The Wind In The Willows (1987)
Dir. Arthur Rankin Jr, Jules Bass
Written by Romeo Muller, based on the book by Kenneth Grahame
Starring (voices): Charles Nelson Reilly, Roddy McDowall, José Ferrer, Eddie Bracken
When I was growing up, Rankin/Bass productions were most known for their stop-motion Christmas specials, most notably RUDOLPH THE RED NOSED REINDEER in 1964. I can’t claim I really have my finger on the pulse of the youth today, but I’d guess that’s still what they’re most remembered for today, if they’re remembered at all. I never saw any of those, though, so to me, the name Rankin/Bass conjures a different sort of movie: their series of traditionally animated fantasy adaptations-- specifically, 1977's THE HOBBIT, its semi-sequel, 1980's THE RETURN OF THE KING* and 1982's THE LAST UNICORN, along with our subject today, 1987’s THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS (in researching this review, I discovered, to my profound astonishment, that there was another film in their series of which I was completely unaware: an adaptation of Gordon Dickson's A FLIGHT OF DRAGONS from 1982. Considering the impact these films had on me as a child, this is roughly equivalent to a 60-year-old discovering that the Beatles put out two albums in 1968, one of which they somehow never heard about).
While THE HOBBIT and THE LAST UNICORN seem to have increased in stature over the years (in part, no doubt, due to the contributions of TopCraft, the animation studio which would go on to birth Studio Ghibli), I'm sorry to say that Rankin/Bass's final animated project, 1987's adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's 1908 children's novel The Wind In The Willows, has remained comparatively rather obscure. I'm not sure why, exactly; true, it looks noticeably cheaper than their earlier films (more recycled animation, simpler character design), and yeah, I guess it probably doesn't help that there are about 40,000 different adaptations of The Wind In The Willows, making it difficult to stand out. And to those woes we can add that the studio was in its death throes during production; the film was actually finished in 1985, but by July 5, 1987, when it finally made its premier on the ABC network, the studio had ceased to exist: they had shut down in May of the same year. Still, despite all that, it’s a shame this has been so widely ignored; it’s is a startlingly mature and ambitious work by a venerable studio with a great voice cast, and you'd think it deserved more than a produced-on-demand DVD dumping with a washed-out video print (courtesy of Warner Brothers, who acquired Rankin/Bass’s post-1975 catalogue after the company officially dissolved in the early 2000’s). But what films deserve and what they get are not often the same thing.
This film is, of course, primarily the story of out-of-control automobile enthusiast Toad (Charles Nelson Reilly, at the time probably most known for his many game show appearances, though he would soon embark on a decade-long voice-acting career under the direction of Don Bluth), with the story built around the series of wild troubles he gets into in the relentless pursuit of his passion. So much you know; so much are all Wind In The Willows adaptations about. This was not the first adaptation of The Wind In The Willows, nor even the first animated adaptation (Disney put out a version in 1949, when Bass was a mere lad of 14). But this adaptation, closely following the original book (much more closely, I should say, than any of the other three or four versions I've seen, particularly the massively abbreviated Disney version) is about much more than that. It's a poetic, meditative and melancholy rumination on the things that give life meaning, with a deeply British sense of the foundational, grounding value of home, but also a note of restless wanderlust which imparts upon the whole thing a surprisingly bittersweet tone.
Still, let us not mince words: the movie is very much motivated by Toad and his antics, and it's easy to understand why. The appeal of Toad was always obvious, especially to a child: he is a character entirely of Id, unchecked and unconcerned with moderation or logic, a joyous slave to his pleasures, ricocheting between giddy highs and miserable lows. He's a selfish character, as all children must be, but also too ebullient and generous with his joy and his energy for us to ever even consider disliking.
So much was obvious to me even as a child, and so much remains a giddy joy today. But revisiting this film after all these years as an adult, I was struck by something else, something that never occurred to me in my youth: Toad is also a vivid, and rather direct, portrait of addiction. The wild highs, the crushing lows, the rampant, defiant irresponsibility, the obsessive, self-destructive fixation; hell, there’s even an intervention scene, from which Toad emerges initially cowed, only to immediately begin plotting his course back off the wagon. A quick peek at Kenneth Grahame’s biography makes it obvious that this is more than mere coincidence: when Grahame was only five, his own father had to give up custody of his children due to his incessant drinking. At least once, he tried to get his children back, but apparently couldn’t stay sober enough to be a secure guardian. Grahame, in other words, had a front-row seat to an out-of-control addiction which very neatly maps to the other characters in the novel, Toad’s friends Ratty, Moley, and Badger, who can only watch in horror as their friend recklessly endangers himself and everyone around him.
Knowing all that, it makes sense that Toad’s anarchic spirit is so intrinsically mixed into a tale with a lingering sense of melancholy. Toad strikes me very much as a child’s-eye-view of a parent spiraling out of control. Which is, I can attest from experience, a more complicated experience than most people might guess; a father who comes home drunk and full of energy, gathers the children up and races them into the woods to catch fireflies far past their bedtime certainly inspires a feeling of wild elation. But those feelings are mingled with a crawling horror that the adult upon whom you are wholly dependent is not behaving responsibly, in ways that even a child can clearly discern. What better metaphor for the mix of love and pain than Toad’s wild motorcar rides? The book –and the film—vividly feel his unfettered rapture, but are also not entirely unaware of the stark danger he is ignoring, and his blissful obliviousness to how much he is embarrassing his friends.
At any rate, Toad’s odyssey gives the movie its animating energy, but it’s not the whole story; in fact, for significant lengths of time Toad is entirely out of the picture. And in the meantime, you have the curious, dovetailing stories of Moley (Eddie Bracken) and Ratty (Roddy McDowell, at peak Englishness), two characters whose relationship with Toad is almost tangential, but whose parallel conflicted desire to explore the world beyond their comfortable homes grounds the film emotionally. Moley –forced from his underground quarters for the first time by Toad’s mayhem—has a shy, earnest excitement about the huge new world he’s stumbled into, and turns to the more worldly Ratty for guidance. But Ratty, it seems, also has romantic dreams of expanding his horizons, dreams that tug at his soul, but also can’t be realized without abandoning his beloved riverside community. There’s a deep, powerful longing under the surface here, neatly embodied in the lovely, haunting theme song sung by Judy Collins (with lyrics –and rather enchanting ones—by Jules Bass), and bolstered by a foundation of quiet, sweet-natured decency that helps make the whimsy feel grounded and substantial.
As for the animation itself, it is, admittedly, cheaper and somewhat less distinct than THE HOBBIT and THE LAST UNICORN, but there’s still a painterly sensibility here which does a fine job of creating a recognizably and distinctly English countryside while still adding a light sense of whimsical fantasy. The animal designs are cute and, --refreshingly-- not overly anthropomorphized, though the human characters tend towards the grotesque. The cheap animation limits their movement somewhat, resulting in some recycled animation which can look disturbing mechanical, but the posture and design conveys enough character to get by. And that character is bolstered immeasurably by a terrific cast, with Bracken, McDowell, Reilly, and José Ferrer (as wise old Mr. Badger) each instilling their character with a tremendous amount of personality and charm.
All this is marvelously tied together by the music, a consistent strength for the studio; in fact, each of the movies in this loose series is guided by distinct musical choices, from the warm-hearted folk tunes sung by Glenn Yarbrough in THE HOBBIT and RETURN OF THE KINGS to the swoony melancholy of the band America’s soundtrack for THE LAST UNICORN (apparently A FLIGHT OF DRAGONS features a Don McLean theme song?). The songs here are written by Rankin/Bass house composer Maury Laws (who also wrote songs, often with some lyrical input from Jules Bass, for THE HOBBIT, RETURN OF THE KING, and A FLIGHT OF DRAGONS, among many other Rankin/Bass productions), who never became a household name, but really had a knack for using songwriting to craft a distinct and specific emotional space for the films to occupy. Considering the short runtime and large number of songs, their importance in defining these films can hardly be overstated, so it’s a good thing Laws was such a consistently good writer. True to form, the songs here are uniformly delightful –ranging from the haunting theme song to Toad’s exuberant panegyric to unsafe driving to a real toe-tapper about his bad behavior at trial.
All things considered, THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS is certainly less epic and fantastical than its Rankin/Bass predecessors; it is by its very nature a smaller film, a gentle, dreamy bedtime story for children rather than a mythic adventure. But in its own unassuming way, it’s hardly less ambitious. Like Grahame’s book, it has at its heart an elusive, kind-hearted lyricism which bolsters its more rollicking inclinations and gives the whole meandering story a quiet kind of power, simultaneously sweet, rambunctious, and a little sad. That puts it, to my mind, in the top tier of American animated films, and strongly argues that it deserves to escape the relative obscurity it has languished in for the past three decades. Gentle whimsy is a somewhat harder sell than adventure-fantasy, but it is, in its own quiet way, just as powerful, and perhaps rather harder to conjure. For all of its unassuming simplicity, there are complicated, rich veins of emotions running beneath the surface, which moved me even as a child, and remain rewarding and mysterious today. It’s not the sort of thing which commonly gets a movie noticed, especially not an obscure made-for-TV adaptation from three decades ago. But it does make it worth remembering.
*Since you asked: the rights to Fellowship Of The Ring and The Two Towers were held by Saul Zaentz, who had produced Ralph Bakshi's bold but ill-fated THE LORD OF THE RINGS in 1978. The idea to just dodge working with Zaentz and adapt only the last book of the trilogy sounds insane, but on closer examination… nope, uh, I guess it still makes no sense at all. It’s best viewed as a conclusion to the Bakshi version, but the spectacularly different visual style, completely different voice cast, and a range of continuity issues makes that impossible, so I don’t know what they were thinking here. On the other hand, I totally dig the pounding, quasi-disco number "Where There's A Whip There's A Way", so, I dunno, worth it?
