The Wind in the Willows

[This post is an entry in Moon in the Gutter's MIA on Region 1 Tribute Month.]

When preparing for this post, I dug my copy of The Wind in the Willows out from underneath about twenty other videotapes, toppling a few of them in the process. I figured this couldn't have been good for the condition of a 22-year-old VHS, and indeed, upon inserting it in the VCR my worst prognosis seemed confirmed. The picture was dismally dark so that the animated characters' features were obscured and the backgrounds could not be distinguished. In addition, the tracking was awful and the whole experience resembled watching some garbled dispatch from outer space. Yet the sound was fine, which only added to whole surreality thing. All in all, I took the catastrophic destruction of a childhood memento in stride. I considered a poignant blog post along the lines of "all things must pass," but first I played around with the VCR a bit and discovered it was a technical problem. There the tape was, restored to its full glory, eventually even without tracking issues. Yet the distanced, warping effect of the first images lingered in my mind and colored how I saw the rest of the movie.

In 1987, in an event which I dimly recall, my father taped an ABC airing of The Wind in the Willows, a Rankin/Bass animated production of the Kenneth Grahame classic (I still own a lavishly illustrated edition thereof). The cartoon, watched again and again on various occasions, was woven into the fabric of my childhood and as the years passed, it became more and more a relic of some half-forgotten, romanticized era. We only taped one commercial break, but it distinguishes the entire tape with its colorful Fruit Loops spots, uber-80s scored Capri Sun bits, and claymation galore. Every time the channel is ready to break for a commercial, a claymation cowboy stands in front of a brick wall and croons, "After these messages, we'll be riiiight back," (later a 50s chorus replaces him). The juxtaposition of these once-modern, now-fondly-dated artifacts with the wistful, pastoral Edwardian milieu of Grahame's tale only adds to the impression that one is looking through some kind of portal across time (perhaps several layers of time).

So far I've spoken only of the nostalgic aura around watching the movie. As for the movie itself, it's hard to be objective (as I've already demonstrated, just the experience of sliding into the VCR triggers all sorts of associations and minor epiphanies). The animation is admittedly not Disney-calibre; often the backgrounds are surprisingly flat and there is little of the virtuoso inventiveness one finds filling out the corners of Uncle Walt's classics. Yet the visuals are often just suggestive enough to evoke the proper mood of quasi-mystical reverence of nature, and especially the tremulous bowing before the Holy Trinity of the Willows story: the River Bank, the Wild Wood, and the Wide World.

The music is something else. I'd describe it as full-fledged, which leads to occasionally overwrought missteps (the song accompanying Toad's various motor mishaps) and plunges into sentiment which are either poignant or treacly depending upon your sensibility (Judy Collins singing the title track). But there are a number of delightfully idiosyncratic numbers, including Badger bellowing his misanthropic anthem "I Hate Company," a courtroom of ghoulish jurors (all the human beings in this film look positively wretched, which is at once fascinating and repellent) crooning about Toad's guilt, and my personal favorite, the army of weasels decadently vandalizing Toad's home while the amphibian languishes in prison for grand theft auto. The furry hooligans cackle to one another about drinking Toad's champagne, smoking his cigars, and writing on his stationary. "Writing on another man's stationary?" the head weasel gasps, as the music comes to a sudden halt. "No gentleman would ever write on another man's stationary!" The weasels agree not to do so, resume their throaty chorus and are summarily interrupted when their leader feels they've reached another social faux pas (invariably something relatively minor compared to the havoc they're wreaking).

The music also floats in the background of many scenes, embodying the subtle melancholy which undergirds Grahame's warm prose in the book. Two scenes stand out in this regard; they are my two favorite scenes from the story, and both scenes are often excluded from adaptations of Wind in the Willows. Their inclusion here, coupled with my childhood connection to this film, goes a long way to confirming this as my favorite version of the story. The first scene finds Ratty in a wistful mood, tossing his scraps of abandoned poetry into the river and dreaming of following some vague wanderlust. A salty old sea rat hobbles down to Ratty's dock and, with a little prodding, relates glorious visions of Grecian ports and Venetian canals, of smelling the salty air and traveling towards the sunset aboard a ship bound for God knows where.

The imagery and the music carry on the resonant romanticism of the passage, which is one of the key moments in Grahame's narrative (here it is tied into the following scene, whereas in the book it appears in its own closed-off chapter, one reason why it's so easily axed from the plot). I don't want to write too much about this scene, nor about the passage which follows, featuring a mystical encounter with the piper at the gates of dawn, because I think I'm going to post something I wrote a few years ago about the book and these chapters in particular. But the fact that the film chooses to include these moments shows that it understands something about the story's spirit, something which so many other adaptations miss. They get the appeal of Toad's character and his various adventures, and they seem to understand the laconic, warm spring day feel of the English countryside which permeates the story's sensibility. But they miss the melancholy, the restlessness, and the mysticism which sharpens the mood of the book and makes it so powerful for readers well into adulthood.

Partly as a result of including these scenes, the movie gives all four major characters their due; in other versions, Toad's expansive, spoiled, charismatic immaturity eclipses the more subtle personalities of his friends and commandeers the narrative as if it was one of the shiny motor cars he's prone to pilfer. But here Moley's plainspoken curiosity and Badger's headstrong, confident authority are given ample coverage. Most notably, Ratty manages to straddle his offputting prickliness and stirring romanticism and emerges as perhaps the central figure of the story. This is due in large part, I think, to that elusive, magical echo in Roddy McDowell's voice. The actor is wonderful as Ratty, and even after discovering - to my impressed surprise - who was speaking through that whiskered mouth, I still hear the character while watching the movie and the same goes for all the major actors in the cast: Charles Nelson Reilly as Toad, Jose Ferrer as Badger, and Eddie Bracken as Mole. Though none of these (except perhaps Reilly) would seem obvious choices, each one fits the part brilliantly, and this is really phenomenal voice casting when you think about it.

Wind in the Willows is a unique adaptation, and one whose appeal is hard to put your finger on. It follows the book's loose structure; but without Grahame's flowing prose to smooth the bumps, it ends up seeming a little more haphazard than it should as it jumps from one adventure to the next. It is not lean, nor especially slick, but it's got something: a darkness as Mole descends into the netherworld of the Wild Wood, a wistfulness as Ratty is encouraged to dream of far-off places, a baroque elegance as Toad parades before a mirror in his estate, a fertile sensuality as Pan guides the woodland creatures on a midnight search through the brooks and eddies of the river bank timber. In other words, it points outward in other directions, allowing the mind to wander, off towards the horizon, dreaming of what foreign ports are calling out with the siren's lilt, what creepy forests invite fearful explorations in the dead of night, what shiny motor cars sit humming along at the edge of a dirt road somewhere, sputtering in the crisp air, gleaming in the early-morning sunlight, just waiting to be taken for a joy ride.



Read my complete and exhaustive "Wind in the Willows" series from a few years later, examining the book and film adaptation in detail.