THE PAGEMASTER

THE PAGEMASTER (Directed by Joe Johnstone and Maurice Hunt. Starring Macaulay Culkin, Christopher Lloyd)

I have got two good things to say about The Pagemaster. The first is that the increasingly stomach-churning under-age ham Macaulay Culkin is only onscreen for a few minutes before he turns into a cartoon, and the other is that the film is short. In fact it is inexplicably 20 minutes shorter than the 83 minute advertised running time (I mean, its hard to believe the censors found anything offensive to cut out of something so innoccuously banal), but I’m not complaining. Culkin plays a nerdish kid who stumbles into a magic library and enters into a kind of cartoon bookworld, where he has adventures with literary characters like Long John Silver, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Captain Ahab and Moby Dick. The cartoon style is more Hannah Barbara than Disney, and despite having a horror section the impression is that the film-makers are afraid to put in anything that might scare a five year old. I guess, like Neverending Story, this is meant to encourage children to read, although if this kind of interactive fantasy is where they discover the joys of literature they are likely to start asking you how to play with their books, and where do the batteries go.