The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Directed by Victor Fleming
Young Dorothy finds herself in a magical world where she makes friends with a lion, a scarecrow and a tin man as they make their way along the yellow brick road to talk with the Wizard and ask for the things they miss most in their lives. The Wicked Witch of the West is the only thing that could stop them.
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What critics compared The Wizard of Oz to
As Elphaba casts a spell to save Fiyero, For Good pays homage to the color schemes of Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz, intercutting black-and-white shots of Fiyero’s torture in a cornfield.
Because the narrative of The Wizard of Oz is a part of Wicked’s overall story, those events have to be wedged in as part of Elphaba’s story…
More than anything, "Wicked For Good" carries the cinematic spirit of "The Wizard of Oz," proving more than 85 years later that the magic of Oz still works.
…with all the Wizard of Oz loose ends to square away…
…sludgy CGI that, for all its millions of dollars, looks far chintzier than the 1939 original’s painted backdrops…
Stephen Schwartz introduces two new songs, “No Place Like Home” and “The Girl in the Bubble”…
Melding bits of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz with Eastern-angled spookiness and an outré sensibility that borders on the indescribable, Spirited Away is fiercely original in every respect.
If the children's literature section of your neighborhood bookstore was shuffled up and animated, with painterly sophistication and a Grimm eye for the bizarre, The Phantom Tollbooth and The Wizard of Oz landing on top, the result might look like Spirited Away.
In the tradition of "The Wizard of Oz" and "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," "Spirited Away" is about a girl who overcomes her fears when plopped into a strange world and takes control of her fate.
Once inside, however, she loses track of her parents and begins an adventure that echoes everything from "The Wizard of Oz" to "The Never-Ending Story" to "Alice in Wonderland."
The story echoes "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Wizard of Oz" as it follows 10-year-old schoolgirl Chihiro (voiced by Daveigh Chase) when she and her parents move to a new city.
Strange, beautifully-animated, moving film that’s like a combination of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz (alongside many other references) yet, at the same time, it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.
Other movies have incorporated The Wizard of Oz into their fabric, notably Woody Allen's Annie Hall , Martin Scorsese's After Hours and David Lynch's Wild at Heart , not to mention the popular book/Broadway play Wicked, which tells the story from the Wicked Witch's perspective.
Lynch has also felt compelled to douse the movie (which took the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes this year) with an unending flood of references to "The Wizard of Oz."
Though far from an intellectual exercise, the film fiddles consciously with big cultural archetypes—Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and The Wizard Of Oz, among others—and with capital-letter depictions of Good and Evil.
Wild at Heart takes the archetypal road movie and adds inventive variations including sexual intrigue, ritual murder, pyromania, dirty talk, an ensemble cast familiar from "Twin Peaks," identification with media icons, and references to The Wizard of Oz.
What Lynch seems to have been going for is a sort of white-trash variation on "The Wizard of Oz" -- one that's been left out in the sun to rot and fester and run lousy with maggots.
But among all the pop-cultural referencing laced throughout Wild At Heart, the most important, noticeable, and constant allusions in the film are the numerous ones pertaining to The Wizard of Oz, with many pieces of dialogue referring to Sailor and Lula’s journey using terminology and imagery from the classic film.
As riffs on Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz go, Jim Henson's Labyrinth is a painfully dated, shockingly un-magical romp through a fragmented netherworld populated by Ziggy Stardust and a horde of little people wearing giant papier-mâché heads.
Similar to the books loved by the film’s young hero, which include Peter Pan, Snow White, The Wizard of Oz and Where the Wild Things Are, Labyrinth is a wildly inventive and imaginative adventure story combined with a parable about maturity.
Movie lovers will recognize elements of "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Wizard of Oz" that Henson "borrowed" to make this movie, but they'll also get a kick out of seeing all of the elements in this film that turn up later in the Harry Potter books and movies.
You can see in this adventure everything from "The Wizard of Oz " and "Alice in Wonderland " to "New Zoo Revue " and Pink Floyd's "The Wall ."
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By this point the viewer is likely to understand all too well how she feels, as “Tomorrowland” increasingly suggests a version of “The Wizard of Oz” that, despite numerous attempts at liftoff, never quite manages makes it over the rainbow.
Imagine jumping back and forth between Kansas and Oz in “The Wizard of Oz” with several key characters out of sight for long stretches and you get the picture.
But director Bird (“The Incredibles,” “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol”) is such a master of momentum, and has such a way with gadgetry that the film’s two-plus hours whiz by, with elements of “The Terminator,” “Hugo,” “The Rocketeer” “The Wizard of Oz” and countless other films flashing past.
The production design is first rate with visual nods from everything to Disneyland to “The Wizard Of Oz” to the 1964 NY World's Fair, where the movie of begins.
Although Tomorrowland's ambitions are right up there with Back to the Future and The Wizard of Oz, the plucky Floridian played by Britt Robertson in the time-hopping Disney adventure is unlikely to be remembered in decades to come - or even in months to come, once the next teenage dystopian fantasy inserts itself into movie houses.
The circumstances of the filmmaking keep coming up alongside the filmmaking itself, not because The Fall is only impressive with asterisks describing its technique, but to demonstrate the filmmaker's unconventional and dedicated approach to material that could be as familiar as watching The Wizard of Oz on cable.
Alexandria draws on people she knows in order to visualize her story much in the same way that Dorothy looked to people on the farm as she imagined the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Lion in The Wizard of Oz.
It doesn't take long to realize that the story reflects both of their lives, originating from his movie background and wounded romanticism and filtered through her imagination and experiences (complete with characters cast from her life, a la "The Wizard of Oz").
Like Pan's Labyrinth and The Wizard of Oz, Tarsem's film dives deep into the imagination of a child, taking characters from her real world and transplanting them into the fantasy.
Cowriter (with Dan Gilroy ("Two for the Money") and Nico Soultanakis ("The Cell")/director Tarsem Singh ("The Cell") spent sixteen years scouting locations in twenty-eight countries, then another four years creating his own visually spectacular, culturally peculiar version of "The Wizard of Oz." Equal part bedtime story and contemporary art museum installation, "The Fall" is unlike anything you've ever seen.
The way in which the story unfolds evokes The Wizard of Oz and The Princess Bride , but the synthesis of the elements marks The Fall as vastly inferior to either.
It may be sacrilege to compare Burton's Alice in Wonderland with The Wizard of Oz (1939), but there are distinct parallels.
Alice's first proper glimpse of Underland comes with the opening of a door, recalling a similar scene in 1939's "The Wizard of Oz" when Dorothy steps out from the black-and-white confines of her farmhouse and into the Technicolor-fused Munchkinland.
Forget the many redundant references to The Wizard of Oz, this hasn't a fraction of that movie's logic, imagination or ambitions.
They also drop so many references to The Wizard of Oz that families can make a game of counting them.
Bill Paxton's tornado measuring machine is named Dorothy (from The Wizard of Oz, naturally), lines of dialogue are lifted from Star Wars ("that's no moon, that's a space station"), and Repo Man ("normal people spend their lives avoiding tense situations, Repo Man spends his life trying to get into tense situations.")
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Lots of medium-amusing references to sources as varied as The Wizard of Oz and the "Daisy" death scene from 2001 share time with a few genuinely inventive throwaway moments, such as public restroom logos that are an outlet and a plug and an animal litter sign that sees a magnet attracting Fido's droppings.
The story of a bright-eyed small-town robot who sets out to find the mechanical wizard of a gleaming utopian metropolis called Robot City, "Robots" gets its engine from "The Wizard of Oz" (the Tin Man has a cameo), which it reinterprets as a postindustrial, consumer-age parable about remaining true to yourself even if you resemble a 1950s kitchen appliance.
It's Pinocchio crossed with The Wizard of Oz.
Thus the ever-fascinating spectacle of "Robots" as created by the computer wizard Chris Wedge of "Ice Age" fame: a mechanical universe rooted firmly in the pre-computerized engineering of 1939 (when "The Wizard of Oz" came out).
Allusions to "The Wizard of Oz" are patently obvious right down to the title character pleading by the third act that she just wants to go home, but they only serve to remind of a 1939 treasure that will continue to stand the test of time long after this film has been largely forgotten.