Return to Oz

Disney’s sequel to The Wizard of Oz, Return to Oz flopped really badly on its initial release and was dropped down the memory hole. Everybody thought that this movie was dark, disturbing, and unsuitable to be the successor to the original, but these opinions show how much people have an irrational love for watching Judy Garland’s song-and-dance show. The Wizard of Oz is a great example of how movies are a medium that greatly prefers style to substance, so much so that many of them are loved because they are all style and no substance.

Return to Oz, however, achieves what its predecessor did not, which is to visually create the tone of Frank Baum’s original series of books. In Baum’s books, Oz is not the kind of place where people and creatures spontaneously burst out into songs of happiness. Oz has its dangerous places, even those where you can die — such as the Deadly Desert — and it has its occasional military coup. Since Baum was thinking in terms of the real world, and not 1930s musicals, his books explicitly comment on real-world issues, like monetary policy and child psychology.

The connection to some real issue or problem is what Return to Oz has going for it over the original. In this movie, Dorothy is taken to a shock therapist for her “bad dreams” about Oz, the imaginary fantasyland she claims she has visited. Her aunt and uncle, simple farmers that they are, fall prey to marketing by a professional scientist who thinks that electrocuting his patients will zap their brains back into normalcy. So Dorothy goes to see this quack doctor. She is set to become the victim of poor science and the social pressure to believe in it.

Of course, odd occurrences happen before Dorothy can receive her therapy, and she is whisked away to Oz, this time with a chicken named Belina instead of a dog named Toto. Dorothy’s trip to Oz is not any rosier than her trip to the shock therapy center, however. Oz is in ruins, the yellow brick road has crumbled, and The Emerald City has lost its luster. Why?  It has been taken over someone who looks awfully like the scientist who was going to give shock treatments to Dorothy.

Return to Oz, like many others in its genre, prefers the vision of fantasy world to the gloomy advancements of science. This, the desire to mentally escape an increasingly technological world, is a common theme in innumerable stories from the past two hundred years. The movie, however, leaves open the possibility that Oz and all the characters who can move between Oz and the real world are only constructs of Dorothy’s imagination. What remains tangible, in the end, is the rural farm in Kansas, where Dorothy can enjoy her imaginings and remain as far as possible from urbanites, scientists, and wrongful advertising.

Whether this movie is unsuitable for children of younger ages is up to the parents who read this review. We watched this at age 8, perhaps earlier, and survived to tell about it. Ever since, we have preferred our children’s movies to have some element of darkness and at least one instance of the memento mori, a reminder of sin and death, because that is an inescapable part of reality that we should not seek to escape from in our entertainment. Return to Oz does have a witch-queen who can remove her head, as well as evil clowns with wheels for feet and hands. It also has one uttered spell that succeeds, uttered by Dorothy.

Entertainment: 7

Intelligence: 4

Morality: 7