Slumberland review: Jason Momoa headlines a version of The Sandman for kids

Say the name “Nemo” to someone, and they’ll probably think you mean the fish from the Pixar movie. Absent that, they’ll think of the vengeful submarine captain from 20.000 Leagues Under the Sea. (Or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.) But if their first association with “Nemo” is a little boy with big dreams, you’ll know you’re talking to someone steeped in the worlds of animation, filmmaking, or comics. Winsor McCay’s early-19th-century newspaper comic Little Nemo in SlumberlandIt has inspired many creatives, including R. Crumb and Neil Gaiman as well as Federico Fellini and Maurice Sendak.

It inspired Francis Lawrence, a director most recently.ConstantineThe final movie in the Hunger Games series, starring David Guion (writing team) and Michael Handelman.Dinner for Schmucks, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb) to revisit Nemo’s world at Netflix, in a heartwarming, visually rich production called Slumberland.

Slumberland boils the “lore” of McCay’s comic strip down to its most fundamental pieces. Each time they are asleep, a child who is kind and caring returns to the magical quest. Their sidekick is a disreputable one, so they always wake up when the action reaches its climax. McCay was defeated by his own narrative. This is why it’s a smart decision. Little NemoComics are full to the brim with racial stereotyping.

In this new incarnation of Nemo is Marlow Barkley.For single parentsA young girl is forced to move from her home in a lighthouse because her parents have died. She lives with an uninformed uncle. She finds refuge in the titular Slumberland when she meets Flip (Jason Momoa), substantially reinvented from McCay’s baldly racist, clown-like caricature of an Irishman. Momoa’s version of the character is an enormous dream-outlaw/hedonist adventurer, all fangs, ram horns, clown shoes, fingerless gloves, shaggy hair, and nail polish, topped with a pink ombre trenchcoat. (My Hat is Off to Trish Sommerville, Academy Award-nominated Hunger Games Series Costumer.

Image courtesy of Netflix

Barkley plays the straight man (or girl) in the relationship, while Momoa plays her Beetlejuice — by way of the character’s cartoon incarnation, that is, where he’s Lydia Deets’ pal, not her antagonist. Flip is just wild enough to make Nemo feel like she’s getting away with something, but not so extreme that he feels It is dangerous dangerous. Momoa portrays Flip with apparent gusto. It is a clown performance that doesn’t feel clownish.Itish. He uses the ability for powerful poses that he brought to Aquaman’s DCEU show, and repurposes them instead for child-friendly hijinks. It’s Jason Momoa in perhaps his dad-est role yet, dad-bod and all.

Momoa’s diminutive star is more remarkable than Momoa. It’s one of many ways in which SlumberlandIt is well balanced. Does it exude spectacle? There are cities built of glass and underwater disasters. Canada has fighter planes-sized citizens. But Lawrence never offers spectacle for spectacle’s sake, and the creativity of the environments never becomes more important to the eye than the character action.

It’s funny! It is funny. But Slumberland is the rare action-heavy family film that doesn’t trade in pop-culture references and sarcastic asides to tickle adult funnybones. Does it contain too much exposition? Yes, there’s an underpinning of in-universe dream rules and an antagonistic bureaucracy of dream police in 1970s cosplay, functioning as rails to keep the quest on course and provide obstacles to overcome. But Slumberland never puts world-building out in front of its true center: Nemo, Flip, and Nemo’s wet blanket of an uncle, played by Chris O’Dowd in a come-from-behind third lead.

Image courtesy of Netflix

If SlumberlandIt could be excessive in any one of the categories. Although two hours may seem like a long time, in these three-hour blockbuster worlds it is quite manageable. However, this might be too much for children. While the film is enjoyable, it can be difficult to watch for children. Slumberland never made me yawn, it did make me check the playback timestamp and think, “Gosh, 40 more minutes? How?”

It is the true joy of watching Slumberland isn’t in its inventiveness or originality — it’s a B on both those fronts — but in the delight of simple themes performed well by talented players, harmonizing to greater resonance. I’m a big believer in family movies that cannot strictly be called “great” in any way, but where the filmmakers had the guts to go extremely weird. There’s an entire canon of movies like that, films that feel like fever dreams when you recall them years later.

Slumberland may not truly belong in that category, but it’s certainly closer to it than most of today’s blockbuster family-movie fare. It’s a colorful fantasy, a heartwarming time, and the kind of weirdness that just might get stuck in the head of a creative young viewer. That may be the element of the film that adapts McCay’s work best: His century-old fantasies provided the seed of an idea that keeps flowering into beautiful dreams, generation after generation.

SlumberlandNetflix streaming available now