Jumanji

In Bradford, New Hampshire, in 1969, the bullied boy Alan Parrish overhears drumbeats and finds a boarding game called "Jumanji" that was buried one hundred years ago by two boys in the real estate of Alan's father Sam Parrish (Jonathan Hyde). Alan plays the game with his sweetheart Sarah Whittle and vanishes while Sarah flees from bats that have arrived in his mansion.

In the present days, in 1995, Nora Shepherd (Bebe Neuwirth) moves to the abandoned house that belonged to Sam Parrish with her orphan niece Judy Shepherd (Kirsten Dunst) and nephew Peter Shepherd (Bradley Pierce) that lost their parents in a car accident in Canada. They hear the drumbeats, find the Jumanji and decide to play the boarding game. They bring giant mosquitoes, monkeys, a lion and Alan Parrish (Robin Williams) back home twenty-six years older. Soon they discover that they need to finish the game to restore everything the way they were. But the game is too dangerous and brings different threats to them and to Bradford while they play.

"Jumanji" is a delightful adventure and family entertainment from the 90's. The story is original and the special effects are still great after twenty years. It is so good to see Robin Williams again and curious to recall Kirsten Dunst still a girl. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Jumanji"

Find a comfortable chair, lay out the board, grab the dice, and get ready to play. But remember: once you start this game, you can't stop. If it takes you over twenty years to finish, finish you must.

"Jumanji" is loosely based on the Caldecott Medal-winning children's book by Chris Van Allsburg. The basic premise stays the same: a sister and brother find a strange game based on a jungle safari adventure. When they begin playing it, they find they cannot stop, for the characters and events of the game come to life and start filling their house with monkeys, lions, explorers and other strange things. Only finishing the game will make it all go away.

In the hands of Hollywood, more story is added. Now we have a game spanning 26 years, when one of the two children playing the game in 1969 gets sucked into the game itself. He's trapped there until a fresh pair of children in 1995 find the game and begin playing. The right number is rolled, and out Alan comes...as Robin Williams! Finding the grown girl to complete the group, the four must complete the game before their town is destroyed by the stampeding rhinos, killer pod vines and crazed Great White Hunter.

Robin has some good moments in this film, though he isn't allowed to riff as much as in other vehicles. He's supported by an excellent cast, including a young Kirsten Dunst as the sister of the new pair of children; Jonathan Hyde as both the 1969 father and Van Pelt, the Great White Hunter from the game; and Bebe Neuwirth as the modern children's aunt. The effects are, not surprisingly, ILM-excellent -- necessary in a film of this type. The script was co-written by Van Allsburg to insure the atmosphere of the film and book mesh, but he did not fall into the "This is MY baby" syndrome, and received good help from his two co-writers (for details, see the main page). Highly recommended for old and young alike.

I have not seen this movie in more then a decade perhaps even more so it was pretty new to me again. Sure I remembered a few things here and there but I didn't remember the amount of CGI for a movie made in 1995 or how well the story was.

The CGI is of course very dated compared to now but for its time this movie was amazing! The story for a movie that revolves around a board game is a very interesting concept and very well told. The acting by a young Kirsten Dunst and comedic Robin Williams and the rest of the cast is very well done.

This is a great movie and if you have children between the ages of 7 to 13 I would bet they'd like it too.

I watched this classic in 2021 for the first time. Trust me, I never felt like old boring stuff. It was truly amazing. Nor, after watching the Jumanji movies till now except for this, did I find this one to be similar. It was different. It was Classical. It was a great show. Fantastical Fantasy. Good adventure although latest ones have lot more. However, this, suprised me considering I had made up my mind of what Jumanji could be. But this was truly amazing. Although latest ones have great cast, next level VFX, astounding adventure, this one's the best. I do love the first part of the latest ones that came in 2017, I'd find rather take a tie between the two than selecting one. Thank you. However, lemme tell you, it was leaving Prime, so I watched and it was worth it.

In 1969, in a small town in New Hampshire, a twelve-year-old boy named Alan Parrish finds a Victorian-era board game called "Jumanji", and starts to play it with his friend Sarah. What the children do not realise, however, is that the game has strange, mysterious powers, and when Alan's token lands on a particular square he is suddenly sucked into the game. Unsurprisingly traumatised by the disappearance of her friend, Sarah runs out of the house shrieking, leaving the game unfinished.

Twenty-six years later two more children, Peter and Judy, orphaned by the death of their parents in a car crash, move into the former Parrish family home with their Aunt Nora. They find the old Jumanji set and start playing the game; when Peter rolls a five Alan suddenly reappears, now a grown man. He explains to them that he has been trapped inside the game for the last twenty-six years and that they must now finish the game which he and Sarah started. This, however, is easier said than done. Not only must the children find Sarah and persuade her to take part, they must also cope with the magical effects of the game. Each roll of the dice results in strange happenings in keeping with the game's jungle adventure theme; animals such as lions, monkeys, elephants and rhinoceroses suddenly materialise and proceed to wreak havoc in the town. Just as deadly is a white hunter named Van Pelt who will take pot-shots at anything that moves, animal or human.

The big-name star in this film is Robin Williams, although it also features a young Kirsten Dunst, later to become a big name herself. This isn't Williams' best role- I generally prefer him in his more serious films like "Dead Poet's Society" or "Good Morning, Vietnam"- but it's a lot better than many of his comedies, which can descend into either silliness or sentimentality.

This is the sort of family film that offers something to entertain the adults as well as the children, and has some underlying serious themes. The main theme is that of courage and of confronting one's fears; the horrors unleashed by the game can (if one is in a particularly serious, analytic frame of mind) be seen as symbolic of the problems that the characters need to overcome. Although (or perhaps because) he is from a wealthy, privileged family, the young Alan is a shy, lonely boy who finds it difficult to make friends and who is neglected by his cold, distant parents. Nevertheless, he does win his father's approval when he finds the courage to stand up to a gang of bullies who have been tormenting him. There is doubtless some Freudian significance in the fact that Alan's father and the murderous Van Pelt are played by the same actor.

Children, of course, could not care less about Freudian symbolism and are generally allergic to underlying serious themes. When I was a child the one thing that would kill a book or a film stone dead for me was the suspicion that it was being used by the adult world to preach some morally improving message to me. (C.S. Lewis was a particular bête noire of mine after an intellectually precocious classmate, who even at the age of nine cherished the long-term ambition to become Archbishop of Canterbury, pointed out to me the Christian allegory behind the "Narnia" stories).

Fortunately, any moralising in "Jumanji" is fairly light, and I suspect that children will simply see it as an exciting adventure story, even if the final twist in the tale involves the intellectually difficult concept of "alternative timelines". The special effects used to create the scenes of the rampaging animals seem to have aroused some excitement when the film first came out, although thirteen years on they have a rather retro, nineties feel to them. (And from the point of view of today's techno-literate youngsters the 1990s probably seem only slightly less technologically backward than the 1890s). 7/10