7/5/2023 0 Comments Dark crystal art![]() Frank Oz, his longtime collaborator, accepted his friend’s invitation to codirect. The Muppets, Henson’s felt and foam creations with lovably imperfect personalities-the ones that had recently taken over primetime television for five seasons and profitably adorned the silver screen in two feature films-were nowhere to be found in Thra, the spiritual world that houses Dark Crystal’s unearthly inhabitants like the humane Gelfling, the insidious and vicious Skeksis, and their counterparts, the wise and patient Mystics.Īnd yes, while The Dark Crystal was ostensibly made for children-although Henson and Brian Froud, the English artist who used his unique sensibility and creativity to cocreate and conceptualize Thra and its many inhabitants, would likely disagree with that supposition-it was a project that the entire creative team took very seriously.Īnd what a creative team it was! The film was only the second time Jim Henson sat in the director’s chair on a feature film (the first being The Great Muppet Caper, a film he agreed to do only if he could also secure financing for Crystal, his longstanding dream project). “This movie is serious: Jim Henson’s foray into the art, dammit, of puppetry.”ĭespite his dismissive tone, Corliss was right on several fronts. Sam the Nixonian Eagle and Grover, with his perpetually pubescent voice, are elsewhere,” he wrote. ![]() Vincent Canby of the New York Times filed a negative review, declaring the film uninteresting and “without charm,” while Rex Reed of the New York Post not only took issue with the film’s price tag(“It seems almost obscene to spend $26 million on a movie for children”) but also its characters and tone (“the monsters and bizarre creatures…are so horrifying they just might give impressionable tots nightmares for days.”)īut perhaps the most sardonic - and telling - review came from Richard Corliss of Time. Like most groundbreaking creative projects, most of the critics didn’t quite get it. But, back on December 17, 1982, when Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal arrived in movie theaters throughout the United States, the critics were not happy. It’s easily one of the best kids’ movies of all time, even if it scared the hell out of kids forty years ago. Today, Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal is widely considered a masterpiece.
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