Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland: Retro Review
I actually can’t believe it has taken me so long to do a review on this movie. Maybe it’s fitting that I’m using it as my return to head writer of Geekhaven Reviews, because it is one of my favorite movies of all time. So much so that my first novel “Escape from Undermind” was heavily influenced by it.
Little Nemo is a one-hundred-eleven year old character, as Winsor McCay created the comic strip in 1905. It was one of the most popular comic strips of all time, so much so that one of the originals was placed in the Museo de Louvre. It was the first piece of comic’s art that was given anywhere near such a prestigious honor. Thus began the debate of whether or not comics are fine art that is still going on today (Whether or not they’re considered literature is a completely different debate).
I have always been a fan of the possibility of dreams and nightmares, the same as the rest of the world. There’s still a lot of mystery and that mystery makes the subject matter the perfect playground. The comic strips were very surreal and dreamlike, but this movie, followed closely by a video game I frequently played on the Sega Master System (I’m so old), is much more straight forward.
Little Nemo, for reasons unknown, is invited by royal summons to Slumberland to be the sole heir of King Morpheus and the playmate of Princess Lillian. He meets some interesting characters along the way, including Flip, a complete a**hole of a character who causes trouble at every opportunity. He does nothing redeemable for the duration of the movie and he’s there pretty much from the very beginning. They would’ve definitely been better off if they had exiled him to space the way they planned.
The more likable characters are Icarus, the squirrel (also useless but doesn’t get caught) and the Oomps, a group of good natured goblins who can fuse together and shape shift and such. They look pretty gross when they do it, but they are easily the only companions that really help. Everyone else does pretty much nothing and then gets caught. It’s almost as if they’re trying to force a massive world into a ninety minute feature. Sometimes writing everyone off as prisoners is the only way to do that.
That’s what makes Nemo such a good protagonist. His guilt drives him to save his friends and more than redeem himself in the end. With his only weapons being the magical Royal Scepter and a flying bed, he constantly works as hard as he can to memorize the complicated and snicker worthy incantation to defeat the Nightmare King.
The one thing I noticed about this movie is the strange pacing. The first act takes up nearly two thirds of the movie, before a brief but satisfactory second act and a stellar third act. It’s unusual to say the least, but it works. The Japanese have always been particularly talented at doing unusual things when it comes to storytelling. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t. This is a definite case of the former. Oftentimes when I see a movie as an adult after loving it as a child, I see all of its numerous, glaring flaws, but this wasn’t the case for Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland.
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Jonathan Thomas Jones is a speculative fiction author and founder of geekhavenreviews.com. He has been passionate about all things geek for his entire life. See more about him at jonathanthomasjones.com and follow him on twitter @jtgloryjones.
