The Storybook Review Reviews

“Mother Goose Stories,” or “The Storybook Review” depending on where you’ve learned the title, is a ten minute short film encompassing four nursery rhymes, complete and unabridged. It’s also just absolutely bizarre to watch given that stop-motion animation was nowhere near as fluid as it is now, so the characters frequently have faces that melt from one expression into another. It’s not just this strange misty-faced emotive performing of the dolls that’s unnerving, but the maniacal glee that Ray Harryhausen exudes in animating the more violent and hallucinatory parts of these rhymes.

It starts off innocently enough with a storybook opening to reveal a kindly Mother Goose, and a pet goose that follow her around. This Mother Goose looks less like an Old Timey librarian and more like what happened when your kindergarten teacher dressed up as a witch for Halloween, but a kindly one. She shows us the four stories she’ll be telling us (“Little Miss Muffett,” “Old Mother Hubbard,” “The Queen of Tarts,” and “Humpty Dumpty”), then pulls out a film projector and off we go.

“Humpty Dumpty” is the obvious highlight here, a completely innocuous series of images that add up to something approaching a feverish nightmare. A gigantic egg vibrates of its own volition, magically grows eyes and a mouth, and then sprouts an entire body (and clothing) to go along with it. He climbs up the wall, but his movements are like watching a drunk trying to walk a tightrope and his success is short lived. Then we witness his fall, from a camera planted on the floor so he falls slightly beneath the frame and the shell fragments fly across the bottom of the frame. The sight of the knight sitting among Humpty Dumpty’s viscera calls to mind trying to glue back together a piece of china that’s shattered.

The others vary in quality, with “Little Miss Muffett” being acceptable, “Old Mother Hubbard” being weirder than you remember the rhyme being and “The Queen of Tarts a few minutes of filler with an overly sexy queen and her pervy-looking king. It all ends with Mother Goose making the projector disappear, climbing back into the storybook, and closing the cover. Sweet dreams kids.