An independent animated picture, Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return, is a 3D-animated musical based on Roger Stanton Baum’s children’s books (the author is the great-grandson of Oz story creator L. Frank Baum). Despite some good efforts and finely crafted moments, this is a poorly conceived and executed movie. It is a mess that defies description and it is best left unseen.
I saw the film at an advance screening with an audience of mostly children – companies sometimes stack the screening audience – and their parents or guardians and none of them seemed to enjoy the picture, though they’d entered the theater with enthusiasm. I could easily see why. Billed as a continuation of The Wizard of Oz, Legends of Oz finds Dorothy (voiced by Glee‘s Lea Michele) waking in her home in post-tornado Kansas. But this movie pretends that the original movie never happened, ignoring Dorothy’s dilemma over her dog Toto, ditching the three uncles, who do not appear, and for some reason aging Auntie Em backwards like Benjamin Button. Only Dorothy seems to have aged.
The Gale family’s faced with a government crony trying to condemn their damaged property, which might have been an interesting framing device except that mid-70s-era cars and a younger aunt already deliver a confused starting point. Soon, by way of a rainbow transporter made by the Scarecrow, Dorothy is summoned back to Oz to defend against the Wicked Witch of the West’s evil brother the Jester (voiced by Martin Short). Again, this might have been interesting – he is as obsessive about controlling every aspect of everyone’s life as Obama and, for story purposes, the crony back in Kansas – but Short’s vocal antics and the general plot, pacing and characters are too irritating, frantic and manic to take root.
The Scarecrow (Dan Aykroyd), Lion (Jim Belushi) and Tin Man (Kelsey Grammer) and Glinda (Bernadette Peters voicing too old for the cartoon character) are all back but the magic is missing. New characters, with a couple of exceptions, are as annoying as an itch you can’t scratch. An owl (Oliver Platt) who is too fat to fly and a very grating and bipolar princess made of china (Megan Hilty) join Dorothy’s trek back to Oz – no Munchkins in sight though the flying, menacing monkeys loom over the not quite as yellow brick road – and they all march toward the Jester to stop his reign of terror. Two new characters, an old tree (Patrick Stewart) who allows himself to made into a boat and a giant military marshmallow (Hugh Dancy) from Candy County help Dorothy make her way to Emerald City.
Songs by Bryan Adams are fine, though one rock number is awful, and the animation is often very well done but it comes and goes. In the first song, Dorothy walks around the Kansas town – no sign of Miss Gulch – singing a nice song but her lips aren’t moving, then they are, and on and on. It turns out that Hugh Dancy as the voice of Marshall Mallow can sing and his songs are lovely – he falls for the little china doll who some may want to smash with a mallet – but inconsistency abounds and distracts. Would Scarecrow really say “copy that”? Does the villain calling one of the monkeys a “fuzzy, evolutionary reject” really put the audience in Oz?
The best song, “Work with Me”, sang as everyone unites to build the boat to Emerald City, brings rodents and beavers around to pitch in. The tune ends too soon. Then it’s back to Dorothy taking another journey to self-awareness without any of the charm of the wonderful world of Oz. Legends of Oz is written by Randi Barnes and Adam Balsam and directed by Daniel St. Pierre and Will Finn, both of whom worked on Disney’s The Little Mermaid. This picture has evidence of skill yet none of a proper impetus. Disney’s prequel Oz the Great and Powerful proved that new Oz stories are possible to depict without making a debacle. Legends of Oz is not a debacle. The spirit of the original film was that Dorothy imagined herself saving an imaginary world in order to better grasp how to deal with reality and save something she loves (her little dog). Here, it feels more like Dorothy is already grown up with nothing to learn and that she fantasizes about Oz as a crutch for boosting morale, which minimizes the theme of the 1939 masterpiece (read my review of The Wizard of Oz here). The character, story and movie deserves better.