Return to Oz
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- For other uses, including the 1964 film of the same name, see Return to Oz (disambiguation)
The 1985 film Return to Oz is a motion picture arguably created as an unofficial sequel to The Wizard of Oz. It was made by Walt Disney Pictures and has no approval by MGM, the company that made the classic 1939 film (although MGM owned film rights to Wizard, Disney owned rights to most of the later Oz books). The film was directed by Walter Murch. It was not well received, particularly by those whose prior assumptions about Oz were based on the MGM film.
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Plot
The movie's plot is a combination of L. Frank Baum's novels Ozma of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz, written as sequels to the original novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Dorothy (played by Fairuza Balk) cannot stop thinking about the Land of Oz and her friends the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion. Her worried aunt takes her to a doctor who wishes to "cure" Dorothy of her dreams and delusions with something like electro-shock therapy, but Dorothy escapes during a storm with a hen called Billina. She returns to Oz only to find it in a post-apocalyptic state: the yellow brick road is desecrated, the Emerald City is a collapsing ruin, all its inhabitants, including the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion have been turned to stone, and the Scarecrow has been kidnapped by the Nome King. She is soon imprisoned by the wicked Princess Mombi (a composite of two characters from the books, Princess Langwidere and the witch Mombi).
After meeting a mechanical man named Tik-Tok and a talking dummy named Jack Pumpkinhead, Dorothy discovers that her friends have been turned to stone by the evil Nome King, who is planning to conquer all of Oz. They build a flying Gump to escape Mombi's castle, and fly to the country of the Nome King to find the Scarecrow, who is the king of the Emerald City. The Nome King reveals that he has transformed the Scarecrow into an ornament, and allows each of them to enter his huge room of ornaments and have three guesses as to which one is the Scarecrow. All they have to do is place their hand on an ornament and say the word 'Oz'. However, failure to find the Scarecrow results in the Gump, Tik-Tok, Jack Pumpkinhead and Billina becoming ornaments themselves. Luckily, Dorothy finds the Scarecrow, realizing in the process that the Nome King has enchanted them all into objects colored green. With this information, Dorothy and the Scarecrow manage to rescue their friends. The Nome King is destroyed when he inadvertently swallows one of Billina's eggs (in Oz, eggs are poisonous to nomes), leaving behind the ruby slippers Dorothy lost while returning from her first visit to Oz. Using these, Dorothy wishes herself and her friends back to a restored Emerald City. She discovers the girl Ozma who is the rightful ruler to the Emerald City, trapped in a mirror by Princess Mombi. After a joyous celebration, Dorothy is returned home.
Comparison With The Wizard of Oz
Return to Oz is often referred to as a sequel to the 1939 Wizard of Oz, but this is only partly true. Some ties to the 1939 MGM musical were deliberately kept. For example, Dorothy was blonde in the books, but remains dark-haired in this movie. The silver shoes in the Baum story remain ruby slippers in Return to Oz as they had been in the MGM film. Also, the MGM movie's concept of Dorothy imagining Oz based on people she knows in the real world - which is not present in the original story - is mostly kept intact in Return to Oz. However, this is where the similarities end.
Besides being more realistic, considerably darker and not a musical, the movie is overall truer to the original concept of Oz as described in Baum's books. Certain key elements, such as the Tin Woodsman's name, which was shortened to "Tin Man" for the 1939 film, as well as his back story, which isn't even mentioned in the original, are restored. Also, Faruiza Balk was nine during the filming of Return to Oz, which is much closer to the age of Dorothy in the books than that of Judy Garland, who was 17 when she starred in The Wizard of Oz. The movie is also full of disturbing situations and scenes of violence. Although this is one of the chief complaints from those unfamiliar with the books, this is again truer to Baum's vision: it was common for the books to contain such scenes, although they were arguably more whimsical than scary.
Reception
The movie was expensive to make and went overbudget, yet did poorly in theaters. The PG rating was likely a major cause of the box-office failure, and many critics denounced the film as too disturbing or scary for young children. For example, Princess Mombi is a headless creature with a collection of the severed heads of the most beautiful women of Oz, and at one point the movie shows her swapping these heads to and from her severed neck stub. Those unfamiliar with the Oz books also found the characters and scenes to be bizarre and unfamiliar, since few characters from the first film appear other than Dorothy and (briefly) the Scarecrow.
Problems
It can be argued that the attempts to maintain continuity with the 1939 MGM musical (e.g., the treatment of Dorothy's experiences in Oz as dreams and/or delusions, as well as the decision to not only retain the "ruby slippers," but combine the Nome King's magic belt with them) were major sources of this film's problems . Other likely sources of the film's problems included the decision to combine The Marvelous Land of Oz (the only Oz book that didn't include Dorothy) with Ozma of Oz, and to combine (as in Mombi and Langwiedre) or eliminate (as in Tip, and the entire Royal Family of the Land of Ev) characters, as well as other, more general departures from the books.
External links
- Return to Oz: The Darker Side Of The Rainbow - a fansite which has everything you need to know about the movie
- Returning To Oz: An Audio Documentary On Walt Disney Pictures "Return To Oz" - A online Internet radio show, on the history and behind the scenes look of the classic 1985 Disney movie, "Return To Oz".
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