THE GREAT LAND OF SMALL

Publicity poster for The Great Land of Small (© Vojtĕch Jasný/Telefilm Camera/New World Pictures – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

On 30 April 2020, I watched The Great Land of Small, a Canadian curiosity of a family-friendly fantasy film from 1986 that I bought cheaply in ex-rental big box VHS videocassette format last year (very difficult/expensive to find in DVD format), because I'd long wanted to add it to my collection (and which plays beautifully, I'm happy to say).

Directed by Vojtĕch Jasný, this nowadays little-known movie is all about two children who make friends with a diminutive leprechaun-like entity in Quebec who has had his bag of gold dust stolen by a mean and decidedly megalomaniacal hunter. Only those who believe in him (such as the children) can see the little guy, named Fritz, who comes from the magical Great Land of Small, on the other side of the rainbow.

 

Also befriended by Mimmick, a somewhat strange fellow derided by the locals as a half-wit but who in reality is more than a tad magical himself, the children and Fritz experience all sorts of high jinks and minor perils before in order to evade the hunter they flee to said Great Land of Small, a land that seems almost entirely populated by the Cirque du Soleil - as indeed it is, really!!

All ends well, however, as one would expect from such a whimsical movie as this, whimsical in fact to the point of being ever so slightly twee at times. No-one really famous is in it unless you remember who played the character talking backwards in the surreal TV series Twin Peaks and who plays both Fritz and his twin brother the King of the Great Land of Small here, i.e. Michael J. Anderson.

One missed opportunity was not converting into a unicorn via some easily-achievable trick cinematography the beautiful snow-white horse named Merlin that features in this movie but does virtually nothing - he'd have made a very fine, believable unicorn and would have added some additional magic in places where both pacing and plot pall somewhat. He could have looked just like a normal white horse to those who don't believe in magic but as a bona fide unicorn to those who do, which is the basic premise of unicorn reality in classical legend.

 

Never mind, this strange but easy-going little movie does contain butterfly humans and a live boulder with eyes and a mouth, so I suppose you can't have everything.

 

What you can have, however, is a sneak preview of The Great Land of Small by clicking here to view its official trailer on YouTube, or here (at least at the time of uploading this review) to watch the entire movie free of charge, again on YouTube.

And to view a complete listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE!