![]() ![]() And they all rose to the occasion, they were all brilliant,’ Gilliam said. That’s what the joy of doing it was and giving these guys a chance to get out of their fucking Womble costumes and R2D2 tin cans and be people. ![]() I just love the idea of taking guys that are small and treating them like heroes, treating them like Alan Ladd, almost as tall as Alan Ladd, I think he was about three inches taller than those guys. ‘One year, I did the freak show tent so I got to see all these extraordinary people sitting around being ordinary and it really fascinated me, so that stuck with me. Populating the film with little people wasn’t just to carry the child lead, Gilliam was inspired by memories of his own youth. But I didn’t think that a kid could carry a whole movie, so I decided to put a gang around him, people the same height, and off it went, it just sort of grew from that,’ Gilliam said of his approach.Īlways room for another Python – John Cleese makes an appearance as Robin Hood ‘I wanted to do this whole film from a kid’s point of view, making a child the hero. Taking the Spielbergian approach of telling a story aimed at kids from the kids perspective, Time Bandits’ form matches its theme (just because someone’s small, doesn’t mean they’re not significant) brilliantly. Possibly influenced by the work of CS Lewis and L Frank Baum, definitely inspiring Labyrinth (itself co-created by Terry Jones, another Python), Time Bandits plays with fairytale tropes to birth a modern myth that feels as significant as Star Wars to its most passionate fans. Then, by six time travelling dwarves who fall out of his wardrobe (after a knight on horseback bursts through it) with a stolen map, to drag him on an adventure across mythic-tinged history, encountering icons such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Robin Hood, and King Agamemnon along the way. Time Bandits’ story sees eleven-year-old Kevin rescued from his humdrum existence (and tech-head parents) in two main ways. #TIME BANDIT FILM MOVIE#And that movie is Time Bandits.Įvil (David Warner) with the fate of the universe in his sights But of the two, only one is a masterpiece. Both mix fantasy and history to create a unique tone. Both are children’s fairy-tales tinged with death and darkness. The sequence appears in his debut, Jabberwocky, perhaps the closest companion for Time Bandits in his filmography. It could have been taken straight from the animations he created for Monty Python’s Flying Circus.īut the shot isn’t just a fun reference to his obliterating Python foot, it operates as a perfect metaphor for Gilliams’ career as a whole, a career that is as grubby as it is pretty, as restricted as it is free, as shocking as it is comforting. ![]() It’s beautiful, it’s gritty, it’s a subversion of expectations. The butterfly (symbolic of freedom in literature), is destroyed by crushing reality. Then, from nowhere, a dirty great boot, on the foot of a traveller, comes crashing down to crush this poetic image. A beautiful butterfly, dappled by sunshine, rests on a leaf. The very first sequence in Terry Gilliam’s illustrious (and ridiculous) filmography is one that could summarise his life’s work. ![]()
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