These days, if you've even heard of Chuck Jones you've probably also heard of his 1969 animated feature, The Phantom Tollbooth. And if you know anything about Chuck Jones you can probably guess what a 1969 Chuck Jones animated feature would be like: more than a little fey, more than a little didactic, and maybe just a wabbit's whisker away from being actively irritating. The Phantom Tollbooth will do nothing to discombobulate these expectations.
 Jones's film is extremely faithful to its source material—a children's book by Norton Juster—but that shouldn't a surprise, since it's just the sort of thing that would have attracted Jones's attention by the late 1960s. (He'd already adapted Juster's "The Dot and the Line" as a cartoon short.) It's the story of a child, bored with school, home, and life in general, who drives off into a strange land when a mysterious tollbooth is delivered to his bedroom. The resulting story is something like The Wizard of Oz meets Alice in Wonderland, in which a rather linear plot—the boy, Milo, sets off to rescue two princesses—is interrupted by lots of nonsense, word play, and catchphrases-brought-literally-to-life. (There is, for instance, the watchdog—whose body is a large clock—who rescues him from the lethargic land of The Doldrums.) Don't be too alarmed at the non-animated (and rather too-extended) live action sequences that open the picture, as everything (Milo included) gets turned into a cartoon once he's through the Tollbooth.
There is quite a lot to admire in this picture. Though its visuals aren't nearly as rich as a Disney feature, it has some nicely designed and animated sequences, especially in the Doldrums with its expressively goopy inhabitants. It has fun with some of Juster's more visual conceits, like the no-faced Trivium and the city of Dictionopolis's five redundant royal councilors. It moves swiftly without becoming breathless, and there is a roughness to the line work and the backgrounds that nicely conveys a palpable sense of reality to a story that is otherwise extremely abstract. There are some fine jokes (like the banquet in which the participants are invited to eat their own words) and the climax and resolution attain a sense of the mad and the magical that the book itself doesn't fully realize. Sequence by sequence it works well enough, and in small doses—as an unconnected series of shorts or as a TV broadcast interrupted by commercials—it would be mildly entertaining. But it is so wearingly the same across its length that the cleverness soon becomes grating. It's a bit like being trapped in a conversation with a skilled purveyor of knock-knock jokes. However funny each bit is, you soon begin to wish for some variety.
The basic problem is one that The Phantom Tollbooth shares with Alice in Wonderland: the original books are creatures of the mind, which draw their power and wit by putting unexpected twists on abstract things like numbers and sentences. And so Juster's book brims with clever conceits, like the automobile that runs on silence ("It goes without saying") or the impoverished Land of Infinity, where it is impossible to make ends meet. Neither of these show up in Jones's film, wisely, for the very good reason that they are not visual. And yet many of the things that Jones does put in the film are not intrinsically more cinematic, either. Officer Short Shrift, the Whether Man, and King Azaz the Unabridged say very funny things, but all their humor is in their dialogue, and Jones can only compensate visually by giving them lots of fussy business to carry out. A "sunrise symphony" is the only place where the film really can and does come to Fantasia-like life.
 On the other hand, he misses the chance to illustrate some of the more promising bits in Juster's book. The city of Reality, Juster tells us, disappeared because people there eventually stopped noticing things—how much fun would it be to see its history in flashback, as bits and pieces evaporated? Even more bizarrely, Jones cut the Fortress of the Soundkeeper, where sounds are made. "She picked up a padded stick and struck a nearby bass drum six times," Juster writes. "Six large woolly fluffy cotton balls, each about two feet across, rolled silently out onto the floor." How could such a thing escape the notice of the director of "What's Opera, Doc?"
For all its mistakes and missed opportunities, I still like Jones's The Phantom Tollbooth better than Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland. Possibly this is because I think Alice is a much better book—dreamier and less rigidly faithful to its own absurdist logic—and so feel less resentment toward a dull adaptation. But it is also partly a grudging admission that the man-in-his-moment had met the book of his dreams. None of his contemporaries would have had the skill and patience to bring off the adaptation, and The Phantom Tollbooth probably best catches Jones in the Indian summer of his career. On its own it is not a terribly edifying picture, but it's an interesting glimpse into career of its idiosyncratic director.
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