Jumanji (1995)

Jumanji is a 1995 American fantasy adventure film directed by Joe Johnston from a screenplay by Jonathan Hensleigh, Greg Taylor, and Jim Strain. Loosely based on Chris Van Allsburg’s picture book of the same name, the film is the first installment of the Jumanji franchise. It stars Robin Williams, Bonnie Hunt, Kirsten Dunst, Jonathan Hyde, and David Alan Grier. The story centers on a supernatural board game that releases jungle-based hazards upon its players with every turn they take. As a boy in 1969, Alan Parrish became trapped inside the game itself while playing with his friend, Sarah Whittle. Twenty-six years later, siblings Judy and Peter Shepherd find the game, begin playing and then unwittingly release the now-adult Alan. After tracking down Sarah,

the quartet resolves to finish the game in order to reverse all of the destruction it has caused. The film was released on December 15, 1995, to mixed-to-positive reviews, but was a box office success, grossing $263 million worldwide on a budget of approximately $65 million. It was the 10th highest-grossing film of 1995. The film spawned an animated television series, which aired from 1996 to 1999, and was followed by a related film, Zathura: A Space Adventure (2005), and two indirect sequels, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) and Jumanji: The Next Level (2019), with Columbia Pictures taking over distribution for all subsequent films.

Plot.

In 1969, Alan Parrish lives with his parents Sam and Carol in Brantford, New Hampshire. One day, he escapes a group of bullies and retreats to Sam’s shoe factory. He meets his friend, Carl Bentley, who reveals a new shoe prototype he made by himself. Alan misplaces the shoe and damages a conveyor belt, but Carl takes responsibility and loses his job. After the bullies attack Alan and steal his bicycle, Alan follows the sound of tribal drumbeats to a construction site. He finds a board game called Jumanji, which was buried 100 years earlier, and brings it home. That night, after arguing with Sam about attending a boarding school, Alan plans to run away, but his friend, Sarah Whittle, returns his bicycle. Alan shows her Jumanji and invites her to play. With each roll of the dice, the game piece moves by itself and a cryptic message describing the roll’s outcome appears in the crystal ball at the center of the board.

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After Alan inadvertently rolls a five, a message tells him that “In the jungle you must wait, until the dice read five or eight”, and he is sucked into the game. Afterwards, a swarm of bats appears and chases Sarah out of the mansion. Twenty-six years later, Judy and Peter Shepherd move into the now-vacant Parrish mansion with their aunt, Nora, after their parents died in an accident on a ski trip in Canada the winter before. Discovering Jumanji in the attic, Judy and Peter begin playing it. Their rolls summons a swarm of giant mosquitoes and a group of monkeys. The game rules state everything will be restored when the game ends, so they continue playing. Peter next rolls a five which releases a lion and a grown up Alan. As Alan makes his way out, he meets Carl, who is now working as a police officer. Alan, Judy, and Peter go to the now-abandoned shoe factory and learn that Sam abandoned the business to search for his son after his disappearance,

until his death in 1991. Eventually, the factory closed, sending Brantford into economic decline. Realizing they need Sarah to finish the game, the three locate Sarah, now haunted by both Jumanji and Alan’s disappearance, and persuade her to join them. Sarah’s first move releases fast-growing carnivorous plants which grab Peter, who was saved by Alan. Alan’s next move releases a big-game hunter named Van Pelt, whom Alan first met in the game’s inner world and start to hunt. The next roll summons a stampede of rhinos, elephants and zebras, after avoiding the stampede, a pelican steals the game and takes it to a river. Van Pelt begins to hunt Alan again after he bought a new gun from a gun store. Peter retrieves the game, but Alan is arrested by Carl. Peter starts to transform into a monkey after he tried to cheat the game. Back in town, the monkeys and the stampede wreaks havoc, and Van Pelt steals the game.

Production.

While Peter Guber was visiting Boston, he invited author Chris Van Allsburg, who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, to option his book. Van Allsburg wrote one of the screenplay’s drafts, which he described as “sort of trying to imbue the story with a quality of mystery and surrealism”. Van Allsburg added that the studio nearly abandoned the project if not for his film treatment, which earned him a story credit given it added story material that was not from the book. TriStar Pictures agreed to finance the film on the condition that Robin Williams plays the starring role. Williams turned down the role based on the first script he was given, but director Joe Johnston and screenwriters Jonathan Hensleigh, Greg Taylor and Jim Strain undertook extensive rewrites and Williams accepted. Johnston had reservations over casting Williams because of the actor’s reputation for improvisation, fearing that he wouldn’t adhere to the script. However, Williams understood that it was “a tightly structured story” and filmed the scenes as outlined in the script,

often filming duplicate scenes afterwards where he was allowed to improvise with Bonnie Hunt. Tom Hanks was the first choice to play Alan Parrish but turned it down due to his commitments to Apollo 13. Other stars were considered, including: Dan Aykroyd, Bruce Willis, Michael Keaton, Kevin Kline, Chevy Chase, Sean Penn, Kevin Costner, Richard Dreyfuss, Michael Douglas, Rupert Everett, Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Bill Paxton, Bryan Cranston, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Alec Baldwin. Willis was unavailable because he was working on Die Hard with a Vengeance. Kirstie Alley was considered for Sarah Whittle while Scarlett Johansson auditioned for Judy Shepherd. Shooting took place in various New England locales, mainly Keene, New Hampshire, which represented the story’s fictional town of Brantford, New Hampshire, and North Berwick, Maine, where the Olde Woolen Mill stood in for the Parrish Shoe Factory. Additional filming took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, where a mock-up of the Parrish house was built.

Release, Home Media.

Jumanji was released in theaters on December 15, 1995. Jumanji was first released on VHS on May 14, 1996, and re-released as a Collector’s Series DVD on January 25, 2000. In the UK, the film was also released on DVD as a special edition bundled with the Jumanji board game. The film was first released on Blu-ray on June 28, 2011, and re-released as a 20th Anniversary Edition on September 14, 2015. A restored version was released on December 5, 2017 on Blu-ray and 4K UHD to coincide with the premiere of the sequel, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.

Box office, Critical response.

Jumanji did well at the box office, opening at No. 1 and earning $100.5 million in the United States and Canada and an additional $162.3 million overseas, bringing the worldwide gross to $262.8 million. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 52% from 46 reviews, with an average rating of 6/10. The site’s consensus reads: “A feast for the eyes with a somewhat shaky plot, Jumanji is a good adventure that still offers a decent amount of fun for the whole family”. On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 39 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating “generally unfavorable reviews”. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of “A−” on an A+ to F scale. Roger Ebert rated the film one-and-a-half out of four stars,

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criticizing its reliance on special effects to convey its story which he felt was lacking. He questioned the decision to rate the film PG rather than PG-13 as he felt that young children would be traumatized by much of the film’s imagery, which he said made the film “about as appropriate for smaller children as, say, Jaws”. He specifically cited Peter’s monkey transformation as making him “look like a Wolf Man … with a hairy snout and wicked jaws” that were likely to scare children. Regarding the board game’s unleashing one hazard after another at its main characters, Ebert concluded: “It’s like those video games where you achieve one level after another by killing and not getting killed. The ultimate level for young viewers will be being able to sit all the way through the movie”.

Cast:

Robin Williams as Alan Parrish
Adam Hann-Byrd as young Alan Parrish
Kirsten Dunst as Judy Shepherd
David Alan Grier as Carl “The Sole-man” Bentley
Bonnie Hunt as Sarah Whittle
Laura Bell Bundy as young Sarah Whittle.
Jonathan Hyde as Sam Parrish
Bebe Neuwirth as Nora Shepherd
Bradley Pierce as Peter Shepherd
James Handy as the Exterminator.
Patricia Clarkson as Carol Parrish.
Hyde also portrays Van Pelt, a big-game hunter who resides in Jumanji.

Jumanji (1995) Biography, Plot, Production Home Media, Trailer.