The Phantom Tollbooth

“This isn’t animation! This isn’t animation! This isn’t animation!”

The younger screamed out his displeasure with the opening scenes of The Phantom Tollbooth (1970). It’s a scene of Milo, played by Butch Patrick, post-Munsters but still a kid, fancifully whiling his time away under some puffy clouds, a cheese-ridden theme song playing along that describes his fancy-free mindset.

What’s to become of Milo? He might rise up if he only tries, see how life could be!

The younger could’ve objected to any number of qualities commonly found in kids’ movies from the sixties and seventies — the TV sitcom star, the low budget, the soundtrack that sounded like a very low-rent version of The Association’s “Windy.”

But it was the live-action setup that was really bugging the kid. He was promised an animated feature, and, damnit, if he were going to be forced to endure one of his dad’s old-man picks from the Stone Age that he said was at least going to be animated, then where the heck was the animation??

I’d never seen this movie, but I knew that it would be an easier sell for the older because he had read the book in fifth grade and was into it. Their class had made a unit of it and had done writing projects in the style of it, sort of fan-fiction versions, with alternate characters and such. The story is comprised of wordplay and puns, with places such as The Doldrums and the Point-of-View, characters such Tock the “watch” dog (as in tick-tock), and Rhyme and Reason, two princesses who are needed to resolve the conflict between words and numbers taking place in the cities of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis. The character he had created and integrated into the plot was called Quitty McQuitter.

Where did it start with me and cartoons? At the very beginning, is where, wired straight into my earliest memories, waking up early to catch Bugs, Popeye, Speed Racer, Felix the Cat, most of it much older than I even knew, or cared, on weekends, or even before school, solo with a bowl of cereal, cold and darkness outside.

Selling Tollbooth had worked like a charm with the older. The younger was a tougher customer.

“That is so old!!” he exclaimed as Milo talks on a phone that was a big box plugged into the wall.

Milo receives a mysterious package after school one day, after complaining to his friend on the phone about being bored. In a stop-action sequence, a tollbooth pops up and a letter invites Milo to drive through in a little car. When he does, he becomes animated! He backs up and goes through again a few times, as the director, Chuck Jones (his only feature!) has fun with split-screen technology and creates an effect of Milo being animated on one side of the tollbooth and live on the other.

When I was a kid, feature-length animation got really interesting, and dark. Watership Down (1978) freaked me out good, and Rikki Tikki Tavi (1975) and The Hobbit (1977) opened up whole worlds. It kept going. Rites of American high school brought the wonders of The Wall (1982), Heavy Metal (1981), and the transgressive pleasures of Ralph Bakshi. Deep dives into feature animation’s past revealed insanity such as Fantastic Planet (1973).

Milo and company come across a series of strange characters, each one receiving its own trippy sequence with song. In the one dealing with Chroma, who’s in charge of regulating time and orchestrating sunrises and sunsets, the animation turns at one point to a dripping-clocks motif.

“Salvador Dali!” The older exclaims, and I’m impressed with his knowledge.

When I ask how he learned about Dali, he says that his class did mini-unit on him.

“It gave me nightmares.”

This movie rips off several famous plots at once, errrr, I mean, has several clear, notable influences. It’s basically a mash-up of The Wizard of Oz, Lord of the Rings, and Alice in Wonderland. Done in the signature animation style of Looney Toons.

“What do you think Miyazaki would say about this movie?” I asked my partner, irritatingly continuing stupid themes from past movie nights.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Well, I don’t think he would have too high an opinion of it.”

“Not his style,” she said.

Caveat: I was sure Miyazaki is a warm and wonderful man, and he’s obviously a creative genius. It just cracked me up when people get angered by Disney. Not that they weren’t 100% correct, but there was something about getting mad about being beaten over the head with joy and happiness that really spoke to the misanthrope deep inside me. Yes, shove that magic kingdom up your magic ass!!

Despite what Miyazaki or any of us might have thought about this movie, and cartoons in general, it hit undeniably on certain kid level. The younger, settled down now after the live-action thing, cracked up when the Spelling Bee keeps stinging people in the butt.

Milo and co. encounter the Dodecahedron, a character with twelve faces that express twelve different emotions, who’s voiced in the film by Mel Blanc. My kids’ faces lit up.

“Sounds like Bugs Bunny!”

They’d only encountered Bugs tangentially, mainly through the Space Jam movies. But for me, the voice and the animation style took me back right away.

There was a warm, fuzzy place in the family den of my heart for Bugs Bunny, Looney Tunes, and The Bugs Bunny – Road Runner Show (“Overture/ hit the lights / this it it / hit the heights.” Jerry sings the whole theme song in an episode of Seinfeld). A handful episodes in particular transported me directly back — “One Froggy Day,” the Wagner opera one with “Kill the Wabbit,” Marvin the Martian v. Daffy Duck. Absolute gems, all of them, even with all the violence and problematic depictions.

For a moment I was there. Then the moment ended.

Milo and co. are tasked with a riddle involving the Fibonacci Sequence. There’s a Grotesque Exaggeration and an Overbearing Know-it-all. Milo fires the word “humility” at him.

The younger got nervous and hid his face when Milo begins causing mischief, messing with the sunrise to get Chroma to wake up. The younger was, as always, so tuned into on-screen characters’ emotions.

Sweet Rhyme and Pure Reason finally arrive and set the world straight so that Milo can make it back home. Turned out they had sent for him in particular to rescue them because they needed someone who was bored, but also very curious.

Rhyme and reason reign once more!

“It wasn’t that terrible for something that old” the older admitted.

A lot of those old cartoons reminded me of my father, for one reason or another, his love of opera, for instance. My limited knowledge of opera came straight from those cartoons, through him, as we watched them together and he told me the references. Or the way he himself loved “One Froggy Day.” (The pathos, he would note, of the poor, mustachioed fellow who discovers the signing frog who won’t sing for anyone but him. So there it was, my origin story for the word “pathos” and its meaning.)

Now there I was, showing my kids some Chuck Jones that I’d never seen, wondering what they will remember of it, what they’ll think of it down the line. Daddy liked old shit, ancient shit, liked it before he was even born, they might say. The older had just recently gained a sense of American decades, the ones before he was born, trying to situate me and my parents in there, figuring out what the word “Boomer” actually referred to. He won’t love old shit quite the way I did, that much was for certain, but it wouldn’t be nil, either. The 20th century would live on, through them, somehow, whether they liked it or not.

After the feature ended an ad came on for another film,1949’s A Challenge to Lassie, and the kids recoiled in horror.

“1949?? Hard no, dad!”

“Did they even have TV back then?”