Can we all just agree that dreams are fucking weird? Theyre one of the least understood aspects of human life and everybody but Mike Pence has them. Their are tons of theories about what their purpose is what they mean and why were always naked in them but to this day nobody can pinpoint what these bizarre movies we get to watch while were recharging even are. Sometimes they have purpose Back when I was in a bad relationship where I felt trapped and with no control over my life Id constantly dream that I was stuck on a labyrinthian waterslide that I couldnt escape from. But they can be completely nonsensical too. Maybe youre fighting in a war with flamethrowers but they suddenly turn into waterguns. Maybe youre running from a spider that can fit through any crack. Maybe youre beating up pedophiles taunting serial killers throwing horses at witches fighting demons in the wild west meeting people you dont see anymore running from a golden car like its a metaphor for Satan or hell maybe you get into a car crash but wind up in your living room with your family ominously telling you Its waiting. For little Nemo dreams arent quite like that. Every single one of his dreams is a lucid one and he can use them to escape to big fantastical worlds all by riding on his bed like its a magic carpet. One day after seeing a parade and wanting desperately to go to the circus Nemo drifts off and is invited to the world of Slumberland a country governed by a kind jovial king and his prickly little daughter and inhabited by a whole host of wild and zany characters. Nemo is declared the Kings heir and entrusted with protecting it from harm but it isnt long at all before one of these inhabitants a chainsmoking green minstrel named Flip tempts him into letting Slumberland get taken over by a terrifying sea of darkness which leaves it in shambles and takes the King away to a faraway land. With the order of a whole world now at stake there is only one chance at saving it Joined by Flip the princess a wacky professor and his talking squirrel sidekick Nemo must brave the horrors of Nightmareland to make everything right again If I were to show you Little Nemo directly there are two reactions I expect from you almost immediately. The first would be disbelief at the fact that Nemos not a clownfishalthough his world is populated by Clowns and incredulity at the fact that it really doesnt look like an anime. It is I assure you It was produced by Japan and released in Japan three years before it was released in the States although Id say roughly a quarter of the people credited to making it are American including both of the screenwriters. The production was a mess of almost legendary proportions with huge names from both sides of the ocean coming into the project and then leaving it just as quickly leaving influence behind but rarely ever any guidance on how to implement it. Even Hayao Miyazaki himself was attached at one point which is probably why the movie opens with a sequence of Nemo flying through the city on his bed. It was ultimately produced by TMS a company that made Akira and animated several american cartoons. And speaking of American cartoons thats exactly what this movie was based on. Little Nemo was originally a newspaper comic that ran in the early 1900s which doesnt sound like something an anime would ever be based on and yet lo and behold thats what we have here. Visually this is exactly what Id think of if I was told that an anime was being designed to look like an American product. First of all being that this WAS a product of TMS the animation budget was high so theres a lot of fluid animation and graceful character movement sometimes almost to a fault. It is very lively and it makes the movie feel really energetic but theres also a certain feeling of overindulgence to it like what the Nostalgia Critic might call movement porn. It never stops moving which can almost feel exhausting at points. Its one of those cases where something was new at the time and had never really been attempted to such a degree so of course it was impressive at the time for what it achieved but looking back it could have been done better. For example theres a scene where the cast engages in a dance at the palace and Professor Genius starts doing a weird danceId be surprised if The Duke of Wesselton wasnt at least partially inspired by this and then the king joins in and for this strangely surreal moment it looks like the two are moving in sync probably through some sort of rotoscoping despite being at least a foot apart in height. Its a really creepy bit of Uncanny valley. Oh and speaking of Uncanny valley theres also the facial animations which I actually kind of had trouble watching. Characters were so far removed from your typical anime style that it honestly looks like something Chuck Jones would have animated while shitface drunk and this is reflected in the character designs. Most of the characters look all right if a bit generic but the animation doesnt always work in their favor. Princess Camille for example? Whenever she lets her shoulders slump she looks more arrow than human. She looks like the love child of Bob Belcher and Marzipan from the Homestarrunner cartoons. At least the demons look cool I guess. When it comes to the music I was actually kind of expecting the American and Japanese releases to have different soundtracks but surprisingly they dont. Even though this movie was originally released in Japan the OST was comprised of English language songs. On Wikipedia the music is credited to a few American sounding names including the Sherman Brothers who are absolute legends in the field of family film musical scores. The films main theme which is simply named Little Nemo after the Japanese title of the movie is beautiful. I love it. It works great in the film carrying the kind of epic whimsy that can only be found in nineties childrens movies and its just as strong when listened to on its own. Melissa Manchester has an amazing voice which I really shouldnt have to tell anyone whos familiar with her work and its a testament to her strength as an artist that she can carry the Sherman Brothers occasionally awkward and flowery lyrics without ever sounding hokey or condescending. Unfortunately this mark of inspiration doesnt really carry over to the rest of the soundtrack which sounds about as standard for a generic childrens movie soundtrack that you can get with some of the songs being directly attached to scenes that were clearly added to the film just to pad out the run time. This is no more clear than with the song Etiquette which I think was supposed to be funny but just winds up coming off as annoying. Melissa Manchester is nowhere to be found on this track but she might not have been able to save it anyway because she wasnt able to carry her majesty from Little Nemo over to the song Slumberland which is just kind of boring overall. Songs like Fun and Laughter The Boomps Song and Princess of Slumberland are safe saccharine and forgettable which is sadly par for the course with this soundtrack. The instrumental tracks are okay but theyre not the kind of thing that could ever set the world on fire and theres nothing about them that really justifies going out of your way to find them. The English dub is Well its also okay. There are a ton of really popular names credited to this film including a preSimpsons Nancy Cartwright and a postVampire Hunter D Michael McConnohie. Actually there area ton of voice actors attached to this project whose resumes would surprise you as even beyond famous names like Tress Macneille Jennifer Darling Sherry Lynn and the late June Foray there are names that may have flown under your radar like Ren Auberjonois and Gabriel Damon and Im sad to say this almost none of them brought their Agame to this project. There are a few exceptions like Laura Mooney in the role of the Princess who was the only cast member who CLEARLY wasnt trying Bernard Erhard who put his heart and soul into making King Morpheus the most likeable guy in the world and strangely enough Mickey Rooney who was obviously having a blast playing the mischievous and duplicitous Flip. Its not a great dub but its passable enough which is good because western releases dont include a Japanese language sub track. So heres an interesting little bit of trivia for you guys: this was the first anime I ever watched. It predates my experiences with Pokemon and Dragonball by nearly a decade even. When I was little like really little my Dad would often rent movies on VHS and bring them home for my brother and me to watch. Hed go to the grocery store Wegmans in my area Rent some random movie with a G rating and bring it home for us. For those of you who are confused by those last two sentences ask your parents. Hed bring home Disney movies Don Bluth movies straighttovideo shitfestsI saw Once Upon a Forest at least three times and on one occasion Little Nemo. Now as a kid I didnt have the greatest attention span but I always found myself getting absorbed in stories. I watched movies mostly attentively and shamed people who didntTo this day I get really annoyed by people who play on their phones during a movie and as soon as I learned to read I could go hours without putting a book or comic down. There are some exceptions to this rule however and Little Nemo is one of them. My memorys not great but Im pretty sure I only saw it once and didnt really pay attention to it. Even only a year later all I could remember about it was the Princess Camille stuff because even Little Naru loved him some princesses. I only really wound up thinking about it a few times in the years that followed like one time when I was reading up on the history of newspaper comics or when Finding Nemo came out or when I found out it was an anime or when The Nostalgia Critic and The Mysterious Mr. Enter did some really good videos on it But I never really started thinking about it seriously until I started reviewing anime and I knew Id have to hit it again eventually. Well almost five years in that time has finally come. I bought the movie online let it sit on my coffee table for a few monthsdont judge me and finally I popped it in and watched it for the first time in over twenty years and let me tell you theres a reason it bored me as a kid. Theres a lot to unpack here so to stay focused Im not going to go too far into any of the behind the scenes stuff. Production of this film was famously a nightmare its apparently one of Hayao Miyazakis worst professional experiences it was a huge bomb when it was released and the production company TMS who were riding high after the success of Akira at the time were so badly damaged by it that they havent been the same since. I dont personally know any more about any of this than Ive been told I havent exactly done any research into its history Thats not really the kind of thing I do here But its lack of success isnt really a surprise to me and if youve ever seen it yourself it doesnt take a lot of run time to pick up on the fact that it was never going to be anybodys favorite film for any reason but childhood nostalgia. The only thing I can really talk about here is my personal experience watching the movie and if it helps my thoughts as to why it flopped as hard as it did. First of all the main character The titular Nemo Is a special kind of bland. He has no personality to speak of he has no interests or goals outside of visiting the circus and doing whatever the plot tells him to do and if I had to guess his companion a little sentient flying squirrel with flight goggles on his head was added to the story to make him more interesting in the new mediumit didnt work. also how weird is it that they had June Foray in the cast the voice of rocky but she didnt play his arguable ripoff?. He just goes with the flow while spouting off lazy little boy oneliners like Yippee Gee Whiz and Wowwee He doesnt even immediately grasp that a princess is a girl a conversation which to be fair Was even dumber in the NES game. The worst thing about him isnt how boring or bland he is however Its how little agency he has in the story. for the bulk of the movie hes just following orders going along with whatever the other characters want him to do and when Flip pressures him to go back on some of these orders he folds like origami. The first real choice he makes is to try and undo that mistake about twenty minutes after making it. He gains some agency in the third act where hes leading the charge to the Nightmare castle to rescue everybody but even then its hard to get invested because you never feel that he has any connection to any of it. Hes only known any of these people for less than a day the whole world is just shallow eye candy with nothing substantial to offer and Im sorry but a king whos willing to hand a key to whats basically the doors of hell to a child he just met fifteen minutes ago was asking for his kingdom to get taken over. In stories like these the hero has to have a personal reason to save the world hes wandered into but with Nemo he just feels like our excuse to explore a bunch of Candyland backgrounds in a barely storydriven animation demo and the moments of actual story feel either distractingly stupid or gratingly annoying. When Nemo is being tossed around by spastic tutors trying to educate him on proper behavior I wouldnt care if he woke up got up to use the bathroom and then went back to bed and dreamed about running from monster tornadoes. Id be just as engaged. But perhaps the biggest problem is that we KNOW hes just having a dream and that theres no more to it than that. Right in the beginning of the movie we see most of the characters from Slumberland walking down the street in a parade which is how he came to dream about them. Thats it. Theyre not real. None of this is real. This wouldnt be such a big deal if the dreamlike aspects were the whole point and it was just supposed to be a trippy experiences but theres a story and plot involved and theres almost no urgency behind any of it. If he fails nothing is lost. If he succeeds nothing is gained. Theres no interesting subtext no metaphor to speak of no commentary just the classic artwork and imagination of Windsor McKay being shown off in a story that doesnt do any of it justice. I mean the only thing that does any work moving the plot forward is the character of Flip but his motivation in the story is so completely bankrupt that he almost feels like the personification of the audience screaming Get on with it It doesnt even manage to be dreamlike. Like I said before dreams are weird. They dont have plots they dont contain full stories. Little Nemo is too conventional of a story to even grasp the surrealism that any good dreambased narrative should at the very least be able to pull off. Remember in Nichijou when characters are put in bizarre situations like having to eat noodles off of a shoot before they hit the ground? Or having to buy a snowman off of the shelf before it melts and they do so with actual sincerity like they believe these tasks to be important? Thats how dreams work. Remember Alice in Wonderland or the old Nightmare Ned computer game? Thats how dreams work. Okay the Nightmare Ned TV series had consistent stories but at least they had the benefit of being smart and well written. You wanna show me a dream with a solid narrative? Make a movie where someone has to deal with a cult of people who brainwash each other into mutilating the bone structure of their faces or getting stuck in a pizza place thats a metaphor for purgatory. The actual story is bad enough but theres almost no creativity to the visuals and while I get that the whole movie is based on a preexisting work and they had established content to work with but that shouldnt have limited them so harshly. Its an adaptation but the concept surrounding it was just ripe for updates. They could have unleashed their imaginations upon the world using McKays imagination as a pretty solid foundation for interpretation but everything just feels so lazy and uninspired. The Slumberland sets basically went from Candyland to the ocean to a dark and dreary underworld and a King of nightmaresor something who just looked like Chernabog on a juice cleanse. Thats the best you got? Give me a demonic three headed goat or somethingcan you tell I crowdsourced some weird dream ideas for this review? I havent been this disappointed since the villain in Insidious turned out to be Darth Mauls edgelord little cousin There are so many ways this movie could have been great but sadly they didnt take any of them. Little Nemo which has the additional subtitle of Adventures of Slumberland over here is way out of print but the Easternstar DVD is still really easy to find online for cheap. The original comic is also easy to find online but it aint cheap and the books theyre contained in tend to be gigantic and can be a pain to display because of it. The entire Little Nemo franchise is in the public domain so if you want to use it for yourself you can do so without issue. When I reviewed Spirited Away I went into detail on my revised feelings towards childrens media and that a movie doesnt necessarily have to be critically good for kids to watch it. The only exception is when a movie teaches a bad message or could potentially provide a negative influence and theres nothing like that in Little Nemo so do I recommend showing it to your kids? I guess so but I cant honestly see them asking to see it. Its a fairly obscure movie and if it didnt develop a huge cult following after getting put out on DVD early this decade then I doubt itll happen anytime soon. If you have fond childhood memories of it and want to show it to your kids for that reason go ahead but theres no guarantee theyll like it. I certainly didnt. That aside its a pretty firmly forgotten movie and while Id love to see someone else take a shot at adapting McKays opus come on Disney this shit has your name all over it This is one nostalgic movie you can leave right in your memories where it belongs. I give Little Nemo a 3/10.