The Pagemaster
Macaulay Culkin, four years after Home Alone, ducks into a library to escape a storm and gets melted into a cartoon, where three talking books and Long John Silver, Moby-Dick and Dr. Jekyll chase him toward the exit sign. It cost a reported $34 million, made $13.7 million, and was the last animated feature 20th Century Fox released with hand-painted cels.
The Pagemaster began as a six-page pitch called "Library Days" by Charles Pogue, which producer David Kirschner handed to screenwriter David Casci, who had been writing live-action versions of it for Disney Television since 1985. Richard Tyler (Culkin) is a ten-year-old who quotes accident statistics to avoid doing anything. Sent out for nails for a treehouse, he takes shelter from a thunderstorm in a library, meets the eccentric librarian Mr. Dewey, slips, and wakes as an illustration. The Pagemaster, keeper of books, sends him through the fiction section toward a green neon exit sign with three anthropomorphic books, Adventure, Fantasy and Horror, who help on condition that he checks them out on his new library card. Along the way: Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde, Moby-Dick, Long John Silver's pirates, and a dragon that swallows Richard, who climbs out on a beanstalk. He wakes with three real books, and Mr. Dewey lets him check out all of them "just this once."
The animation came from Turner Feature Animation, newly spun off from Hanna-Barbera under Kirschner and supervising animator Bruce W. Smith, and it mixed live action, hand-drawn animation and computer graphics, including a CG dragon made to look like paint, in one of the first films to combine all three. James Horner scored it, and the cast included Christopher Lloyd, Whoopi Goldberg, Patrick Stewart, Leonard Nimoy and Frank Welker. Behind the scenes it was a mess. The animation crew later said the production went over budget through mismanagement and story changes, live-action director Joe Johnston said the film was re-edited without his consent and has since struck it from his résumé, and Kirschner tried to claim sole writing credit, triggering a long Writers Guild arbitration that found Casci the primary writer and ended in a settlement crediting both, plus Ernie Contreras. Fox released it on November 23, 1994, backed by a Pizza Hut tie-in and a video game.
It finished with $13.7 million in North America against a reported $34 million budget. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 19 percent. Roger Ebert called it "sad and dreary" and thought its message was that "books can be almost as much fun as TV cartoons and video arcade games," though audiences gave it an A-minus CinemaScore. Culkin earned a Razzie nomination for it, shared with Getting Even with Dad and Richie Rich, before he retired from acting at fourteen. For the kids who caught it on VHS from April 1995 on, none of that registered. It was the movie that made a library look dangerous.
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