Movie Monday: The Pagemaster

Michael Blaker
Game Industry News is running the best blog posts from people writing about the game industry. Articles here may originally appear on Michael's blog, Windborne's Story Eatery.

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This week for Movie Monday I’m back with a movie that wasn’t so great. It’s The Pagemaster!

Plot: The plot is pretty bad. I’m not gonna lie, this is probably one of the least memorable movies I watched as a kid. The only reason I remembered it all was I saw a picture of it on my Twitter feed one day recently and thought it looked very familiar and asked the tweet’s author for the movie title. That and I love books, so the story had a bit of sentimental value if only for that one reason. Other than that, the story is pretty bad and full of missed opportunities to really use some excellent stories. Considering that it was the scriptwriter’s first time ever doing a children’s book and that he was known for his R-Rated Horror films before this should have been a big red flag.

Casting: The cast was full of big names, from Christopher Lloyd to Macaulay Culkin. Sadly the cast couldn’t save the movie from it’s poorly done plot. Honestly I’d love to see this remade bigger and better than it was before, but that’s unlikely given the nature of books and libraries these days.

Cinematography: This was another point against this movie, the animation that was used was very bad. It’s not quite at CD-I Zelda levels of bad, but it comes really close. The non-animated portions were pretty good, but again it wasn’t enough to save the movie.

Music: The music was mediocre, it fit but again it wasn’t enough to deal with the poor plot. Special shout outs to Patrick Stewart, Whoopi Goldberg and Frank Welker for voicing Action, Fantasy and Horror respectively though.

Overall: A very easily skippable movie, though it’s message is now rather obsolete these days I still had some fun with it back in the day for that message alone.

For those who like: A star-studded cast and that’s about it.

Not for those who don’t like: Medicority in almost every aspect of their films.

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