Word: jumanji
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...Jumanji finds an audience, our point will be proved. Director Joe Johnston's elaborately dressed kids' movie--about a board game that sucks its players into a perilous jungle overrun by lions, rhinos, monkeys, crocodiles and spiders--spends so much time on the how of special effects that it neglects the why of characterization. Jumanji wastes the gifts of two terrific comic actors, Robin Williams and David Alan Grier, and some other good people (Kirsten Dunst, Bonnie Hunt). Like the viewer, everyone on-screen pretty much sits back, gets strapped in and takes a bumpy techno-thrill ride through...
...Allsburg's vision may be bizarre, but it strikes a broadly responsive chord. Jumanji (1981), his board-game fantasy, won the Caldecott Medal, the industry's most prestigious award for illustrated children's books. The Polar Express, also a Caldecott winner, has appeared on best-seller lists in three Christmas seasons since its release in 1985. In this lovely tale, a boy wakes on Christmas Eve to find a train wreathed in steam below his bedroom window, waiting to take him to the North Pole and a meeting with Santa Claus. In all, the nine books Van Allsburg has published...
...timepiece to purchase a set of combs. Lisbeth Zwerger's biting line and soft, evocative palette illuminate the characters with an aura of a gaslit nobility, and burnish an antique until it shines. With two previous books, The Garden of Abdul Gasazi and last year's Jumanji, Chris Van Allsburg has become the reigning master of black-and-white illustration. In his third work, Ben's Dream (Houghton Mifflin; $8.95), the pictorial style far outdistances the story. Ben falls asleep and abruptly finds himself awash in a second flood. Only the tops of things show: the head...