Return to Oz – the creepiest Disney film ever to grace the screen – turned 30 this year, joining Netflix and prompting an expanded re-release of David Shire’s spellbinding score.
The first and last children’s film by made Walter Murch (with uncredited assistance from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg) was critically panned on its release in 1985. Audiences expected to be swept back to Judy Garland’s Oz, a rosy-cheeked world of munchkins, rainbows, felt lions and sing-alongs. What they got was a decidedly darker adventure.
Dorothy – played with solemn authority by a young Fairuza Balk – is now a pale insomniac, locked up in a psychiatric institution by her benevolent but careworn Aunt Em, who hopes Dr Worley’s electroconvulsive machines will cure Dorothy’s fretful delusions of Oz. Freed from her gurney straps by a mysterious stranger (Ozma), the two girls flee, braving a storm-lashed night that – like the tornado – transports Dorothy back to Oz, only to find her beloved wonderland is now a wasteland under the rule of the Nome King.
Not exactly pre-adolescent birthday party fare, as a gaggle of friends and I would discover one February afternoon in the late 80s, but it was far more faithful to L Frank Baum’s original vision of a young, proto-feminist fantasia than MGM’s Technicolor classic. Over the years, this eerie opus has become a cherished favourite of mine – partly because I identified so passionately with Balk’s queer, gothy heroine, and partly because Shire’s magnificent score did so much to make Murch’s eldritch vision sing.
It’s easy to see why viewers found Return upsetting; this is a tale of traumatised children navigating a world run by cruel (Nurse Wilson), ineffective (Uncle Henry) and depleted (Aunt Em) adults. There’s a bitter longing here too; Dorothy wants desperately to be believed by adults, to be able to exist in “in two places at the same time”. Yet Shire’s score manages to interpret all this pain with unforgettable tenderness – bringing a clarity to the darkness while finding a magic that so many critics missed: a rich and vivid thing coloured by friendship, devotion and fierce female resilience. In Shire’s hands, a starched and haunted Dorothy becomes a complex champion, softened with wistful strings and livened by warm, Kansas brass.
How did Shire manage to craft such an timeless, spellbinding thing? “I wanted [it] to hold together like Pictures at an Exhibition or Peter and the Wolf … [to feel] like a concert suite rather than a collection of cues,” he explained to CinemaScore, shortly after the film’s release. There are flourishes of nostalgic, turn-of-the-century styles here – particular in the Rag March’s many variations – but Shire opted for a character-driven arc rather than era-pinned signifiers, diligently crafting each misfit, hero or villain their own distinctive theme: “I wanted each of the ‘little’ characters to have a characteristic small ensemble sound and [to] pit all of them against the larger symphonic forces that mostly represent the ‘large’ forces of evil (the Nome king and Mombi) that they are up against.”
For Tik-Tock, Dorothy’s rotund, mechanical lieutenant – a brass march of comic pomp; for Jack Pumpkinhead, a bass clarinet waltz; for cluckish pal Bellina – nervous, pecking high reeds; for Gump, the taxidermy moose head brought to life with some magic words (“weaugh, teaugh, peaugh!”) and a stolen, xylophone-dappled sprinkle of powder of life – a clockwork-type vamp and a triumph of horns when he takes flight from Mombi’s castle, strapped to the front of an enchanted getaway sofa-plane.
Mombi’s diabolical villain plays her own theme – a cold, baroque mandolin melody – while seated in her palace of mirrors. Her servants, the mad, peacockish Wheelers, are heralded by squealing, metallic percussion, while the Nome King, Dorothy’s final foe, is cast in a motif of whole-tone harmonies that descend in scale as his reign falls. As Shire explained: “I tried to mirror his psychological disintegration with a gradual harmonic one.”
While the Nome King unravels, Dorothy prevails, saving her friends and freeing both the Scarecrow and Princess Ozma – the rightful ruler of Oz. Murch saw Ozma as Dorothy’s mirror self, Shire said: “According to Walter, Dorothy is going back to Oz to rescue and thus be able to reconcile herself with Ozma, and somehow find a way to be true to the world of her imagination while living in the real world.” That reconciliation arrives as the credits roll, Dorothy’s violin signature married in giddy, soaring synthesis with Ozma’s cello theme.
As a child, I understood Dorothy’s struggle – that ambivalent ache for autonomy, escapism and the refuge of other, secret worlds. Years on, I still feel it, exquisitely articulated in the twinkling strings and thudding timpani of Return to Oz’s opening sequence. In an age where extended adolescence is the new norm, music that reconnects us to our childhood selves can be a radical, healing thing – particularly for women.
Return to Oz may have sunk at the box office, but the film and its score remain a treasure – familiar and yet otherworldly. It’s the sound of a place where the mundane and the magical can coexist, where messages are delivered via shooting stars, trees grow lunch and brave, lost girls can traverse worlds to save each other.
