Film Analysis - Jumanji

I actually never saw Jumanji as a kid. I first saw it some two years ago at one of the first Family Home Evenings I had when moving to Provo. Full of some heavy subject matter within the first 30 minutes, loss of a friend, death of parents, economic devastation, it really sends the mind racing. I thought it was rather scary for a children's movie, but imaginative nonetheless, expounding on some difficult themes like grief and denial after the loss/death of a close friend, and the error in avoiding "dangerous" past-times. I couldn't help but think of the film as a hardly-cautionary tale of Ouija boards.

In a small town in New Hampshire, Alan Parrish and his best friend Sarah Whittle escape the embarrassment of getting their friend laid off from the Parrish factory by playing a mysterious game that they excavated from god-knows when. When Alan is sucked into the game, Sarah runs away, leaving Alan stuck inside for 26 years. A new set of children discover the game when dealing with much more sever grief, and release Alan. Together they finish the game, surviving the raucous ordeal of wild, jungle-dwelling predators, and eventually undoing all of the horrors that occurred to them when they were younger.

Sadly underplayed is Sarah's denial over the disappearance of her greatest childhood friend. The game explicitly states to the player, "Do not play unless you intend to finish," but her fear over the power of the game pushes her away, even to the extent of helping her friend. A profound apology over her friend - and her own - lost youth brings them back together. Jumanji almost act a symbol for the grieving process itself, and the damage of stagnation in the first stage: denial and isolation. The invitation of the game itself as a "way to leave the world behind," is so poetically deceptive. It acts a specter of evil promising transcendent imagination, but only offering debilitating escapism.

The intrigue of the game can be likened to my own experience fooling around with Ouija boards as teenager. While I never found anything particularly extraordinary with my experience playing with the board, the mechanics of Jumanji resemble the mystery of Ouija, such as the way it "moves on its own, " and plays out riddles according the roller's personal situation. At least in Ouija, this is purely circumstantial, because the player simply draws from his own anxieties to mislead other players. In Jumanji, its riddles, the most difficult of which is the re-appearance of Alan's deceased father to hunt and kill him, aim to prey on the fears and stunted growth of the protagonists. Jumanji deceptively imagines a cruel, merciless world as the idiomatic "jungle out there," despite the endearing friendships that get us through it.

It's sort of a shame that I didn't see this movie when I was younger. Ouijas never really did me wrong, but it certainly spooked a lot of my friends, an experience which may have been rich in imaginative lies, but unkind to the health of my own friends. I suppose maybe we don't need board games to love our time with friends. We just need our own minds, and our own imagination.