PETER PAN: DVD

SYNOPSIS:
All children grow up - except one: Peter Pan (Jeremy Sumpter). When he whisks Wendy (Rachel Hurd-Wood) to Neverland with her brothers, they engage in a serious adventure - and adventures are what matter to the eternally young. But with adventure comes danger, and in Neverland, the biggest danger is the pirate Captain James Hook (Jason Isaac), Peter Pan's eternal enemy. While Peter Pan revels in the fantasy world that supports fairies like Tinkerbell (Ludivine Sagnier), Wendy is torn by her family's desire for her to grow up and deal with more than just adventure, none more so than her mother (Olivia Williams). And a mother is what every kid dearly wants . . .

Review by Andrew L. Urban:
Don't go taking your little kids and their friends to this Peter Pan expecting a tra-la-la trip through Neverland, with bland shows of happiness and joy and laughter abounding. Australia's P.J. Hogan, who never intended his debut feature, Muriel's Wedding to be a comedy, tinges this big budget fairy tale with his disappointed world view - and it gives the film more ballast than bulldust. Or even fairydust.

Lest we forget, many children's stories walk the dark edges of the human condition, from the wicked stepmother/witch who tries to poison Snow White and then dispatches the woodsman to kill her, to the nasty old witch who eats children in Hansel and Gretel. It has taken an Australian to jolt a Hollywood studio's children's fable about fantasy into reality.

Growing old, losing innocence, taking responsibility, loneliness, emotional barrenness . . . Peter Pan hides these issues as well as any fairytale, beneath its outer layer of storytelling. It even parades storytelling as the secret ingredient in eternal happiness - only to dispose of it as a device by the time we get to The End. For all this, I am grateful to P.J. It's not many Australians who can take comedy seriously, nor take fairytales seriously; and they don't really work unless you do.

As well, I am in awe of his masterful handling of a film whose special effects (the credits are crammed three deep and still run for about seven minutes) need to melt into the reality of performances and even stagecraft - when it comes to the nuts and bolts scenes in the Darling household. Adults may be saddened by the subtext, but kids - as evidenced by those at my media screening - love the film.

If you need further confirmation that this is a film with a deep and ironic resonance about the fable of staying young forever, stay for the end credits, where you'll see it is dedicated to Dodi Al Fayed, the son of executive producer Mohamed Al Fayed; Dodi was the man killed in the car crash with Princess Diana.

The extras on the DVD, however, are another kettle of flying fish. The five main chapters each contain sub-chapters, designed to either have the kids in wide-eyed awe or in stitches. Like Through the eyes of Capt Hook (within the Pirates' Ship chapter), in which Jason Isaacs sillies his way through a short behind the scenes montage.

The chapter Home Under the Ground includes a 10 minute piece hosted by Sarah Ferguson - plus some of her outtakes - about The Legacy of Pan.

But most kids will probably head (like me) straight for the Learning to Fly, a 5-minute feature showing how the cast learnt to master the wirework for the flying sequences. Or will they (like me) head straight for the feature about Tinkerbell - this is really good stuff, very funny and revealing. It tells, among other things, how PJ Hogan was the one who was determined to use Ludivine Sagnier, instead of some CGI work, and there are brief shots of him working with the remarkable French starlet. She's likened to a female Charlie Chaplin, and indeed, there is footage of PJ cracking up at some of her hilarious blue screen work. I cracked up too.

Published May 6, 2004