Splendiferous Studio Collapse: TWICE UPON A TIME (1983)

There have been many flops over the years, some more deserving than others, and in the grand scheme of things these films are mere blips on the historical radar.  Some tremendous failures, such as Heaven’s Gate, Battlefield Earth, and Inchon, will be remembered long after their initial releases simply for their sheer…failurocity.  However, a scant few movies were so unsuccessful, and released at just the right time, that they caused an entire studio to collapse.  Such was the case with Titan A.E. and Fox Animation Studios, Battlefield Earth with Franchise Pictures, and Cutthroat Island with Carolco Pictures.  Some of these studios released a number of great films in their time, such as Carolco Pictures and Terminator 2.

One of the quickest rises to, and falls from, grace in film history was experienced by The Ladd Company, the studio behind Blade Runner.  In 1983, Ladd faced a tough decision: how do we release our two current, big-gamble films, The Right Stuff and Twice upon a Time?  The decision came down to which of these films to give a large release and which to give a small release.  The large release eventually went to The Right Stuff, a three-hour epic chronicling the early years of the American space program, obvious Oscar bait.  Much more so than Twice upon a Time, a quirky, stop-motion animated kid’s movie with a troubled production history.  Whether a different release plan would have worked better is open to speculation, but the one chosen by Ladd was its death sentence, and the company folded soon after.

The Right Stuff became a classic, and it was honored at that year’s Oscars.  However, barely anyone remembers Twice upon a Time, and that movie is more often blamed for Ladd’s collapse.  We’re here to honor it today.  Despite its obscure theatrical release and an unsuccessful video release by Warner Bros., the film maintains a small but rabid cult following, and stands as one of the most hilarious, innovative, and endearing family films of the past 30 years, and an important entry in the stop-motion film canon.

Twice upon a Time takes place in a fictionalized, Earth-like cosmology, where there are two worlds: Din and the joined worlds of Frivoli and the Murkworks.  Din is home of the Rushers (humans), and is comprised of one city of 4,000,000,000 people according to a cute population sign gag (all the Din sequences are in black-and-white live-action, one of the more interesting technical tricks of the film).  In Din, dreams aren’t created in people’s heads; instead, they are delivered to them by beings from Frivoli and the Murkworks.  Frivoli delivers sweet dreams via a magic powder, doused on the sleepers’ heads by hopping figs (named the Figmen of Imagination) under the control of the codger Greensleeves (according to him, the Figmen “tap-dance not, neither do they fart.”).  Nightmares arrive in the form of bombs, carried by vultures (called Rudy & the Minions, in the style of a 50’s doo-wop group).  This balance is ruptured one night by the dorky, blob-like ruler of the Murkworks, Synonamess Botch, when he kidnaps Greensleeves and the Figmen.  Just before Greensleeves is captured, he sends an S.O.S. to Frivoli in hopes of getting help.

We then cut to Frivoli (“Home of the Original Sweet Dream”), a whimsical nightmare that takes design cues from old cookbooks, aprons, and ice-cream parlors, while populated with smiling, dancing flowers, and tie-dyed cows.  Its ruler is the incompetent Chef of State, who cannot read and thus can’t understand Greensleeve’s S.O.S., promptly throwing it into a garbage chute.  We meet “Aspiring Actress” Flora Fauna, Greensleeve’s niece and master of poor fashion design.  We also meet Ralph the All-Purpose Animal (played by Lorenzo Music, the voice of Garfield), who can change into any animal with varying degrees of success, and Mum, a slapsticky loafer who speaks in sound effects.  Through a series of events too long to explain here, Ralph and Mum accidentally take Flora out with the garbage, and she finds Greensleeves’s S.O.S. in the bin with her.  Smitten by her at first sight, Ralph and Mum decide to help her.

This catches the attention of Synonamess via Ibor, a video gorilla (which is just as awesome as it sounds).  Determined to rope the three of them into his plot, he goes to them accompanied by his pet Ratatooie (a rat/armadillo hybrid that eats garbage) and Scuzzbopper, his embittered head nightmare writer (who has been secretly working on the “Great Amurkian Novel” with a typewriter so large it works across five sheets of paper simultaneously, and requires massive hammers to work the keys).  Synonamess invites the trio to his castle in the Murkworks, claiming that he wants to help them find Greensleeves.

The Murkworks is a looming fortress teetering on flimsy metalworks in the sky, with towers of garbage on the horizon. (I especially like the entrance sign, a giant metal skull with a neon arrow reading “Murkworks” in its teeth.)  Though styled after foreboding villain castles of the past, Botch’s palace is littered with dirty dishes, tacky rugs, and a series of increasingly distressing collections such as salami and stretched cats.  He then shows them a series of slides depicting Din, and presents his deal: he’ll help them find Greensleeves if they’ll go to a second-hand store in Din that contains the Cosmic Clock, which contains a magic spring.  If they get him the spring, he’ll get them Greensleeves.  What they don’t know is that by taking the spring from the clock, they’ll stop time in Din, thus allowing Synonamess to fill the world with his nightmare bombs and explode them all at once, giving Din endless nightmares.

To give you a taste of the kind of verbal humor in this movie, here’s a conversation in this scene on the concept of time, as there is no such thing in either Frivoli or the Murkworks:

Ralph (talking about the Rushers): Are they friendly?

Synonamess: Oh, they’d love to be friendly, except they don’t have the time.

R: The what don’t they –

S: The time – they have watches, or clocks on their wrists, which tell them the time they don’t have because they are always rushing, and they think they don’t have –

R: I’m getting…what is time?

S: Two-o’-clock, four-o’-clock, five-o’-clock…

R: If they – there’s something that tells them they don’t have something…

S: Yes.

R: …and it’s a clock…

S: It’s a clock.

R: …and they watch it…

S: They watch it.

R: …and it tells them…

S: The time.

R: …that they don’t have.

S: It’s simple, isn’t it, you get it?

R: Oh, uh…

Ralph and Mum agree to get the spring, and as they are leaving, Flora has a jealous freak-out because they are being hired and she isn’t.  After she screams that she can act, Synonamess hires her into his nightmare factory, where people’s screams are recorded in classic nightmare scenes and condensed into the “pure essence of terror” which makes up the nightmare bombs (I think the Pixar team behind Monsters, Inc. has some credit-giving to do).

Ralph and Mum make it to the Cosmic Clock (epic and beautifully designed), and promptly break it in a hilarious sequence where live-action footage is shown reversed, sped up, and eventually creaking to a halt.  The spring pops loose and escapes into the now-frozen city streets, where Rudy and the Minions nab it.  After this awful mistake, Ralph and Mum are approached by the Fairy Godmother, fashioned after a long lineage of cynical Jewish New York matrons, who gives them magic dimes to a phone booth that allows them to call her if they get in trouble (I’m not sure why they can’t just call for her with their voices, and even she admits she doesn’t understand the process).  She leaves them in Din and goes to look for a hero to send them, and the Minions begin planting the bombs on the Rushers.  She appears again throughout the film, mostly to bicker and make things explode.

She ends up hiring “Perspiring Hero” Rod Rescueman, who’s still on his Learner’s Permit and sports a hybrid of Superman’s costume and a sports uniform, topped with a Viking helmet.  The interview takes place in the Fairy Godmother’s office, a one-room trailer suspended from an enormous balloon in the sky.  I won’t spoil it for you, as it is one of the funniest comic scenes I’ve ever seen in a film, although I will reveal that when she asks for Rod Rescueman’s resume he gives her a blank piece of paper, “but it is notarized, and legal size.”  He features in a subplot in which he rescues, and then attempts to romance, Flora, with hilarious results.  I especially like his house, a giant floating football in which every piece of furniture doubles as exercise equipment.

The plot unfolds from that point in the grand tradition of fantasy adventures, but with the film’s own quirky and breathless sense of humor.  We all know that a story like this involves the heroes finding their bravery and stopping the villain’s evil plot from being realized, and so we look for the details and embellishments to keep the movie alive.  Fortunately, Twice upon a Time is a fast-paced, hysterically funny, and very imaginative ride, helped along the way not only by the countless gags but also by a cast of memorable and fun characters, as well as impressive dramatic sequences and truly memorable images.

Any discussion of an animated film has to touch upon its technical merits, and Twice upon a Time is about as impressive as an animated feature gets.  Its most remarkable aspect is the technique itself, named Lumage by its creator John Korty.  Korty had used this technique in the 1970s for some segments on “Sesame Street,” but this was the first, and last, time it was used in a feature film.  The animation was realized by cutting the figures out of translucent, colored plastic, which was then moved around a light table.  While this process is both unique and quite beautiful, it is extremely painstaking work; while normal drawn animation only needs people to draw the figures once and put them over a background, Lumage adds the step of cutting each frame of each figure’s animation out of plastic after tracing it, doubling the time it takes to finish a scene.  It’s a miracle the film made it to feature length, and this may have been in part to financial help from executive producer George Lucas.

In addition to Lumage, more of the film is realized through the aforementioned live-action Din sequences, as well as manipulating still photographs and, in the case of Ibor’s TV-set head, stock-footage with clever pop-culture references like Fonzie and Darth Vader.  These varied techniques work together surprisingly smoothly, creating a visual world unlike any other seen in a kid’s film.  Werner Herzog once said that “Our civilization is starving for new images,” and this is one of the only family films I know that actually delivers.

One of the most interesting design choices of the film was the frozen Din, where instead of normal freeze-frames we get streets cobbled out of photographs, creating weirdly disjointed and often funny collages of people and objects, resulting in strange visual angles.  Along with these settings, the film has a number of visually breathtaking sequences, such as a section of the climactic battle that is lit only by cannon-fire (as Ralph states, “Dark is not one of my favorite colors.”).  The scene also involves Mum falling into a series of traps intended for various animals that Ralph transforms into, and so he appears in the screen of one of Synonamess’s security cameras caught in a bear trap and giant flypaper strips.  Probably the most impressive sequence happens in the frozen Din, when Ralph and Mum accidentally set off one of the nightmare bombs, flooding the floor of an office building.  The nightmare is quite unsettling, set against dark backgrounds and featuring photographic negatives of office equipment that come to life and try to kill the two.

As for humor, the movie throws everything but the kitchen sink at the audience.  I’ve barely scratched the surface of all the really hilarious gags in the film, including verbal jokes, background details, imaginative physical comedy, and spoof humor.  Much of the verbal humor was produced by improv comics and the pacing is as fast as any Marx Brothers word jousting.  This kind of humor is part of what sets the film apart from other family films of its day, along with its unique look and feel.

In fact, this movie could have been a big success if not for its bungled release.  The late 70’s and early 80’s were the peak of Disney’s black years, when the studio was producing only middling successes, as well as a couple of bombs such as the misunderstood Black Cauldron.  This family film vacuum allowed some other studios to put out great alternatives to Disney’s stock fairy-tale movies, with directors like Don Bluth (The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail) and Ralph Bakshi (The Lord of the Rings) rising to prominence, as well as producing Richard Williams’s ambitious but deeply flawed Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure.  Twice upon a Time, if given the promotion and full screening it deserved, would have fit nicely into this exciting period, and subsequently would have been remembered as a classic and loved by families all over.

The film’s troubled production contributed to its poor release timing and subsequent obscurity.  To meet deadlines, much of the animation was completed in John Korty’s bathroom.  Korty and co-creator Bill Couturié frequently quarreled over production details, and several different versions of the film arose from these battles (also partially because of alternate jokes supplied by the largely improvised script).  The theatrical version differed from the later video release, which also differed from a version broadcast on HBO in the early 80’s.  One reason for the multiple versions was that the film features jokes that were fairly risqué for a kid’s film at the time, such as a list of “Happy Dream Makers on Duty” in Frivoli that features Sleezy and Kinky, and a moment in the “breaking Cosmic Clock” sequence in which, for about a third of a second, an inflatable sex doll is accidentally blown up in an elevator carrying nuns (though both of these moments made it into the video cut).  More damning than that, however, is an unusually high amount of adult language in the theatrical cut (largely from Synonamess), which Korty disapproved of and worked hard to erase from the TV and video versions.  Due to this and other problems, the video cut features some strange and obvious edits, including a song sequence that is cut short in the middle of a verse, and a point at the end of a scene where Scuzzbopper calls Synonamess “asshole.”

Despite these production difficulties, the end product is one of the most engaging and creative animated films of all time, a virtuoso comedic romp with fun characters, great visuals, and some of the funniest and fastest humor you’ll ever see in a kid’s film.  It appeals to both children and adults, making it a true family film and a personal favorite of mine.  In fact, this movie is groundbreaking in another way, in how it paved the way for the Shrek films’ fairy-tale spoofing and adult humor, as well as a slew of similar movies made it their wake.  I would say that few people remember it that way, but it’s more accurate to say that few people remember it at all.  Warner Bros. hasn’t announced any plans to release the movie on DVD, and Korty himself seems to have moved on in life, mostly making TV movies and most recently a documentary on the restoration of a grand piano.  The film maintains a ravenous cult following, however, and so we may be able to sustain it through bootlegging and movie parties.  Because God knows, Twice upon a Time deserves all the love and praise it can get.

~PNK

For more information on Twice upon a Time, the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_Upon_a_Time_(1983_film) is very helpful and has links to two great articles: “Twice upon a Time: The Movie that Time Forgot,” a two-part interview with writer and animation historian Taylor Jessen and art director Harley Jessup, and “Damsel in Distress Currently on Fire (20 Years Later, Twice upon a Time still burns).”  The IMDB article (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086489/) is also helpful and is a great display of the love of the film’s fans.

Also, I recently discovered a “restoration cut” on YouTube posted by marvin8723, apparently drawn from several different sources and better reflecting the film’s theatrical release.  Aside from ironing out editing wrinkles it changes Botch's dialogue to be more "adult."  The first installment can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b-e4Bz4rXM