Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie

Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

utgard14 Classic surrealistic Chuck Jones animated feature film (with some live action parts). It's an intelligent, entertaining movie. I would say educational as well but if your kid is able to learn from the fast-paced and often tongue-twisting wordage here then they are much smarter than I was as a tyke.The plot is about a young boy named Milo (Butch Patrick) who enters a mysterious tollbooth and is transported to the Kingdom of Wisdom. Accompanied by Tock, a watchdog who literally has a watch in his body, he has a series of adventures traveling through the various enchanted lands.It's a fun, smart, sophisticated movie that won't appeal to all. Sadly, I must cynically say it won't appeal to most kids of today. Another thing: the songs are nothing exceptional but not as bad as I've seen others say. Some of them are quite good. Don't let naysayers talk you out of trying this movie. If you love Chuck Jones or classic animation in general, it's definitely a must see.

johntrlhkr If we are to make the most of every second of life and explore the big beautiful world then skip this waste of time. I saw this movie as a child in 1970 and I remember over half the audience walking out before it was over because it was so boring. I watched it recently as a middle age adult and realized that it was so boring to so many children at that time because it is mostly mindless drivel and meaningless tripe. Chuck Jones does a fair job at animation especially given the limitations of technology when this was released in 1970. Many of the characters are reminiscent of the classic Warner Brothers cartoons which may have added to the confusion and boredom experienced by many of the children at that time. If you see expressions and vocalizations that are similar to Bugs Bunny or Yosemite Sam you naturally expect similar actions in the movie.

lemon_magic I am a big fan of Chuck Jones, and I had heard of "The Phantom Tollbooth" in various contexts as an animated feature, so when I saw it on the cable schedule, I made sure to reserve the time to watch it. Hmmmm. I decided that this wasn't bad for an first foray into feature length territory, and that if Jones had a chance to learn from his mistakes and try a couple more times, he would have probably come up with a real classic. But "Phantom Tollbooth" wasn't it, and deserves its place in semi-obscurity. Problem: Too much heavy handed moralizing. I was surprised that people as sneakily funny and subversive as Jones and his crew would be satisfied with the "tone" of the dialog and the exposition here. No matter that the target audience was young; Even Disney in the early years was never this blunt and cheesy in their subtexts and allegories. (From what I've read, the original text wasn't this unsubtle either. Or else what works in a 20 word blurb on the page doesn't always work at length in a live medium). More problems: About half of the songs are, um, pretty lame, at least to my sensibilities. The ones that yammer away about the virtues of earnestness, duty, hard work, etc. And Butch Patrick was a pretty good kid actor, but he was no singer - all he ever does is pipe along with the lyrics as if they were the musical version of The Pledge Of Allegiance. Worse yet, some of the animation is 2nd rate. Oh, sure, the main characters - the Watch Dog, the Humbug, Milo, the Mathemagician - are done as well as you expect from a Jones flick, and some of the backgrounds are suitably trippy, but most of the monsters and supporting cast (including Rhyme and Reason) are slapdash and badly conceived and look like another crew of 2nd unit apprentices did them. Still, the movie has its moments. The scene in the Doldrums had a nice sinister edge to it. It was nice to hear Blanc and Foray and Tremayne and the rest do what they do so well, even if they had trouble selling some of the dialog. And I am sure that the kid I was back in 1970 would have enjoyed more than I do now - although not as much as One Hundred and One Dalmations, or "The Sword In The Stone". I really wanted to like this movie as much as I do those two (which sport a similar style of character animation) and I want to overlook its faults, because it has a good heart. But as I said, it is undercooked enough that it really doesn't match up to the classics from that era.

benovite 1)The animation is bad, especially by Chuck Jones' standards. If you've seen any amount of his work with Bugs Bunny or Tom & Jerry then you will see why. Things suddenly have or change color, some things skip a few frames of animation, and at some points it looks like a 2nd grade class animated it with markers.2)There is no story, or at least none that I could find. It's basically one long experimental movie mixing live action with animation. There are very little live action scenes in the beginning to establish anything such as - where are Milo's parents? The kid doesn't live by himself does he? It's as if Chuck wanted to get to the animation as fast as possible.3) When we get to this animated world, it's very mundane and not very imaginative, ESPECIALLY the opening scenes involving the doldrums.Do we really need to see the main character yawning while other snot-like creates yawn too? This is movie-making rule #1: Don't have too much yawning in your movie or else the audience will be yawning right along with it! The part with the doldrums was torture.3) It's hard to make out a lot of the dialogue because of the sound effects and what they tried to do with the voices.It looks like crap and sounds like crap.I take it that this was supposed to be a sort of Alice in Wonderland experience, but it's not very fun or imaginative. I mean the police officer with one long leg that's a wheel(?) should tell you how lacking this movie is.When I saw this on TCM the other day Robert Osbourne said that this was made in 1968 but released in 1970, mostly due to MGM having a constant change of guard and because they didn't know how to sell this movie. I believe it! No one beyond the age of 1 should watch this.Actually, I can't imagine audiences going to see this in a movie theater. I barely was able to pay attention at home- and I didn't for a long stretch, deciding to do something else while it was on.Something more fun.