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Here’s an underrated and barely known quantity in Chuck Jones’ career. His lone feature-length film, The Phantom Tollbooth is his second dip into Norton Juster’s work, but with less explosive results than the adventurous “The Dot and the Line.” It’s still a very enjoyable and enjoyably strange effort, but there’s the persistent feeling that something is missing here.
Normally any film withheld for release for a prolonged period is a red flag that it’s a turkey. Like, an immediate one with no possible other interpretation than the studio saw the finished product and knew it had something questionable on their hands. The Phantom Tollbooth is an exception that proves the rule for a majority of its running time, even if some spots are sluggish and a certain amount of verbal wordplay and wit is buried beneath a series of visual jokes.
Perhaps another problem with The Phantom Tollbooth is a two-headed flaw, one that lingers over many adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It is both an insistence on teaching moral lessons in a loop story of word play and gleeful mischief, and a flabbiness that settles in when you realize the story is merely a series of odd sketches strung together. In fact, The Phantom Tollbooth frequently plays like an agnate variation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Even if The Phantom Tollbooth does give off a vibe of déjà vu, at least it allows for Jones to create a series of wonderfully strange and experimental images. The fact that it was originally completed in 1968 hints at what the images will look like. Yes, much like Yellow Submarine and the general weirdness of Saturday morning cartoons of the era, a certain hallucinatory quality pervades the images. By the time it was released in 1970, a mere two years but an eternity in pop culture, this played like a looser, smarter, kookier rebuttal to Disney’s dominating animated features of the era. (Although, much like Disney films of this era, things would only have improved with the removal of the unnecessary songs that slam things to a halt.)
Even better is the solid cast that Jones has assembled for this. Mainstays like Mel Blanc, Les Tremayne, and June Foray are present and accounted for. The appearances of Hans Conried (best known for voicing Captain Hook in Peter Pan), Candy Candido, and Daws Butler (the voice of Hanna-Barbera cartoons) do solid work in their typically quirky and nutty character parts. None of The Phantom Tollbooth would work effectively without Butch Patrick (Eddie Munster himself) giving credible life to a bored little boy looking for adventure.
If the final product is a bit messy, at least The Phantom Tollbooth is a film overflowing with ideas and imagination. It is well worth seeking out as it combines a zesty, poppy vibe with more sophisticated humor into something delightfully odd. It is a solid piece of work, but a few nips and tucks here and there had the potential to push into the realm of unheralded, underappreciated near classic.
