Half-remembered stuff
Aug. 29th, 2004 06:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinNathan Shumate's review of the very strange Sixties Japanese cartoon Jack and the Witch reminded me of a half-remembered cartoon that I'd seen in my childhood and found kind of odd and disturbing at the time. In my extremely imperfect recollection there seemed to be a similarity of styles, though it obviously wasn't the same cartoon; I wondered if it was also a Sixties Japanese effort, maybe from the same guy.
Brief Googling reveals: Nope, the movie I remember was Der Zauberstein, a German movie from the mid-seventies released here as Once Upon A Time; I must have seen it in its first American theatrical release. And the style is actually not much like that of Jack and the Witch at all; it's much more conventional fairy-tale stuff, though I remember that things get pretty weird in Mrs. Holle's magical realm.
I think what reminded me of it was Shumate's description of a heavy scene in Jack and the Witch in which the little blue-skinned harpy-girl lies down to die in a freezing cave. Der Zauberstein's obligatory cute animal sidekick is a little blue dog, and there's a scene burned into my mind in which he more or less dies and is transmogrified into a blue flower, which then turns back into the doggy when our heroine kisses it, or something. In fact, that's pretty close to the only thing I remember about the movie, except that the glass-slipperish Macguffin was the garnet stone mentioned in the German title.
...And there's something about a magical choo-choo. I swear there is.
Brief Googling reveals: Nope, the movie I remember was Der Zauberstein, a German movie from the mid-seventies released here as Once Upon A Time; I must have seen it in its first American theatrical release. And the style is actually not much like that of Jack and the Witch at all; it's much more conventional fairy-tale stuff, though I remember that things get pretty weird in Mrs. Holle's magical realm.
I think what reminded me of it was Shumate's description of a heavy scene in Jack and the Witch in which the little blue-skinned harpy-girl lies down to die in a freezing cave. Der Zauberstein's obligatory cute animal sidekick is a little blue dog, and there's a scene burned into my mind in which he more or less dies and is transmogrified into a blue flower, which then turns back into the doggy when our heroine kisses it, or something. In fact, that's pretty close to the only thing I remember about the movie, except that the glass-slipperish Macguffin was the garnet stone mentioned in the German title.
...And there's something about a magical choo-choo. I swear there is.