Jumanji (1995)

***Jumanji*** is a 1995 American fantasy adventure film directed by Joe Johnston. It is an adaptation of the 1981 children's book of the same name by Chris Van Allsburg and the first installment of the *Jumanji* franchise. The film was written by Van Allsburg, Greg Taylor, Jonathan Hensleigh, and Jim Strain and stars Robin Williams, Kirsten Dunst, David Alan Grier, Bonnie Hunt, Bradley Pierce, Jonathan Hyde, and Bebe Neuwirth.

The story centers on a supernatural board game that releases jungle-based hazards upon its players with every turn they take. As a boy in 1969, Alan Parrish became trapped inside the game itself while playing with his best friend Sarah Whittle. Twenty-six years later, in 1995, siblings Judy and Peter Shepherd find the game, begin playing and then unwittingly release the now-adult Alan. After tracking down Sarah, the quartet resolves to finish the game in order to reverse all of the destruction it has caused.

The film was released on December 15, 1995, to mixed reviews, but was a box office success, grossing $263 million worldwide on a budget of approximately $65 million. It was the 10th highest-grossing film of 1995.

The film spawned an animated television series, which aired from 1996 to 1999, and was followed by a related film, *Zathura: A Space Adventure* (2005), and two direct sequels, *Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle* (2017) and *Jumanji: The Next Level* (2019), with Columbia Pictures taking over distribution.

## Plot

In 1869 Brantford, New Hampshire, two boys bury a chest. A century later in 1969, Alan Parrish escapes a group of bullies and retreats to a shoe company owned by his father Sam. He finds Carl Bentley, an employee and friend of his, who reveals a new shoe prototype he made himself. Alan misplaces the shoe and damages a machine, but Carl takes responsibility and loses his job. After being attacked by the bullies, who steal his bicycle, Alan follows the sound of tribal drumbeats to a construction site. He finds the chest containing a board game called *Jumanji* and takes it home.

At home, after an argument with Sam about attending boarding school, Alan plans to run away. His friend Sarah Whittle comes to return his bicycle, and he shows her *Jumanji* and invites her to play. With each roll of the dice, the game piece moves by itself and a cryptic message describing the roll's outcome appears in the crystal ball at the board's center. Sarah reads the first message on the board and hears an eerie sound. Alan then unintentionally rolls the dice after being startled by the chiming clock; a message tells him to wait in a jungle until someone rolls a five or eight, and he is sucked into the game. Afterward, a swarm of bats appears and chases Sarah out of the mansion.

Twenty-six years later in 1995, Judy and Peter Shepherd move into the vacant Parrish mansion with their aunt Nora after their parents' deaths in a car crash in Canada that winter. Two days later, Judy and Peter find *Jumanji* in the attic and begin playing it. Their rolls summon big mosquitoes and a swarm of monkeys. The game rules state that everything will be restored when the game ends, so they continue playing. Peter's next roll releases a lion and an adult Alan. As Alan makes his way out, he meets Carl, who is now a police officer. Alan, Judy, and Peter go to the now-abandoned shoe factory where a homeless man tells Alan that Sam abandoned the business to search for Alan after his disappearance, until his death in 1991 along with his wife. Eventually, the factory closed, causing Brantford's economic decline.

Realizing that they need Sarah to finish the game, the three locate her--now suffering mental trauma from both *Jumanji* and Alan's disappearance--and persuade her to join them. Sarah's first move releases fast-growing carnivorous vines, and Alan's next move releases a big-game hunter named Van Pelt, whom Alan first met in the jungle. The next roll summons a herd of various animals that stampede, and a pelican steals the game. Peter retrieves it, but Carl arrests Alan. Peter tries to win the game by cheating, but instead, he turns into a monkey and his game piece returns to the start. Back in town, Sarah, Judy, and Peter go to the bank to try to bail Alan out. Meanwhile, the stampede wreaks havoc and Van Pelt steals the game. Peter, Sarah, and Judy track Van Pelt to a department store, where they set booby traps to subdue him and retrieve the game; after identifying himself to Carl, Alan is freed. When the four return to the mansion, jungle wildlife has completely overrun it. The next turn causes a monsoon to flood the house's main floor, and a large crocodile chases the group before Carl and Nora get all the water drained. Everyone heads for the attic where Sarah takes her turn; the floor turns to quicksand which almost swallows Alan. Judy rolls the dice, freezing the floor, saving Alan from being swallowed up by the floor. Peter rolls next and large spiders suddenly appear. Judy attempts to fight them off, but accidentally finds one of the plants, which shoots her with a poisonous barb.

Sarah takes her turn, resulting in an earthquake that splits the Parrish house in two. Alan is freed and falls through the floor, along with the game. Alan manages to recover the game and is about to take his turn when Van Pelt appears. When Alan drops the dice, he wins the game, which causes everything that happened as a result of the game to be reversed.

Alan and Sarah return to 1969 as children but have memories of everything that happened. Alan reconciles with his father and admits that he was responsible for the shoe that damaged the factory's machine. Carl is rehired, and Sam finally accepts Alan for who he is and tells him he doesn't need to attend boarding school. Alan and Sarah throw *Jumanji* into a river and Sarah kisses Alan, saying she would do it before she "feels too much like a kid."

26 years later, Alan and Sarah are married and expecting their first child. Alan's parents are still alive and successfully running the family business. Alan and Sarah meet Judy, Peter, and their parents Jim and Martha for the first time during a Christmas party. Alan offers Jim a job and convinces them to cancel their upcoming ski trip, preventing their deaths. The film ends somewhere else in the world, where two young French-speaking girls hear drumbeats while walking on a beach. *Jumanji* is seen lying partially buried in the sand.

## Cast

* Robin Williams as Alan Parrish III, a man trapped in Jumanji for 26 years
	+ Adam Hann-Byrd as Young Alan
* Kirsten Dunst as Judy Shepherd, Peter's older sister
* David Alan Grier as Carl Bentley, an employee at Sam's shoe factory and Alan's oldest friend, who later becomes a police officer
* Bonnie Hunt as Sarah Whittle, Alan's friend who is traumatized by Jumanji and devastated by Alan's disappearance
	+ Laura Bell Bundy as Young Sarah
* Jonathan Hyde as Van Pelt, a big-game hunter from Jumanji who is dead set to hunt Alan and other players to prevent them from winning the game
	+ Hyde also portrays Samuel Parrish, Alan's father
* Bebe Neuwirth as Nora Shepherd, Judy and Peter's aunt
* Bradley Pierce as Peter Shepherd, Judy's younger brother
* James Handy as The Exterminator
* Patricia Clarkson as Carol-Anne Parrish, Alan's mother
* Malcolm Stewart as James Shepherd, Judy and Peter's father
* Annabel Kershaw as Martha Shepherd, Judy and Peter's mother
* Gary Joseph Thorup as Billy Jessup, the bullies' cowardly leader
* Frank Welker provides the special vocal effects

## Production

Template:Expand section
While Peter Guber was visiting Boston, he invited author Chris Van Allsburg, who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, to option his book. Van Allsburg wrote one of the screenplay's drafts, which he described as "sort of trying to imbue the story with a quality of mystery and surrealism". Van Allsburg added that the studio nearly abandoned the project if not for his film treatment, which earned him a story credit given it added story material that was not from the book.

TriStar Pictures agreed to finance the film on the condition that Robin Williams plays the starring role. However, Williams turned down the role based on the first script he was given. Only after director Joe Johnston and screenwriters Jonathan Hensleigh, Greg Taylor and Jim Strain undertook extensive rewrites did Williams accept. Johnston had reservations over casting Williams because of the actor's reputation for improvisation, fearing that he wouldn't adhere to the script. However, Williams understood that it was "a tightly structured story" and filmed the scenes as outlined in the script, often filming duplicate scenes afterwards where he was allowed to improvise with Bonnie Hunt.

Shooting took place in various New England locales, mainly Keene, New Hampshire, which represented the story's fictional town of Brantford, New Hampshire, and North Berwick, Maine, where the Olde Woolen Mill stood in for the Parrish Shoe Factory. Additional filming took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, where a mock-up of the Parrish house was built.

Special effects were a combination of more traditional techniques like puppetry and animatronics (provided by Amalgamated Dynamics) with state-of-the-art digital effects overseen by Industrial Light & Magic. ILM developed two new software programs specially for *Jumanji*, one called iSculpt, which allowed the illustrators to create realistic facial expressions on the computer-generated animals in the film, and another that for the first time created realistic digital hair, used on the monkeys and the lion. Actor Bradley Pierce (Peter) underwent three and a half hours of prosthetic makeup application daily for a period of two and a half months to film the scenes where he transformed into a monkey.

The film was dedicated to visual effects supervisor Stephen L. Price, who died before the film's release.

the filmings began in October 1994 and wrapp in January 1995

## Release

*Jumanji* was released in theaters on December 15, 1995.

### Home media

*Jumanji* was first released on VHS on May 14, 1996, and re-released as a Collector's Series DVD on January 25, 2000. In the UK, the film was also released on DVD as a special edition bundled with the *Jumanji* board game.Template:Citation needed The film was first released on Blu-ray on June 28, 2011, and re-released as a 20th Anniversary Edition on September 14, 2015. A restored version was released on December 5, 2017 on Blu-ray and 4K UHD to coincide with the premiere of the sequel, *Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle*.

## Soundtrack

### Label

Epic Soundtrax

**Commercial songs from film, but not on soundtrack**

* "Una Voce Poco Fa"
	+ Written by Gioacchino Rossini
	+ Performed by Agnes Baltsa and the Vienna Symphony
	+ Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Ian Marin
* "Night & Day"
	+ Written by Cole Porter
* "Serenade in D, Op. 44"
	+ Composed by Antonín Dvořák
	+ Performed by Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields
	+ Conducted by Neville Marriner
* "Locomotive Breath"
	+ Written by Ian Anderson
	+ Performed by Jethro Tull
* "The Ballad of Gilligan's Isle" (Theme from *Gilligan's Island*)
	+ Written by Sherwood Schwartz & George Wyle
* "Dark Continent (Native Terror)"
	+ Composed by James Horner
	+ " Main theme of The Soundtrack

## Reception

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*Jumanji* did well at the box office, earning $100.5 million in the United States and Canada and an additional $162.3 million overseas, bringing the worldwide gross to $262.8 million.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 54% from 37 reviews, with an average rating of 5.68/10. The site's consensus reads: "A feast for the eyes with a somewhat malnourished plot, *Jumanji* is an underachieving adventure that still offers a decent amount of fun for the whole family". On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 39 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.

Roger Ebert rated the film 1.5 of 4 stars, criticizing its reliance on special effects to convey its story which he felt was lacking. He questioned the decision to rate the film PG rather than PG-13 as he felt that young children would be traumatized by much of the film's imagery, which he said made the film "about as appropriate for smaller children as, say, *Jaws*". He specifically cited Peter's monkey transformation as making him "look like a Wolf Man [...] with a hairy snout and wicked jaws" that were likely to scare children. Regarding the board game's unleashing one hazard after another at its main characters, Ebert concluded, "It's like those video games where you achieve one level after another by killing and not getting killed. The ultimate level for young viewers will be being able to sit all the way through the movie."

Van Allsburg approved of the film despite the changes from the book and its not being as "idiosyncratic and peculiar", declaring that "the film is faithful in reproducing the chaos level that comes with having a jungle animal in the house. It's a good movie."

## Sequels

### *Zathura: A Space Adventure*

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*Zathura: A Space Adventure*, the spiritual successor that was marketed as being from the same continuity of the *Jumanji* franchise with varied uses of the tagline "From the world of *Jumanji*", was released as a feature film in 2005. Unlike the book *Zathura*, the film makes no references to the previous film outside of the marketing statement. This book served as a sequel to the *Jumanji* book. Both films are based on books written by Chris Van Allsburg. With the films being based on books that take place in the same series, the films vaguely make reference to that concept from the novels by having a similar concept and themes.

### *Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle*

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In July 2012, rumors emerged that a remake of the film was already in development. In a conversation with *The Hollywood Reporter*, Columbia Pictures president Doug Belgrad said: "We're going to try and reimagine *Jumanji* and update it for the present." On August 1, 2012, it was confirmed that Matthew Tolmach would be producing the new version alongside William Teitler, who produced the original film.

On August 5, 2015, Sony Pictures Entertainment announced their plans to film a remake and set the release date as December 25, 2016. Internet reception to this announcement was negative, with some posters remarking that this announcement came too soon after the death of Williams. The news was also heavily criticized by Bradley Pierce and *E! News*, the latter of which stated that they felt that the remake was "unnecessary and kind of insulting". On January 14, 2016, it was announced that Jake Kasdan will direct the remake. On January 20, 2016, it was announced that the remake would be pushed back to July 28, 2017. In April 2016, Dwayne Johnson signed on to produce and star in the remake, while *Variety*, *TheWrap* and Deadline.com reported that Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Nick Jonas were in early talks to co-star. In August 2016, Dwayne Johnson confirmed that the film would not be a remake, rather a continuation of the 1995 film and that it would be filmed in Hawaii. In August, Johnson announced on Instagram that Karen Gillan has been cast in the film. In September 2016, Johnson released a concept art of his character "The Smoldering" Dr. Bravestone. It is served as a direct sequel to the 1995 film.

The film, officially titled *Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle*, was released on December 20, 2017.

### *Jumanji: The Next Level*

Template:Main
An upcoming fourth film in the franchise titled, *Jumanji: The Next Level*, a sequel to *Welcome to the Jungle* is slated to be released on December 13, 2019.

## In other media

### Television

Template:Main
An animated television series was produced between 1996 and 1999. While it borrowed heavily from the film – incorporating various characters, locations and props, and modelling Alan's house and the board game on the way they appeared in the film – the series retconsTemplate:Technical statement rather than using the film's storyline. In the series version, on each turn, the players are given a "game clue" and then sucked into the jungle until they solve it. Alan is stuck in *Jumanji* because he has not seen his clue. Judy and Peter try to help him leave the game, providing their motivation during the series. Sarah is absent from the series.

### Games

*Jumanji: The Game* is a board game originally published by Milton Bradley Company in the US in 1995. An updated version with new colorised artwork was released in 2017 by Cardinal Games. Some of the riddle message texts on the danger cards were changed, especially the unique danger messages.
*Jumanji: A Jungle Adventure Game Pack* is a North American-exclusive game for Microsoft Windows that was released on October 9, 1996. It was developed by Studio Interactive and published by Philips Interactive Media. It contains five different action-arcade-based mini-games that are based on popular scenes from the film. Clips of cutscenes from the film can also be viewed. There are five different mini-games that the player can choose from, with different rules and objectives. Animals from the film provide instructions to the player for each mini-game, except for the Treasure Maze mini-game, where the Jumanji board game spirit provides instructions instead. Notably, players cannot play the actual Jumanji board game from the film. All of these mini-games contain rounds (or levels) and when players reach a goal, that level is cleared and the player advances to a more difficult version of the mini-game. The player must try to score as many points as possible, and set the best high score.

A party video game based on the film was released in Europe for the PlayStation 2 in 2006.

In 2007, Fujishoji released a Pachinko game, using clips from the film and also 3D rendered CGI anime character designs for the game as part of the screen interaction.

## Legacy

In 2005, *Jumanji* was listed 48 in Channel 4's documentary *100 Greatest Family Films*, just behind *Dumbo*, *Spider-Man* and *Jason & the Argonauts*.

In 2011, Robin Williams recorded an audiobook for Van Allsburg's book's 30th edition to coincide its release.

In 2014, a game board prop from the film was auctioned on eBay and sold for US$60,800.

## Sound Effects

* *Main article: Jumanji (1995)/Sound Effects*

## External links

* Template:Official website
* Template:IMDb title
* Template:Mojo title
* Template:Rotten Tomatoes

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