Oz the great and powerful cast monkey full#

More often than not, this isn’t a bad thing. After a black-and-white opening that quickly gives way to a tornado-powered exit, pretty much everything encountered in Oz that was seen in the original film-munchkins, a yellow brick road, a green witch astride a broomstick in desperate need of an oil change-are faithful recreations of the original vision. From the get-go, Raimi’s film is both tribute to and evocation of its predecessor. Would we have Sam Raimi’s latest film? Definitely not.Ī prequel to the 1939 groundbreaker, Oz the Great and Powerful tells the story of how a carnival con man (James Franco) arrives in Oz, meets a monkey, a china doll and some witches, and becomes the Wizard. Would Baum’s initially beloved books have cleaved to the popular imagination without the silver screen assistance of Garland, Bolger, Lahr, Haley and company? It’s hard to say. (Of course, by 1945’s Animal Farm, the world’s psyche had been given a lot more horror to digest.)Īnd then there’s the catalyst of 1939’s classic film treatment, The Wizard of Oz. Yet, neither is it the type of cumbersome (and/or terrifying) allegory that would mark future works involving talking animals.

Oz the great and powerful cast monkey full#

Though plenty strange and wonderful in cast and occurrences, Baum’s tale falls a full rabbit hole shy of the rampant whimsy and strangeness of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. For one thing, it neatly sidesteps the overt moralizing of the more traditional fairy tales of Grimm, Goose et al. Frank Baum’s original The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a peculiar piece of myth-making.