The Phantom Tollbooth (1969) 90m.

After making over two hundred animated shorts, Chuck Jones finally got to the chance to direct a feature with this adaptation of Norton Juster’s children’s book. It’s a colorful effort, but patchy. Children will be hooked by the film’s live-action opening: a listless boy by the name of Milo is suprised to find a miniature tollbooth and car in his bedroom. The scene is set for some great adventure, but the switch to animation may lose the connection kids will have with the protagonist’s real-life counterpart. Story is a blend of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’, relating Milo’s adventures in the lands of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis. It’s one of the few films of its type that doesn’t have a presiding villain. Indeed, the point of it is that wasted time (through laziness, disinterest, ignorance) is the only real enemy of childhood. As Juster’s episodic book has been judiciously compressed, this revelation (as it occurs to Milo at the film’s end) isn’t too convincing. Film also has other flaws: there’s too many songs in the first twenty minutes; character voices sound too much like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Augie Doggie, and others; and the most memorable character from the book, the Watchdog, is badly conceived (he looks just like a regular dog, and his fatherly voice doesn’t jibe with his dewy eyes).

Film is recognizably a product of the Warners studio, although Milo is drawn noticeably in the Disney mold of child heroes. It may be of more interest to fans of Jones than those of the book, although it doesn’t reach the heights of his short subjects. There’s certainly less humor than you’d expect, and Jones makes almost no attempt at slapstick, sticking instead to the wit and wordplay prevalent throughout the book. To be fair, the book’s abstract concepts would be difficult to adapt successfully to the screen. Film is uneven but is interesting as an alternative to the dominant Disney features of the time - you have to wonder about Warners’ timing, considering Disney had died shortly beforehand. And it does improve as it goes on. It’s no YELLOW SUBMARINE but you can see influences of psychedelia in the vivid colors and geometric patterns - it makes you wish that it would really cut loose with a couple of sequences more reminiscent of the zany cartoons the studio is famous for.