that production is arguably too dumbed-down (Elphaba wanting the Wizard to de-green her may work as a nice parallel to the characters in “The Wizard of Oz,” but it strikes a discordant note for a character with steel for a backbone), it does point to the fact that the story works as a story quite well without needing the self-consciously literary flourishes with which Maguire gilds his story.
In many ways, it would have been nicer if “Wicked” were Maguire’s second novel, not his first: The glimpses of brilliance that fans respond to in the novel might well have been unobscured if he was confident enough in his vision to not have tried to stack the deck and guaranteed the approval of sober-minded literary critics for someone daring to examine modern life through the lens of a classic children’s story.
Recommended for adult fans of the Oz novels or movies willing to wade through a novel not as good as it ought to have been. Those who get discouraged with the sometimes glacial pace and obscure writing style are advised to pick up the “Wicked” musical soundtrack instead, which has full lyrics in the liner notes.
Three stars out of five.
