Return to Oz (1985)

Return to Oz arrives in 1985 as a curiosity: a Disney production that treats the Land of Oz as a place recently conquered rather than a place to sing about. Walter Murch, making his directorial debut, drew from L. Frank Baum's second and third novels and produced something somber, strange, and largely uninterested in the cultural battles of a later decade. Fairuza Balk plays Dorothy as a tired, haunted child, and the film opens in a Kansas sanatorium where adults propose electrotherapy for a girl who simply remembers a place they do not believe in. That premise carries a certain unease about institutional authority, though the film treats Dorothy's trouble as a misdiagnosis to be escaped, not as an identity to be explored.

The supporting cast is drawn almost entirely from British character actors, and the film makes no effort to diversify or comment upon its own whiteness. There is no romantic subtext, no environmental sermon, no indictment of wealth, no meditation on bodies or class. Princess Ozma is restored to the throne at the end, which gives the story a female ruler and a capable girl at its center, but this comes straight from Baum's 1904 and 1907 texts. The film is adapting, not agitating.

The result is a genuinely unsettling piece of children's entertainment. Princess Mombi keeps a cabinet of interchangeable heads, the Wheelers roll on all fours, and the Nome King turns his enemies into ornaments. Murch stages all of it with a straight face and no lesson attached. The film has no interest in telling us how to feel about any of it. It simply shows us the ruin of a beloved place and lets a child put it back together. On the scale of contemporary social messaging, that is close to nothing at all. As a viewing experience, it is something rarer: a dark fantasy that trusts its audience to sit with the darkness.