lasttimeisaw A restored 139-min version of this quintessential Disney entertainment, under the helm of the ambidextrous conjuror Robert Stevenson, who has once brought us MARY POPPINS (1964).BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS is a whimsical and kind-hearted genre-buster, a menagerie of comedy, musical (catchy ditties written by Richard M. Sherman and Robert Be. Sherman), live- action fantasy and animation, it won BEST SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS in the Oscars. The story takes places in Great Britain during the high point of WWII, an apprentice witch Eglantine Price (Lansbury, as immaculate and one-of-a-kind as ever) is saddled with three children, Charlie (Weighill), Carrie (O'Callaghan)and Paul (Snart), who are evacuated from London during the Blitz, in the rural town Pepperinge Eye. After an initial adjusting period, during which an 11-year-old Charlie, the oldest of the three, in the age of not believing, cunningly and constantly blackmails Miss Price for monetary gain in exchange of keeping her secret safe, a special bond begins to shape up when they embark on an adventure to seek out a final magic spell when her correspondence school of witchcraft announces its closure due to the warfare.Eglantine casts a transportation spell on her bed-knob, and asks Paul, the youngest kid, to keep it, only under Paul's command, the bed can transport them to wherever he dictates. When they locate Mr. Emelius Browne (Tomlinson, recruited again for his avuncular affinity), the headmaster of the said school in London, it turns out that Mr. Browne is merely an unlucky street con artist, he is not blessed with the gift for witchcraft as Miss Price does, but he is on board for the journey nevertheless, which augurs a remotely romantic undercurrent.After an elongated set piece in Portobello Road, where a fanfare of ethnographic dancing display takes place gratuitously, the film will be channeled into the innovative passage where live-action and traditional animation studiously coalesce together in the island of Naboombu, governed by a pack of anthropomorphic wild animals. This part can be safely excised from the whole picture, narrative-wise, and presented itself as an individual cartoon short about a jejune soccer match with distinctively animalistic sketch, as back in home, Miss Price will soon realise the spell she has been looking for is just around the corner where she never cares to look.The final chapter is an act of sheer patriotism, preceded by Mr. Browne's self-deprecating retreat to play hard-to-get for a reason rather too obvious, followed by a generalised and G-rated battle between archaic museum exhibits (under her hard-earned Substitutiary Locomotion spell) and a platoon of ill-fated Nazi soldiers, reaches its well-aimed crescendo. Sadly from a grown-up's view, the story's innate shortage of any sophisticated characterisation owing to its children-pandering propensity foils any attempt to thrill audience who is looking for something a bit more than a common family treat. Only if one could watch it for the first time as a kid, which could make a grand difference after all, that's also the chance those family ventures are taking, ad infinitum.

OllieSuave-007 This movie has been compared to Mary Poppins as it features a nanny of some sorts who possesses magical powers and is assigned to babysit some children. However, I think it stands well on its own and it is somewhat more entertaining that Mary Poppins was. The plot is set in World War II England, where apprentice witch Eglantine Price (Angela Lansbury) journey, with orphans Charlie, Carrie and Paul, to meet Emelius Browne (David Tomlinson), headmaster of the Correspondence College of Witchcraft. There, Miss Price tells Mr. Browne of a plan to find the magic words for a spell known as Substitutiary Locomotion, which brings inanimate objects to life.There are tons of songs in this movie, and my favorites include the solemn but meaningful "Age of Not Believing," the mysterious "Portebello Road," the whimsical and fun "Beautiful Briny Sea" and the catchy "Substitutiary Locomotion." Angela Lansbury sang a large number of the songs and her beautiful singing voice made the music that much more enjoyable. I also enjoyed the combination of live action with animated sequences - cleverly done special effects, especially the under the ocean sequence.Unlike Mary Poppins, I thought the overall movie was somewhat more entertaining. While the film is saturated with songs, there are a lot more adventurous scenes such as the flying bed, royal court, the under the sea and climatic soldier battle sequences. The acting was more believable and less childishly annoying compared to Dick Van Dyle's character in Mary Poppins. And, Miss Price (Lansbury) took on a more nurturing role than Julie Andrews did with her Mary Poppins character and seemed to care for the children more. However, I do find the bratty Charlie character very teeth-cringing.Overall, this is a song-saturated movie and has its boring moments, but kept mostly pretty entertaining with the many uses of magic, good vs. evil aspects and imagination.Grade B-

Stompgal_87 I vaguely remember seeing bits of this film as a child and teenager, either in the film itself or in its trailer. Watching this in full for probably the first time today gave me the opportunity to write my first IMDb review of 2014 (the last review I wrote in 2013 was for 'Mary Poppins,' which this film has similar elements to) but most importantly to jot down some ideas for my written university assignment on how London has been portrayed in the history of film. Not a lot of this film takes place in or refers to London, just the children having evacuated from there and wanting to return, the Portobello Road scene and Professor Browne mentioning he used to play for Tottenham Hotspur, a popular London football team.Over to the film itself. I liked the medieval-style opening credit sequence (because I recently researched medieval art as part of another university assignment) and some of it reminded me of the Bayeux Tapestry. The technicolor cinematography is just as vivid as that in 'Mary Poppins' and the special effects are decent; however the backgrounds shown during the first bed flight were a little on the garish side despite some impressive uses of scanimation. The incidental music has the same nostalgic feel as that in 'Mary Poppins' with some whimsical and authentic hints although some parts of it sounded a bit like one of the instrumental arrangements of 'Spoonful of Sugar.' My favourite songs here are 'Portobello Road' and 'The Beautiful Briny Sea,' which lyrically reminded me of 'Under the Sea' from 'The Little Mermaid.' The other songs were pleasant if not as memorable as the two I've already mentioned. I liked the animated segments. Although they had that typical sketchy look of Disney animations from the 1960s to the 1980s, I recognised parts of the underwater scene from when they accompanied 'The Codfish Ball,' a song from 'Disney Sing-Along-Songs: The Little Mermaid,' alongside clips from the classic Silly Symphonies cartoon 'Merbabies.' While I'm not particularly a fan of football, the football match was comical in spite of its elephant-afraid-of-mouse cliché. Some of the dialogue was over-familiar but some of it was funny albeit Paul's line "It's got nothing to do with my knob'" being unintentionally funny and easy to misinterpret although he was actually referring to the magical bedknob. Angela Lansbury was charming and witty as Miss Price while David Tomlinson, who I recognised as Mr. Banks from 'Mary Poppins,' was more fun-loving than he was in said title and the children provided some amusement and adventure to the story. If I could point out any other flaws, these would be the German soldiers' dialogue not being entirely subtitled and the climax being overlong despite the creativity of army uniforms and suits of armour moving. While one reviewer found the ending hard to understand at first, I believe Paul wanted more adventures on bed to again escape from boredom and the war. Although I have compared this to 'Mary Poppins' as did other reviewers, I didn't enjoy this quite as much as the former but the animation, funny moments and music made this film worthwhile. 8/10.

jbartelone Bedknobs and Broomsticks is often compared to Mary Poppins and rightfully so as both films have a similar story line. A magical nanny is sent to look after children, both have the same leading protagonist (David Tomlinson,) both feature live film and animation, with songs by the Sherman brothers, and both came out of the Walt Disney studio.Bedknobs and Broomsticks involves an apprentice witch who wants to complete her correspondence course in beginning witchcraft, but to do this, she has to search for a magical spell called Subsitutiary Locomotion which will complete her training. The story involves Angela Lansbury, playing the witch, who flies on a magical bed with Tomlinson and her three caretakers, to an animated land attempting to retrieve the spell. In addition, the film is set in World War II, where a mixture of live Nazi's and animated creatures both try to help and hinder Lansbury, Tomlinson, and the children on their adventures. The five characters control the bed through a magical bedknob that transports them from a reality world to a fantasy world and back again.Years ago, I had a record that had the Songs From Bedknobs and Broomsticks on it and loved it! However, when I saw the film on Turner Classic Movies and later researched it, sadly I learned that this film, which could have been a classic, suffers badly because of editing and failed restoration work.The original release of the film played in limited areas and ran about two and a half hours. Disney decided to make its first cuts to the film several months later when it went into wide release. The wide release version is what I saw on Turner Classic Movies. While this film was trimmed by over twenty minutes, most likely to cater to the shorter attention spans of children at the time of wide release, you can easily spot the edits. The Eglantine number is shortened, only a few words of With a Flair remain, The Old Home Guard seems to start in the middle of the second verse of the song, and the wonderful perhaps best song in the film "A Step in The Right Direction" is not there. However, you can hear the instances of the instrumental on the soundtrack.In 1979, the film was re-released again and ludicrously cut even more to about ninety five minutes. For years this is what was played on Standard Cable and Broadcast TV. Only two songs remain in this version. In 1996, Disney attempted to reconstruct the film, but were successful only in spots. About twenty minutes of footage was found and added back into the movie. However, the song "A Step in the Right Direction" was mysteriously not found and remains "Lost." The audio track for the song was recovered, and you can hear this on the Special Edition DVD, with still shots from the film showing what the scenes looked like as the song was song.However, the discarded footage soundtrack was not recoverable, because it had been damaged or lost. Many actors were too old or had passed away and could not re-do their speaking and singing parts, so Disney had to hire extras to dub their voices over the restored footage. The dubbing is horribly bad, especially for the voice-over of one of the children, Charlie, and the voice-over for David Tomlinson, sounds nothing like him! You would think Disney could have at least found actors with voices that resembled the tones, accents, and pitches of the original dialog. It is great that several songs were recovered, but without "Step in the Right Direction," restored back to the film, which is such an uplifting and encouraging song, and the terrible dubbing, the film will be a mixed bag.Why Disney cut "Step in the Right Direction" is criminal! I think Disney should have taken more time to look for it when they did the film restoration project for the 1996 DVD. What SHOULD have been shortened is the animated soccer match, which remains a sequence that does not help the film at all. The "With A Flair" song, as well as "Eglantine" are at their full lengths on the restored DVD, as is the Portobello Road dance sequence. However, some critics feel that the extended version of Portobello Road is too long. The restored DVD has a new song called "Nobody's Problems For Me." My vote would be a choice of versions on a double-sided DVD for future release. Side 1 would contain the widespread DVD release that Turner Classic Movies plays. Side 2 would be the extended version, but WITH the originally undubbed dialog found and remastered with "A Step in the Right Direction" added in if it is ever found! The loss of "Step in the Right Direction" and the bad dubbing in the extended version hurts what could have been a great film. Bedknobs and Broomsticks has the important plot of searching for a missing spell. Tragically ironic that Disney took out bits and pieces of this film that may never be recovered. It is sad to think what this film could have been if the limited release had been LEFT ALONE!