There are some omissions, again mostly in the name of speeding things along: Carlotta is almost entirely omitted (we never see her, just hear that she's indisposed and that Christine will be singing instead), the graveyard scene is removed (more about that later), and the incidental characters (Madame Giry, Jammes, La Sorelli, Meg, Mama Valerius, Philippe, etc.) are entirely absent as well.
Raoul and Christine (who have already re-met one another to speed things up) pay attention to social conventions of the time, for one thing - the scene wherein Christine's chaperone tells Raoul to bugger off made me giggle - and the opera house itself is mainly the same as the original novel describes it. Aside from a rather bewildering time change to 1890 (what's so wrong with 1881, people? Why the hate?), the plot and characters are virtually identical to those of the original novel. This little cartoon film lists Gaston Leroux as their main writer, and they're not lying.
This is probably more out of a need for expediency - the film isn't even an hour long - than out of a desire to give Erik's character any further nobility, but it's effective enough anyway. This version not only allows him his final act of selflessness, but actually intensifies it where Leroux's Phantom forces Christine to remain with him and only lets her go after Raoul has left and he realizes that she would have kept her word, this version of Erik lets her leave with Raoul as soon as he sees how unhappy she is. When you're making your villain as villainous as possible in order to terrify the audience, you tend to make him somewhat irredeemable (the 1925 Julian/Chaney film, for example, or the 1943 Lubin/Rains version) and even the versions that have more sympathy for the Phantom's plight, like the 1962 Fisher/Lom or the 1983 Markowitz/Schell, generally portray him as too far gone in madness to be saved, meaning that all of those films fail to allow the Phantom his final redemption.
#CHRISTINE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA COSTUME DON JUAN MOVIE#
Since most movie versions choose the horror route, the Phantom generally dies at the end, usually so that Christine and Raoul can escape and go make pretty babies somewhere or something. What elevates this movie despite its obvious production problems is that it's the only original movie adaptation so far that actually retains Leroux's theme of redemption through love. (Sometimes, I love things specifically because they're not good.) But just because I love it doesn't mean it's good. This is very stylized, and while the moving characters are sort of despressingly marionette-like, the painted backgrounds are gorgeous and very effective at conveying a sense of faded grandeur in the opera house, and suggesting barely-concealed terror in the cellars beneath it. So we've established that the presentation is some kind of C grade at best they try, but the whole thing gives off that air of some dudes in a basement doing all the voices and art themselves and subsisting on pizza while they complete their labor of love.Īs I said, I happen to love older animation. Likewise, while some of the voice acting is fine (nothing to get too excited over, but fine), some of it is. The detractors do have a point, however - the animation is extremely simplistic, relying heavily on reused frames, painted backgrounds that do not move, and jerky movement that indicates a bare-bones number of cels used.
Back off my nineties video games and step off my crappy Rankin/Bass-style animation.Įmerald City Productions, Ltd., is basically defunct now (sadly, there appear to have been legal difficulties near the end of its life), but when they were functioning, they put out an impressive array of titles, most of them drawn from classic literature - Les Miserables, Oliver Twist, Around the World in 80 Days, etc. I prefered the puppets of the original Star Wars to the computer-generated critters of the later ones, for example. I'm inclined to cut Emerald City Productions some slack here my love of old, moldy things is well-documented, and I've never had much patience for the argument that things with less-than-stellar graphics or technology aren't enjoyable. Instead, they had seven animating guys and about that number more painting backgrounds.
On one side, you have people who love it unrelentingly because it is without a doubt the closest adaptation to Leroux's original novel that you will find in film to date and on the other side, you have people who don't want to believe that animation and voice acting this flawed were ever inflicted on the general public.įor 1987, it's nothing mind-blowing, but it's pretty standard for a small production studio (Disney this is not) they didn't have computer rendering or a team of fifty animators working on character designs.
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