Remembering Robin Williams and ‘Jumanji’ (1995)

December 15, 2020

Recognizing my sounding like an old curmudgeon, it seems like the only mentions of Jumanji nowadays either include memes that say, “What year is it?!” or Dwayne Johnson smack-talking Kevin Hart. With all due respect to Mr. The Rock, Robin Williams won over our hearts 25 years ago with his portrayal of Alan Parrish in the original film directed by Joe Johnston (The Rocketeer, Captain America: The First Avenger), which was based on the popular children’s book written by Chris Van Allsburg. Let’s go back 25 years, listen to the heartbeat of the jungle drums, and remember Robin Williams and Jumanji.

For the youngsters that have never seen the original Jumanji, a young Alan Parrish finds an old board game buried in a chest at a construction site in 1969. After an argument with his father, Alan decides to play the game with his friend Sarah. After rolling a couple rounds, the game sucks Alan into it and giant bats chase Sarah down the street (causing severe PTSD), and the world moves on for 26 years, with the rumor that Alan’s father murdered him and moved away before dying. Fast-forward to when Judy and Peter move into the old house, fresh off the deaths of their parents, find the game, and continue playing what Alan and Sarah started. The game starts producing lions, giant mosquitoes, and an adult Alan Parrish (Williams) that has been stuck in the jungle wiping his butt with banana leaves for almost three decades. Together they must find Sarah and complete the game to put a stop to the havoc it keeps unleashing.

As with most Joe Johnston films, Jumanji feels like the most Spielbergian non-Spielberg film ever. I always refer to Johnston and Ron Howard as “diet Spielbergs”. Not because they aren’t wonderful filmmakers themselves, but because their films typically fall slightly short of capturing the usual magic of one of best filmmakers of all time. That is nothing to turn your nose up to. Jumanji tries really hard. The cast is incredible. Robin Williams is one of my all-time favorite actors. I had the opportunity to see Robin perform his stand-up Weapons of Self-Destruction tour in 2009, and he was just as heart-warming and authentic in person as he seems on screen. In fact, Joe Johnston said that Williams ad-libbed a lot of the lines during scene shooting, providing a testament to his genius. Bonnie Hunt, Kirsten Dunst, and David Alan Grier all provided amazing supporting work, and let’s be honest, does anyone play a better British asshole than Jonathan Hyde?

Although some of the effects feel a little dated now, they were groundbreaking in 1995, competing with the best of that era in film. Using CGI as a main source of effects in filmmaking was still new, so a large portion of the effects were a combination of full-scale animatronics created by Amalgamated Dynamic, INC (Tremors, Starship Troopers, Spider-Man) and miniatures by ILM (Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones). Like Jurassic Park, at the time, the animals felt real. Unfortunately, the main difference between the two films was the lighting used to cover-up the CGI. Jurassic Park used darker shots, while most of Jumanji was set in broad daylight, making it harder to camouflage CGI that would become dated faster. This kind of made Johnston a bigger risk taker, because these were shots of stampeding animals crushing cars, breaking through houses, riding motorcycles, etc. and they weren’t even what Johnston wanted the audience to focus on. Johnston has said many times throughout his career that VFX should only ever be there to serve the story, not take the audience away from it.

There is a reason Jumanji still holds up 25 years later. It’s engaging, heart-felt, triumphant, and adventurous. You would never think that a film about a board game would weave in the effects of family tragedy on children, or the emotional dissonance between fathers and their sons in the 1960’s, but here we are. Speaking of the board game, I owned it when I was a child, and the game has been recently reproduced for mass markets like Target to go along with the releases of the newer films. However, if you’re a big fan, I would suggest checking out The Noble Collection’s film replica of it, that includes detailed figure sculpts and is fully playable.

Jumanji is still a blast. After not seeing it in years, revisiting it made me feel like a kid again. I recommend going back and once again starting the game from the beginning.