Psycho's Movie Reviews #276: JUMANJI (1995)

Jumanji is a 1995 American fantasy adventure film directed by Joe Johnston from a screenplay by Jonathan Hensleigh, Greg Taylor, and Jim Strain. Loosely based on Chris Van Allsburg's picture book of the same name, the film is the first instalment of the Jumanji franchise. It stars Robin Williams, Bonnie Hunt, Kirsten Dunst, Bradley Pierce, Jonathan Hyde, and David Alan Grier.

The story centres on a supernatural board game that releases jungle-based hazards upon its players with every turn they take. As a boy in 1969, Alan Parrish became trapped inside the game itself while playing with his friend, Sarah Whittle. Twenty-six years later, siblings Judy and Peter Shepherd find the game, begin playing and then unwittingly release the now-adult Alan. After tracking down Sarah, the quartet resolves to finish the game in order to reverse all of the destruction it has caused.

The film was released on December 15, 1995, to mixed reviews, but was a box office success, grossing $263 million worldwide on a budget of approximately $65 million. It was the 10th highest-grossing film of 1995.

The film spawned an animated television series, which aired from 1996 to 1999, and was followed by a related film, Zathura: A Space Adventure (2005), and two indirect sequels, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) and Jumanji: The Next Level (2019), with Columbia Pictures taking over distribution for all subsequent films.

Plot

In 1969, Alan Parrish lives with his parents Sam and Carol in Brantford, New Hampshire. One day, he escapes a group of bullies and retreats to Sam's shoe factory. He meets his friend, Carl Bentley, who reveals a new shoe prototype he made by himself. Alan misplaces the shoe and damages a conveyor belt, but Carl takes responsibility and loses his job. After the bullies attack Alan and steal his bicycle, Alan follows the sound of tribal drumbeats to a construction site. He finds a board game called Jumanji, which was buried 100 years earlier, and brings it home.

That night, after arguing with Sam about attending a boarding school, Alan plans to run away, but his friend, Sarah Whittle, returns his bicycle. Alan shows her Jumanji and invites her to play. With each roll of the dice, the game piece moves by itself and a cryptic message describing the roll's outcome appears in the crystal ball at the centre of the board. After Alan inadvertently rolls a five, a message tells him to wait in a jungle until someone rolls a five or eight, and he is sucked into the game. Afterwards, a swarm of bats appears and chases Sarah out of the mansion.

Twenty-six years later, Judy and Peter Shepherd move into the now-vacant Parrish mansion with their aunt, Nora, after their parents died in an accident on a ski trip in Canada the winter before. Discovering Jumanji in the attic, Judy and Peter begin playing it. Their rolls summon giant mosquitoes and swarms of monkeys. The game rules state everything will be restored when the game ends, so they continue playing. Peter next rolls a five which releases a lion and a grown up Alan. As Alan makes his way out, he meets Carl, who is now working as a police officer. Alan, Judy, and Peter go to the now-abandoned shoe factory and learn that Sam abandoned the business to search for his son after his disappearance, until his death in 1991.

Realizing they need Sarah to finish the game, the three locate Sarah, now haunted by both Jumanji and Alan's disappearance, and persuade her to join them. Sarah's first move releases fast-growing carnivorous vines, and Alan's next move releases a big-game hunter named Van Pelt, whom Alan first met in the game’s inner world. The next roll summons a stampede of various animals, and a pelican steals the game. Peter retrieves it, but Alan is arrested by Carl. Back in town, the stampede wreaks havoc, and Van Pelt steals the game.

Peter, Sarah, and Judy track Van Pelt to a department store, where they set booby traps to subdue him and retrieve the game, while Alan, after revealing his identity to Carl, is set free. When the four return to the mansion, it is now completely overrun by jungle wildlife. They release one calamity after another until Van Pelt arrives. When Alan drops the dice, he wins the game which causes everything that happened as a result of the game to be reversed.

Alan and Sarah return to 1969, just in time for Alan to reconcile with Sam, who tells him that he does not have to attend boarding school. Alan also admits his responsibility for damaging the conveyor belt. After realizing that they have memories of the game, Alan and Sarah throw Jumanji into a river, then share a kiss.

In an alternate version of the present, Alan and Sarah are married and expecting their first child. Alan's parents are still alive and Alan is now successfully running the family business. Alan and Sarah meet Judy, Peter, and their parents Jim and Martha for the first time during a Christmas party. Alan offers Jim a job and convinces them to cancel their upcoming ski trip, averting their deaths.

Meanwhile, two young girls hear drumbeats while walking on a beach. Jumanji is seen lying partially buried in the sand.

Production

While Peter Guber was visiting Boston, he invited author Chris Van Allsburg, who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, to option his book. Van Allsburg wrote one of the screenplay's drafts, which he described as "sort of trying to imbue the story with a quality of mystery and surrealism". Van Allsburg added that the studio nearly abandoned the project if not for his film treatment, which earned him a story credit given it added story material that was not from the book.

TriStar Pictures agreed to finance the film on the condition that Robin Williams plays the starring role. However, Williams turned down the role based on the first script he was given. Only after director Joe Johnston and screenwriters Jonathan Hensleigh, Greg Taylor and Jim Strain undertook extensive rewrites did Williams accept. Johnston had reservations over casting Williams because of the actor's reputation for improvisation, fearing that he wouldn't adhere to the script. However, Williams understood that it was "a tightly structured story" and filmed the scenes as outlined in the script, often filming duplicate scenes afterwards where he was allowed to improvise with Bonnie Hunt.

Tom Hanks was the first choice to play Alan Parrish. Other stars were considered, including: Dan Aykroyd, Bruce Willis, Michael Keaton, Kevin Kline, Chevy Chase, Sean Penn, Kevin Costner, Richard Dreyfuss, Michael Douglas, Rupert Everett, Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Bill Paxton, Bryan Cranston, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Alec Baldwin. Willis was unavailable because he was working on Die Hard with a Vengeance.

Kirstie Alley was considered for Sarah Whittle while Scarlett Johansson auditioned for Judy Shepherd.

Shooting took place in various New England locales, mainly Keene, New Hampshire, which represented the story's fictional town of Brantford, New Hampshire, and North Berwick, Maine, where the Olde Woolen Mill stood in for the Parrish Shoe Factory. Additional filming took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, where a mock-up of the Parrish house was built.

Special effects were a combination of more traditional techniques like puppetry and animatronics (provided by Amalgamated Dynamics) with state-of-the-art digital effects overseen by Industrial Light & Magic. ILM developed two new software programs specifically for Jumanji, one called iSculpt, which allowed the illustrators to create realistic facial expressions on the computer-generated animals in the film, and another that for the first time created realistic digital hair, used on the monkeys and lion. Actor Bradley Pierce (Peter) underwent three and a half hours of prosthetic makeup application daily for a period of two and a half months to film the scenes where he transformed into a monkey.

The film was dedicated to visual effects supervisor Stephen L. Price, who died before the film's release.

Release/Reception/Box Office

Jumanji was released in theatres on December 15, 1995.

Jumanji did well at the box office, opening at No. 1 and earning $100.5 million in the United States and Canada and an additional $162.3 million overseas, bringing the worldwide gross to $262.8 million.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 55% from 38 reviews, with an average rating of 5.78/10. The site's consensus reads: "A feast for the eyes with a somewhat shaky plot, Jumanji is a good adventure that still offers a decent amount of fun for the whole family". On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 39 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating "generally unfavourable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.

Roger Ebert rated the film one-and-a-half out of four stars, criticizing its reliance on special effects to convey its story which he felt was lacking. He questioned the decision to rate the film PG rather than PG-13 as he felt that young children would be traumatized by much of the film's imagery, which he said made the film "about as appropriate for smaller children as, say, Jaws". He specifically cited Peter's monkey transformation as making him "look like a Wolf Man with a hairy snout and wicked jaws" that were likely to scare children. Regarding the board game's unleashing one hazard after another at its main characters, Ebert concluded: "It's like those video games where you achieve one level after another by killing and not getting killed. The ultimate level for young viewers will be being able to sit all the way through the movie".

Van Allsburg approved of the film despite the changes from the book and it not being as "idiosyncratic and peculiar", declaring that "the film is faithful in reproducing the chaos level that comes with having a jungle animal in the house. It's a good movie".

Budget $65 million

Box office $262.8 million

My Review

The big-name star in this film is Robin Williams, although it also features a young Kirsten Dunst, later to become a big name herself. This isn't Williams' best role- I generally prefer him in his more serious films like "Dead Poet's Society" or "Good Morning, Vietnam"- but it's a lot better than many of his comedies, which can descend into either silliness or sentimentality.

This is the sort of family film that offers something to entertain the adults as well as the children, and has some underlying serious themes. The main theme is that of courage and of confronting one's fears; the horrors unleashed by the game can (if one is in a particularly serious, analytic frame of mind) be seen as symbolic of the problems that the characters need to overcome. Although (or perhaps because) he is from a wealthy, privileged family, the young Alan is a shy, lonely boy who finds it difficult to make friends and who is neglected by his cold, distant parents. Nevertheless, he does win his father's approval when he finds the courage to stand up to a gang of bullies who have been tormenting him. There is doubtless some Freudian significance in the fact that Alan's father and the murderous Van Pelt are played by the same actor {I never realised that until recent years}.

Children, of course, could not care less about Freudian symbolism and are generally allergic to underlying serious themes. When I was a child the one thing that would kill a book or a film stone dead for me was the suspicion that it was being used by the adult world to preach some morally improving message to me. (C.S. Lewis was a particular bête noire of mine after an intellectually precocious classmate, who even at the age of nine cherished the long-term ambition to become Archbishop of Canterbury, pointed out to me the Christian allegory behind the "Narnia" stories).

Fortunately, any moralising in "Jumanji" is fairly light, and I suspect that children will simply see it as an exciting adventure story, even if the final twist in the tale involves the intellectually difficult concept of "alternative timelines". The special effects used to create the scenes of the rampaging animals seem to have aroused some excitement when the film first came out, although thirteen years on they have a rather retro, nineties feel to them. (And from the point of view of today's techno-literate youngsters the 1990s probably seem only slightly less technologically backward than the 1890s).

While I try not to take IMDb ratings to heart, I do think the rating for this film is too low. The film is absolutely fantastic in all departments. I will admit, there are some bits that are quite scary due to some scenes that are amazingly dark. The film does start off slowly, but when the film fast forwards to twenty six years later, the film turns into fast-paced family entertainment. Other than one or two scary scenes and the slow beginning, I could find very little wrong with Jumanji. The story is great, very intriguing and filled with humour, scares and poignancy. The cinematography and scenery are constantly breath-taking, and the special effects are extraordinary. The film is aided by a hilarious and poignant script, spirited direction, atmospheric music and the fact that it goes at a very fast pace. Even the acting was great, with Robin Williams in one of his best performances as Alan Parrish. While he is subtle in places, the director allows him to be funny, which is what he does best. Bonnie Hunt is good too and she and Williams have great chemistry, and Bradley Pierce and Kirsten Dunst are cute and lively. Plus the ending is nice and satisfying. All in all, I love this movie, even with its very minor problems, it is non-stop fast paced family entertainment. 9.5/10