Look not at the shoe factory in the background of the film, but at the crazy animals in the jungle.
It’s that time of year again, when AAM takes a look at movies with manufacturing themes. This time, we’re looking at 1995’s “Jumanji” Is it a bit silly? Does it have a few plot holes? Yeah, maybe. But it mostly holds together!
Here’s the synopsis: Jumanji tells the story of Alan, the teenage son of a wealthy, blunt New England businessman (a key detail for us). In the 1960s, he digs up a cursed board game (called, you guessed it, Jumanji) from the ground at a construction site next to his father’s shoe factory. That night at the family mansion, Alan and a friend accidentally play the board game, and an unlucky roll of the dice early on literally sucks him into the game’s fantastical, dangerous jungle setting. His friend panics and runs out of the house, but no one believes her story. Alan is missing and is presumed dead, and his father, who everyone in town thinks killed him, pours time and energy into searching for his son. But he never finds him. The boy is trapped inside the board game. His father’s shoe manufacturing business declines, the factory closes, and the town declines.
on the other hand, Decades Alan is left stranded in the jungle. In the 1990s, when a new family moves into the long-abandoned mansion, the kids find the game in a box in the attic and, with a roll of the dice, inadvertently free the missing Alan. He grows up to be a sort of Robinson Crusoe, played by the late, great Robin Williams, and is understandably terrified of Jumanji. Nevertheless, he agrees to finish the game he started to rid the town of the unleashed, over-the-top jungle animals, and put everything back together again.
And yet the film feels real, and it’s all about the shoe factory. The opening sequence is set in an old, rosy America: a small New Hampshire town with clean streets lined with picket fenced houses and a tidy town square surrounded by bustling shops. The father’s shoe factory is portrayed as a pillar of the community, an institution that carries the weight of a local economy bustling with employees. This is not to say that mid-century New England didn’t have its socio-economic problems, but it did have an established shoemaking industry (in this case, shoes) that went back centuries. And despite its shortcomings, and despite the sort of place depicted in “Jumanji,” There was a real wart. – Life is relatively good, was This is the reality of many post-war factory towns, and it’s the slice of American life depicted in the first 10 minutes (ignore the bullies and the earlier scenes set in the 19th century).
But as mentioned above, things change when Alan disappears and his father becomes totally focused on finding him. The film only has 30 seconds of dialogue explaining this, but when the shoe factory goes bankrupt, the town follows suit. When Alan returns, the town is filled with liquor stores and sex shops. There are a lot of homeless people. The town is deserted. It’s only when Alan and the ’90s kids (and Bonnie Hunt, who plays his grown-up friend) finish the game that everything resets. The film’s timeline switches to a thriving town in the 1960s. The world is back to normal, Alan has grown up and taken over the family business, and the film ends with the ’90s again, with a thriving community built around the shoe factory.
and it is That’s where it gets off track.
No! Jumanji is a Magic Board Game Giant mosquitoes and spiders, man-eating plants, hordes of zebras and rhinos appear. They swallow a magical board game. No, the ending takes us back to the 60s and we’re detached from reality. Until then, the movie is Suggestive it is, “Great Man” Theorysuggests that history is driven by the actions of heroes and villains, whose individual actions shape the course of human events. Up until now, the film has suggested that Alan’s father has been vital to the lifeblood of this New Hampshire mill town, but that all falls apart when he is distracted by his son’s disappearance.
Once the game ends and the timeline resets, support for this great man theory is solid: the jungle is contained, the factories continue to thrive, Alan’s father (and subsequently Alan) remains at the helm, and prosperity continues uninterrupted.
and it is do not have The experience of American shoe manufacturing over the past 50 years. The size of the industry in terms of jobs has declined sharply since the 1970s as shoe manufacturers outsourced production to low-cost labor markets in Asia. Shoe manufacturing was not an industry Washington wanted to protect, so it didn’t.
Thanks The Berry Amendment Demand for American-made shoes from the U.S. military is steady. In fact, there are still hundreds of shoe factories in the U.S., but they are relatively small and make niche, expensive products, like the well-made New Balance sneakers I own. But you’ll hardly ever find American-made shoes at Target or Walmart. 2021 Analysis The domestic footwear market was almost entirely supplied by imports, which “accounted for 95.9 percent of U.S. consumption that year,” according to a U.S. International Trade Commission report.
To be honest, unless Alan’s father (or Alan himself) was a rare exception rebelling against the rule, they would probably have closed their factories in New Hampshire and emigrated to find cheaper labor overseas.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t watch “Jumanji,” which is available on multiple streaming services. I watched it recently with my kids. Williams: his I thought it was too scary for kids. My kids loved it. It’s not exactly art, but… teeth The special effects alone are a joy to watch – Williams explains: As “mutts on steroids” and as the actors’ performances.
