Babes in Toyland Reviews

BABES IN TOYLAND is a nicely made direct-to-video cartoon version of Victor Herbert's operetta that is fine entertainment for its intended audience and short and stylish enough that parents should also enjoy it. On a train to see their Uncle Barnaby (voice of Christopher Plummer) two days before Christmas, orphans Jack (voice of Joseph Ashton) and Jill (voice of Lacey Chaber) meet Tom Piper (voice of Raphael Sbarge), who's the head toymaker in Toyland and is returning from the North Pole with an order to build 1,000 wooden soldiers for Santa Claus. In Toyland, Jack and Jill meet Humpty Dumpty (voice of Charles Nelson Reilly), who takes them to Barnaby's house, but he's a mean old man who hates toys and throws Jack and Jill into a rat-infested attic. After unsuccessfully trying to buy the toy factory from its owner, Mary (voice of Catherine Cavadini), Barnaby hires two goons (voices of Bronson Pinchot and James Belushi) to sabotage it, but they're caught by Jack and Jill, who have run away from Barnaby's house. When Barnaby catches Jack and Jill, they're taken to Goblin Forest, which is filled with monstrous creatures. Tom and Mary rescue them, then return to Toyland to build the wooden soldiers. Barnaby pushes Humpty Dumpty off a bridge and smashes him, then leads the goblins from the forest into Toyland to destroy it, but Tom uses the wooden soldiers to fight back, defeating them. The goblins turn on Barnaby and chase him out of town, and Tom patches Humpty up. On Christmas Eve, Santa Claus arrives in Toyland and flies away with all of the toys that Tom and Mary have made. Within its modest budgetary and formulaic genre limits, BABES IN TOYLAND is surprisingly tolerable, favoring a warm, hand-drawn (if admittedly overly anthropomorphic) look. Mixing in numerous fairy tale characters, the film takes great liberties with the original story and is actually much closer in spirit to such classics as "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) than to either the Laurel and Hardy or Disney film versions. In place of the Grinch's dog, Uncle Barnaby has a hapless cat, and as voiced by Christopher Plummer, Barnaby even sounds a little bit like Boris Karloff, warbling an amusingly villainous, "You're a Mean One"-like song while plotting to destroy Toyland. The menacing trees in Goblin Forest are straight out of Oz and the goblins themselves are virtually identical to Oz's flying monkeys, while the finale where they burn down Toyland is quite frightening for such innocuous kiddie fare. Like most of today's feature cartoons, it suffers from the recent Disney-popularized practice of stopping the story every 10 minutes for sappy songs that invariably turn into overblown production numbers. But these are thankfully kept to a minimum, and the film breezes along at a nice clip, culminating in a fine rendition of the famous "March of the Wooden Soldiers" number.