Return to Neverland
Oh, Grow Up
Film review by Witney Seibold

Sing with me now: “F-O-R-M-U-L-A spells Disney.” I realized while I was watching Return to Neverland, the latest Disney animated feature, what a tragedy the story of Peter Pan really is. Here is a world where young boys are destined to remain forever immature, and murderous pirates are destined never to learn from their mistakes. Remaining eternally young might be fun, but after the first century, boredom might begin to settle.

I have not seen Disney’s original take on Peter Pan, but I am familiar with the story. Return to Neverland picks up, I think, 20 year after the original in war-torn London. Wendy is grown with two children. Capt. Hook, that scoundrel, travels to London in a flying pirate ship, and kidnaps whom he believes is Wendy, but is in fact her daughter Jane, to use as bait to lure Peter Pan back home. Who, at this juncture, is willing to bet that realist Jane will warm to Peter Pan’s boyish life-approach, and help the be-pajama-ed Lost Boys foil Capt. Hook’s plans?


Let’s not see all the same hands now…

I am not a huge fan of Disney’s animated films for numerous reasons, all of which are demonstrated by Return to Neverland. While many of their cartoons are innovative and often display great energy, Disney seems dangerously preoccupied with fulfilling stale plot formulae. Instead reaching upward to show us something original, the entire studio seems to be intentionally miring themselves in a pit of recycled story devices and characters that we’ve seen “re-imagined” any number of times. I desperately long to show My Neighbor Totoro, or some other such Japanese feature, to the producers of this film. Show them how wondrous cartoons can be.

I guess the fatal flaw of Disney’s film is that they market too much toward children. They know how to exploit kids, and they profit. A note to Disney: You have the most powerful animation department in the entire world. It’s o.k. to take risks and make films for grown-ups too. It’s time, I think, to leave Neverland and do the unthinkable: Grow up.

If you're a 10 year-old boy, the idea of to going to school wearing a girl's pink dress would probably be enough to have you faking a cough and holding a thermometer under a light bulb in order to stay home. But what happens to Bill Simpson, the main character in the play, Bill's New Frock, is even worse: when he wakes up, everyone around him suddenly and mysteriously thinks he really is a girl. Wearing a dress to school is the least of his problems, now he has to deal with the way the dress seems to determine who he is and what he can do.


So begins Bill's New Frock, based on the novel by Anne Fine and adapted for the stage by Visible Fictions. This is the story of an ordinary boy who, during the course of an extraordinary day, begins to see the world in a whole new (and pink) light.


The production is presented by Center Theatre Group's P.L.A.Y. (Performing for LA Youth, the youth theatre program of the Mark Taper Forum and Ahmanson Theatre), will tour So. Cal. schools in March and April before making its leap across the Atlantic to Edinburgh, Scotland, where it will show at the Scottish International Children's Festival.


If you hear about Bill's New Frock coming to your school, save your "sick" days for math quizzes and oral reports because you won't want to miss it. But if you do, don't worry. The play will also be performed at theatres in and around LA.

Bill’s new frock Mar 30; 1pm; The 24th Street Theatre 1117 W. 24th St, LA 213-745-6516.