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Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland Movie Review

Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland is a 1989 animated family fantasy film directed by Masami Hata and written by Chris Columbus. It’s an underrated gem of a flick.

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“Your Majesty, I broke my promise.

I opened the forbidden door. I’m very sorry“

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The king of Slumberland makes Nemo his heir and entrusts him with a key to the door of terrifying powers. However, Nemo yields to manipulation and causes a mess that only he can resolve. This movie is one of my childhood favorites. I remember watching it many times and being scared of its second half as the film employs that best mixture in children’s entertainment – light storytelling with some genuinely dark elements.

The film had a troubled production. At one point, Hayao Miyazaki himself was involved. Eventually, a Japanese team animated it while the rest of the production was all American. You can definitely see that Japanese influence in the final product, especially in character designs, but when it comes to storytelling, it’s heavily reminiscent of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Peter Pan’. It was based on an iconic comic-book series created by Winsor McCay in the early 20^th century, and that old-fashioned charm from that period is prevalent here.

Undeniably very kid-friendly and goofy in its first half, but highly memorable and effective in its creepier second half, the film ultimately worked in both of those areas without ever being tonally imbalanced. That’s because the storytelling was excellent and the movie flows so well. It’s instantly charming from the start while becoming genuinely interesting in its mythology and intriguingly surreal in its employment of dreamlike structure later down the line.

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With that being said, the character development left a lot to be desired. The characters range from quite memorable to downright forgettable, but most are underwritten due to the movie’s insistence on having so many characters instead of focusing on fewer people and developing them more. Nemo himself is solid, though the supporting players often steal the show from him. But his arc is great for kids as it’s infused with a couple of important messages.

Flip is fantastic. Some have accused this creation to be racially motivated, resembling blackface, but I personally found him to be so memorable and so much fun that I did not care about those supposedly racist connotations. Flip is the agent of chaos here and he works so well as this clearly bad influence on Nemo, but an amusing friend regardless. His cigar-smoking was quite funny and his clothing was striking.

The Nightmare King is so amazing and cool that he reminded me pleasantly of The Horned King from ‘The Black Cauldron’. He is so menacing and perfectly voiced and designed that he really needed more time to shine as he got ridiculously little screen time. Icarus the flying squirrel was just adorable and a perfect animal sidekick for our protagonist. King Morpheus is goofy and fun while Princess Camille and Professor Genius are solid and endearing, but they also needed more screen time to shine.

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Whom I did not care for are those goblins. First off, there were way too many of them. Secondly, they arrived too late in the game to make a significant impact. The film’s inclusion of these additional sidekicks in a story that already had a couple of them was downright ludicrous and just a bad choice all around.

Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland is gorgeously animated. The Japanese influence in character designs, especially in Nightmare Land was evident. The colorful aesthetic of Slumberland was beautiful to behold while the movie’s best animated moments came during those surreal dream sequences and the bed/train riding sequences. The movements are so polished here and the details are surprisingly meticulous.

This is also a musical and in that area it’s a mixed bag. The movie is Disneyesque in characters and animation, but especially in its soundtrack that is a mixture of fun numbers and more operatic ones. Little Nemo is sweet and charming while Slumberland was the best and most enjoyable song of the bunch, but Etiquette and The Boomps Song both served as filler unfortunately.

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The overall score is stupendous as is the sound design. Some of the humor and dialogue are also great, but the movie at times settled into overly goofy territory, especially in its overwhelming focus on sidekicks, but I still loved watching this movie all these years later and I still find it to be incredibly imaginative and fun.