Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Milo is a bored kid. He goes home and finds a box which unfolds into one genuine turnpike tollbooth. It presents a fantastical world beyond. As he drives the given car through the tollbooth, he turns into a cartoon character in an animated world.From the mind of Chuck Jones based on a children's book, this is a wild and imaginative road trip. It's got the charms of the Chuck Jones animation. The Doldrums are a little tiring. My sympathetic yawns almost put me to sleep. A bored kid is not the most compelling protagonist. It would be nice to have an ultimate goal or destination. The Castle in the Air sounds cool but meaningless. It would be better if he has a reason to get there. If the aimless Milo gets a goal from the start, he can learn to be proactive and curious from the quest. There is the central theme of not wasting time but I don't completely agree with the whole premise. It can get scattered with the weird wacky numerous characters. It rambles around and around. For Chuck Jones fans, this lesser known movie is a must. For everybody else, this may be an exercise in animation only.

SPOILER ALERT!!! I haven't watched the movie, but if it is anything like the book, then it is really a waste of your time. Milo hates his life and then he magically gets imported to a magical land of metaphors, not wisdom. And in the end, after his self-changing journey, he goes back to Earth and of course, classically, only one hour has passed. And then he looks at the world differently. He notices small things; he loves school and everything much more. It's definitely different from Modern Movies. I would rate this as a very bad book. Especially because about every one to three chapters, a bunch of characters are jumping from one place to the next ("Jumping to Conclusions") and there are about 50 characters in the whole book, and I lost track after Milo, Tock, Tick, The Mathemagician, King Azaz, Rhyme, Reason, The Humbug and the Which. Also, if you are looking for a realistic read, never read this book. It's very fantasy, except it's not actually a "fantasy", because there is nothing good that happens in it! If you are going to read it, get it from the library. Don't waste your money.

I am a big fan of Chuck Jones, and I had heard of "The Phantom Tollbooth" in various contexts as an animated feature, so when I saw it on the cable schedule, I made sure to reserve the time to watch it. Hmmmm. I decided that this wasn't bad for an first foray into feature length territory, and that if Jones had a chance to learn from his mistakes and try a couple more times, he would have probably come up with a real classic. But "Phantom Tollbooth" wasn't it, and deserves its place in semi-obscurity. Problem: Too much heavy handed moralizing. I was surprised that people as sneakily funny and subversive as Jones and his crew would be satisfied with the "tone" of the dialog and the exposition here. No matter that the target audience was young; Even Disney in the early years was never this blunt and cheesy in their subtexts and allegories. (From what I've read, the original text wasn't this unsubtle either. Or else what works in a 20 word blurb on the page doesn't always work at length in a live medium). More problems: About half of the songs are, um, pretty lame, at least to my sensibilities. The ones that yammer away about the virtues of earnestness, duty, hard work, etc. And Butch Patrick was a pretty good kid actor, but he was no singer - all he ever does is pipe along with the lyrics as if they were the musical version of The Pledge Of Allegiance. Worse yet, some of the animation is 2nd rate. Oh, sure, the main characters - the Watch Dog, the Humbug, Milo, the Mathemagician - are done as well as you expect from a Jones flick, and some of the backgrounds are suitably trippy, but most of the monsters and supporting cast (including Rhyme and Reason) are slapdash and badly conceived and look like another crew of 2nd unit apprentices did them. Still, the movie has its moments. The scene in the Doldrums had a nice sinister edge to it. It was nice to hear Blanc and Foray and Tremayne and the rest do what they do so well, even if they had trouble selling some of the dialog. And I am sure that the kid I was back in 1970 would have enjoyed more than I do now - although not as much as One Hundred and One Dalmations, or "The Sword In The Stone". I really wanted to like this movie as much as I do those two (which sport a similar style of character animation) and I want to overlook its faults, because it has a good heart. But as I said, it is undercooked enough that it really doesn't match up to the classics from that era.

I have loved the Phantom Tollbooth since I was a young boy, when my Father first rented it from our local video shop. After that, my brother and I seldom missed the opportunity to rent it out again if we could, and even today we can probably quote the entire film to each other, or to anyone who would want to listen for that matter.Made by MGM in 1970, The Phantom Tollbooth pretty much remains faithful to Norton Juster's book but gets brought right up to date, (for the time that is), and given a good dose of phsycodelia.Milo, (Butch Patrick), is a bored young boy who lives in San Fransisco, one day a mysterious box appears in his bedroom, which contains a magic tollbooth which, when passed through takes Milo into a cartoon world called the Kingdom Of Wisdom. A Kingdom ruled by two warring brothers. King Azaz of Dictionopolis whose iron rule is that words are more important than numbers, and The Mathemagician of Digitopolis, who holds the view that numbers are far more important than words.In order to restore some sanity back to the land he agrees to rescue the Princesses Rhyme & Reason from the Castle In The Air. But first he has to overcome certain obstacles, such as The Doldrums and their inhabitants, The Lethargians who want to stop Milo for Eating, Sleeping and even Breathing. He has to escape the clutches of Kakofonous A. Dischord a mad scientist that wants to stop Milo from ever hearing pleasant sounds again, which he tries with the aid of his accomplice the Awful Dynne (wonderfully voiced by none other than Candy Candido). Officer Short Shrift is a unicycle cop with a insatiable fondness for arresting people for no good purpose. and the Demons of Ignorance who wait in the mountains guarding the approach to the Castle In The Air.It's not all doom & Gloom though, as Milo does encounter many allies to aid him on his journey. There is Tock The Watchdog, Mr Humbug, The Spelling Bee who, by his own admission, can spell any word that has ever been written in any language, anywhere, The Whetherman and his sister Faintly Macabre, The not so wicked Which, (and no, they are not misspellings).Every Character in the Phantom Tollbooth is in fact a not too disguised Metaphor for something else. be it impatience, sloth and greed, but the film also shows a remedy for these negative traits.The most famous of all the people who lent their vocal talents to the movie, is none other than voice of Bugs Bunny, Mel Blanc. If Lon Chaney was the 'Man of a Thousand faces', then Blanc surely was The Man of a Thousand Voices' Unless you're really sensitive about everything, there is nothing in The Phantom Tollbooth that could offend anyone. It's a film that can be watched whether you're 8 or 80 and still get the same thrill from it. I'm also thrilled that my children are also fans of this film that meant so much to me when I was their age, and I hope it is something that they will pass on to THEIR children too.Enjoy!