A little boy, living in a big house and being raised by his old aunts because his father is always traveling, would seem to want for nothing, but he is lonely, with only his toys for company, and he has to follow too many rules. He sees a little girl outside playing but can't join her because he has to stay within the gates of his property. On his tenth birthday, his father sends him a music box with a mechanical nightingale on it, but the boy falls ill and the doctor says he has no remedy for the sickness of too many rules. That night, he dreams of a child emperor in China who, like him, lives a life surrounded by artificial things and too many rules. His life is run by routine, literally by a large mechanical figure named Clang, the Ruler of Routine. He plays with glass swans on a mirror lake and a "philharmonic fish" statue that makes music. On his birthday, a sailor in a hot air balloon visits and gives him the gift of a picture book featuring images of China's natural world which the Emperor has never seen. He is particularly taken with a picture of a nightingale. He tries to find out how to see one. The court astronomer is too busy counting the stars, but a young kitchen maid knows where to find one, and leads some courtiers, who feel disoriented out in the natural world, to get one. The nightingale sings for the boy who is enchanted. He keeps the bird in an ornate cage and listens to his song, but soon even that pleasure becomes routine. On the Emperor's next birthday, the sailor sends him a golden mechanical nightingale which captives the Emperor and his court, and the real bird, now ignored, flies away. The golden bird's song is artificial, like everything else in the Emperor's world, and soon the boy grows sick and Death comes to call, preparing to take the boy. The real nightingale finally returns and sings a song at the Emperor's window, bringing him back to health and banishing Death. The child orders the shattering of routine in his kingdom. When the real-life boy awakens from his dream, he too shatters his guardians' rules, jumps over the tall fence around his property, and joins the little girl to play.
It's Thanksgiving week so it's time to review fantasy and adventure movies of the kind that my local TV stations used to play during the Thanksgiving weekend when kids were home from school in front of the television. This is a Czechoslovakian stop-motion puppet animation film from director Jiri Trnka. Originally produced in 1949, this version, released in the U.S in 1951, features narration by Boris Karloff. Though based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen with a running time of just over an hour, it's probably not ideal viewing for children, now or back then. The animation is nicely done and the sets are gorgeous, and Karloff's narration, as with his later How the Grinch Stole Christmas, is very effective. But the pace of the film is incredibly slow and I imagine children checking out before the half-hour mark. Near the end of the film, there is a ten-minute passage with no narration that, though both lovely and creepy (featuring Death stalking the Emperor), put me to sleep. The full musical score by Vaclav Trojan is, like the narration, very effective, and a suite of his music from the film has been performed and recorded. The frame story of the lonely boy is in live action, with the animated dream world consisting mostly of things from the boy's room. The themes of nature versus artifice, rules versus freedom, companionship versus friendship, are clear, perhaps too much so. The colorful film has been restored for DVD, but the YouTube version of this print is way too murky and dark to really be enjoyed, with much loss of image detail. I even suspect that the YouTube print doesn't get all the colors right. But unless I can find the DVD, this viewing will have to suffice. [YouTube]
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