Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-Review by Professor Popinjay

Based on the whimsical and sometimes bizarre comics by Winsor McKay circa 1905; yeah, it’s been around a while. He was a pioneer in comics and animation. This guy made Gertie the Dinosaur. If you’re an animation fan and have never heard of Gertie, stop reading this and look Gertie up. You deserve it.

My first encounter with Nemo was in the Nintendo game Little Nemo: The Dream Master by Capcom in 1990. It had an interesting mechanic where you could give certain animals three pieces of candy and they would fall asleep so you could ride on them or wear their skin like a costume at which point you would gain their abilities. Just like real life animals! Tell me that’s not a plot to a horror movie! I did marvel at how deep the lore for the game was and I had to wonder where else these characters existed.

As it turns out, the game was based on an anime manifestation of Mckay’s work (considered an anime even though it was worked on by a multitude of Japanese AND American companies) which wasn’t released in the U.S. until 1992. Apparently, the production had been in development hell throughout much of the 80’s with multiple writers and directors signing on and dropping out of the project. Several scripts were submitted by Hayo Miyazaki in fact, most of which were rejected and repurposed for other well-known Studio Ghibli productions including Castle in the Sky, Nausicaä, and  Princess Mononoke.

According to something I read just before writing this that totally wasn’t Wikipedia, the Little Nemo Comic strip was well known in the U.S. So much so that two different film ideas were proposed to Walt Disney. A man named Yutaka Fujioka had started Tokyo Movie Shinsha in 1975 and Nemo would be his pet project until its production. As it was considered a flop, Fujioka took responsibility and left the company he started. He died two years later in 1998. Nemo had been in production for the duration of his time at his company.

Miyazaki’s influence and can be felt throughout the film but the mish-mash of multiple writers makes this a bit of a fever dream. Oddly enough, that’s kind of what you get from the original Little Nemo comics. There’s little logic to Mckay’s stories and sometimes inexplicable things happen as they might in a dream. The character of Flip is a prime example of this, as he presents as a mentor but also does mischievous things unprovoked, even if his actions might initiate an apocalypse. He’s not a villain per sé, but he’s definitely a force of chaos for good or ill.

Personally, I like the film, but it can be quite strange at times and even kind of frightening. The artwork is amazing and the music was done by The Sherman Brothers who are known for their work on Disney’s The Jungle Book. Probably even more fascinating than the film is the story of its production, 21 years in the making. Pet projects never work out when they start getting stuck in development hell. They need to just put it in a barrel and bury it in the cellar and see if it turns in to something later. Otherwise we end up with productions like The Adventures of Pluto Nash. Nemo has developed a bit of a cult following though. It’s not soulless. It just had too many cooks.

Also to my surprise, not a single animal was put to sleep and gotten inside of. Maybe they thought it was too close to something that happened in Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back.

Research uncovered a Little Nemo arcade game that looks hard af and a hand-drawn Metroidvania-style game called Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends that was trying to get kickstarted. I can find no downloads for it so I fear it must not have come to fruition yet. I’m on pins and needles for it though!