Labyrinth (film)

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Labyrinth is a 1986 fantasy film directed by the late Jim Henson and designed through the art of Brian Froud and Henson. The human leads are David Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King, and a teenage Jennifer Connelly as Sarah. The plot revolves around Sarah's quest in a strange fantasy maze. Most of the other significant roles are played by puppets or by a combination of puppetry and human performance. It was shot on location in New York and at Elstree Studios in the UK.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Sarah is a dreamer, a young woman obsessed with fantasy and playing dress-up who is stuck babysitting her brother after a fight with her step-mother. Even worse, he has her treasured bear Lancelot. Sarah tries to quiet his screaming by telling him the story, apparently from a play she's been rehearsing, of a young woman granted special powers by the king of goblins. It tells of how the girl could no longer stand her life and wishes for goblins to take away her screaming baby brother. As she ends the story and turns out the light, she says, "I wish the goblins would take you away." Then Toby stops crying... for goblins have taken him away...

A barn owl appears and transforms into the goblin king Jareth (David Bowie) and tells her he has taken the baby as a gift to her. Offended but playful when she asks for the baby back, he gives her 13 hours to find Toby before he is turned into a goblin. Now she must find her way to the center of a fantastic labyrinth and bring him back.

It turns out the Labyrinth is not a simple maze as much as its own world, riddled with logic puzzles and tests. She first meets Hoggle, a small dwarf-like man spraying for fairies outside the entrance. He later turns out to be a halfhearted mole for Jareth who lacks the spine to either defy him or condemn Sarah; he is a coward. The other partners are Sir Didymus, a chivalrous fox-dog creature who rides a sheepdog, and Ludo, a gentle beast. After a variety of setpieces, including detachable-limbed revelers, the Bog of Eternal Stench, and a drug-induced memory loss by Jareth, she makes her way into his castle at the center of its squalid city.


The film climaxes in a multi-dimensional Escher set where Jareth tries to confuse and frighten Sarah, making a final appeal for her to ignore Toby and stay with him. She learns to rely on her own strength and rejects him at the last moment.

In her room she begins to collect some of her toys, returning to Toby's room to give him back Lancelot. The inhabitants of the Labyrinth appear in her room, first as images in the mirror, then invited in wholesale. A barn owl watches the window for a moment before flying away.

Although primarily seen as a children's film, Labyrinth may also be interpreted as a symbolic tale of a young girl's acceptance of her sexuality. Scenes at the beginning and end of the film reveal that most of the characters which Sarah encounters echo toys, posters etc from her bedroom - e.g. a Hoggle-like wooden bookend, a board game designed as a maze, a musical doll wearing the gown from the ballroom scene. Most significantly, newspaper clippings on Sarah's actress mother show that she has or had a relationship with her stage partner - Bowie's image is used for these photos. These details - plus the suggestions of decadent sexual tempation in the ballroom - raise Labyrinth above a run-of-the-mill children's film and suggest an affinity with another 1980s film - the film of The Company of Wolves, directed by Neil Jordan from short stories by Angela Carter (like Labyrinth, it features a fantasy ballroom scene)

Many of the settings and creatures in the film were based on designs by Brian Froud, who had previously collaborated with Jim Henson on The Dark Crystal. Froud and screenwriter Terry Jones later collaborated on the book The Goblins of Labyrinth which depicted some of the incidental creatures from the film. Froud's infant son Toby played Sarah's brother in the movie.

The filmmakers acknowledged several influences, including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the works of Maurice Sendak and M. C. Escher.

Some of the puppeteers went on to work for computer animation studios.

For the film, a soundtrack album was created including much of Trevor Jones' strictly instrumental music including "Into the Labyrinth, Sarah, Hallucination, Goblin Battle, Thirteen O'Clock and Home at Last" and David Bowie's five songs, Magic Dance (also credited as Dance Magic), Chilly Down, As the World Falls Down, Within You, and the single released for the film, Underground.

Tokyopop in partnership with The Jim Henson Company are planning to publish a manga-style comic based on the movie, it is planned as sequel to the film and is set to be about a 13 year old Toby who coincidentally has the same name of the baby brother in the movie. TokyoPop Press Release

A video game based on the movie was released in Japan for the Nintendo Famicom, but never saw release in America, however a C64 version was released in 1986. 1

Image:Film-labyrinth-anim-amoswolfe.gif

Contents

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Credits

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Cast

The film received a PG rating in the US and a U in the UK (equivalent to a US G). It runs for 101 minutes.

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External links

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References

1 Gamespot.com

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