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Revived for its 40th anniversary, this is one of the most beguilingly eccentric and charming family movies imaginable. Jim Henson’s fantasy adventure mixes human actors, unmistakably Hensonian puppet creatures, and one authentic legend who goes beyond either category: David Bowie as Jareth, the spikily coiffured king of the goblins, towering over the diminutive figures the way he might if he’d been a guest on The Muppet Show. He carries off this wacky role with absolute commitment and good humour.
Labyrinth also features cherubic teen Jennifer Connelly as Sarah, a girl who is infuriated at being made to look after her baby half-brother Toby when her dad and stepmom are out for the evening. In a fit of loneliness and pique, influenced by a fairytale she has been reading called The Labyrinth, and perhaps unable to process the psychological reasons for her resentment of baby Toby, Sarah makes a spiteful wish that goblins take the infant away. This they do, and Sarah is faced with a daunting quest: she must somehow get through the labyrinth that surrounds Jareth’s castle and wrest the poor child from his awful grasp.
Labyrinth is obviously influenced by Lewis Carroll: Sarah has very Alice-type encounters with conceited and talkative creatures who have a tendency to make quibbling, riddling demands on her – and she falls weightlessly down holes. The film also takes a good deal from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, a book that is glimpsed in an early scene, and Sendak is explicitly thanked in the credits. There is a rather amazing hallucinatory sequence at the end in which Sarah confronts Jareth directly, which is taken from MC Escher. But watched again, we can perhaps see how Labyrinth might have been a subconscious influence on someone else, an author who had vaguely registered some details: along with the goblins there are owls flying mysteriously about, and a certain goblin called Hoggle is wrongly addressed as “Hogwart”.
This is a very analogue-era movie with analogue-type storytelling and dialogue: it is not driven with the same hyperactive focused energy that modern Pixar/Disney films have. The action often ambles and dawdles and the dialogue, written by Terry Jones, has a casually constructed but often very funny humour. A year later, Rob Reiner would give us The Princess Bride, which is comparable in some ways. But this is utterly unique whimsy and fun.
