Gulliver's Travels

When I was little I used to go to visit my grandparents, they had a small collection of videos mainly things recorded from television, things to keep the grandchildren entertained. One of these videos was a copy of Gulliver’s Travels (1939), an animated version of the Jonathan Swift tale and only the second animated feature film ever made, the first being Disney’s Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs.

Gulliver’s Travels (1939) was created by Max and Dave Fleischer, for their own Fleischer studios, and who also created the animated legends of Betty Boop and Popeye. The Fleischer brothers were also responsible for the creation of rotoscoping, a process of making the drawing of animation easier, by way of tracing over live action film, frame by frame. The live action images were projected on to a piece of glass, and then traced, the projected used is called a rotoscope, hence rotoscoping. Max was granted the patent in 1915, although the brothers had already used the technique in the first animation released the previous year. Rotoscoping was used through out the making of Gulliver’s Travels (1939)

There have been many adaptations of Jonathan Swift’s book in film, on television and on the radio. Notably the 1977 film starring Richard Harris, or the original Dumbledore to anyone born this century. The 1982 BBC series produced by Dr. Who legend Barry Letts and the 1996 mini-series starring Ted Danson and his wife Mary Steenburgen.

And now we have Jack Black, in a modern update of the tale, in which Black in an attempt to impress Amanda peet’s travel journalist travels to the Bermuda triangle, and after entering the triangle Black arrives in Lilliput. At first he is considered a beast, but after he safes the king (Billy Connolly)from a fire he is deemed a hero, and made general of the Lilliputian army, to great irritation of the current general and villain of the piece, General Edward (Chris O‘Dowd, TV‘s The I.T Crowd). Who switches sides, defecting to the Blefuscians, with whom the Lilliputians are at war. Eventually building a robot piloted by the General himself, and a Godzilla like smack down ensues, and no Jack Black film would be complete with out a musical number, in this case ‘War’ by Edwin Starr, with black singing the words “War. Huh. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing” in an attempt to bring the two warring nations together.

This version is my no means an Oscar winner, but a perfectly entertaining family film, much like Black’s previous work School of Rock, perfect for a non-taxing Sunday afternoon, and by no means on the level of the brilliant high fidelity, but not as big a pile of flaming monkey turd as King Kong.

The film is also accompanied by a new short featuring Scrat the pre-historic squirrel-thing from the Ice age films, called Scrat’s continental crack-up, where we’re given an alternative take on the forming of the continents. Lets face it Scrat was the best thing about Ice Age, while the rest of the film was fairly average, you were just waiting for the moments when Scrat would pop up again. But he’s also a character that could never carry a whole film on his own, I think it would start to get a old after ten minutes.