User reviews

Like "blackriverfalls" in Leeds, England, I, too, have been in search of a copy of The Magic Toyshop for the past 15 years. The movie, back in 1987, had a run in a tiny, now-defunct art-house cinema just off the University of California campus in Berkeley. I remember the movie receiving glowing reviews in the local free alternative presses.

The Magic Toyshop has left an indelible impression in my brain. Yes, the story is bizarre, disturbing, perverse, and sexually discomfiting; but that is the nature of Angela Carter's artistry. Her's is a world in which mythology, fairy tale, and childhood innocence meld and clash with the sometimes magical, sometimes perversely ugly reality of adult consciousness. The Magic Toyshop encapsulates the violence inherent in the confrontation of the adults' and children's worlds into a succinct cinematic package. Scene upon surrealistic scene vividly and lushly convey the romantic dreaminess of childhood and the tight rigidity of contrived adulthood.

A few years after its brief visit to the Bay Area, The Magic Toyshop was in rotation on the Bravo arts cable channel. I managed to make a VHS recording of The Magic Toyshop. The quality is poor, but luckily this was recorded before Bravo had to fall to running commercials, so my copy of the movie has no breaks. I hope I still have my VHS copy, because it seems that, despite the death of Angela Carter and the continued interest in her literary work, the movie The Magic Toyshop may exist as ephemerally as the memory of a persons's first cherished toy.

In an odd coincidence, I also saw this film at what I am sure is the same out-of-the-way cinema in Berkeley, CA in 1987 or 1988 that was mentioned above. (It was in North Berkeley I believe on Euclid Avenue just off of Hearst St. and round the corner from LaVal's pizza.)

I have been looking for this film ever since and also had the thought that perhaps I had imagined seeing it and it never really existed. Well, not really. But it did appear to completely disappear from the face of the earth after that.

I just loved the puppet sequences and creepiness of Tom Bell and his toyshop. I remember when one of the children accidentally broke a pull toy the deliciously weird way he spoke directly to the toy, "We'll have to get you a new leg, will we?" I also like the oddly positive form of the tag question ("will we?") and wondered if that came from a particular English dialect.

It's funny how much good press her other film The Company of Wolves got compared with this one (I didn't like it that much.) But I'd be quite surprised if this turns out to be an act of censorship. I think it's more likely the lack of an interested distributor that is holding it back.

As someone mentioned above they actually got a copy of this in the U.S. I hope that means I can find one, too. Good luck to everyone else.

The best thing about this movie is the soundtrack.. It is just epic.

The movie itself has a great setting and great feeling as well. It is difficult to categorize and I would say it is a fantasy; yet it is not a very comfortable movie and has nudity and adult situations. At times the cruelty and sad situations almost make it a horror film. At the same time it doesn't necessarily feel like a horror film either.

The protagonist is a young girl around 16 who, because of the death of her parents, goes to her uncles home with her siblings. Her uncle is a toy-maker and a cruel man. The movie has some strange relationships and abuses going on. We notice all of this is happening while we are showered with fantastic, dreamy images and scenes including puppet shows, dances, animal costumes in gardens etc.

Caroline Milmoe who plays the main character is very lovely and does a great job. The different dresses she wears are kind of reminiscent of ballerina/ wedding dresses and add to the feel.

I very much recommend getting your hands on this movie if you are a fan of fantasy films or even horror movies like Argento's Suspiria or The Shining.

Other users here at IMDb seem to have a hard time locating this film, leading to talk of it having been suppressed. The reason The Magic Toyshop has become (unfairly) obscure is simply because it was screened on British television before having any major theatrical release. Technically it's a TV movie, made by the Granada network (not the BBC), and it has suffered the same fate as many British television movies of the 70's and 80's. Thankfully this film was released by Palace video in the UK - I located a copy and have now archived mine to DVD.

Caroline Milmoe was not underage when the film was made - she was 23 years old, playing a 15 year old. It is true that the nude scenes present a minor through a grown woman, and that is one of the central themes of the film - the sexual element itself is disturbingly grim.

The whole film has a unworldly sheen and inhabits magical realism long before it became fashionably known as such. Watch the camera track the parrot's gaze to get an idea of the sheer level of invention and ingenuity. And Milmoe really knows how to torment those braids...

This is one of the best films of the 1980's, and certainly the best film I have ever seen about childhood's end. I don't mind it being obscure because that lends it cult status, but I feel unhappy for the cast, particularly Caroline Milmoe, as this film is the top of their art and that deserves a wider audience.

Brilliant.

This film was shown on ITV in the UK on a Saturday night in 1988 or 1989, and enjoyed a 2-page feature in the main UK listings magazine of the day. Since then it has disappeared without trace, presumably because its mixture of fantasy, horror, mild eroticism, romance, and apparent children's fare never found a target audience. Even Caroline Milmoe, then 23, who played the 15-year old central character hasn't appeared in TV or films since 1995.

The story is unique and literally unforgettable. Having just procured a copy from the USA and seen it for the first time in 17 years, I'm amazed at how much I could still remember. Some of the scenes are beautiful and dream-like; others are down to earth kitchen-sink drama. And the whole takes place in a real world that isn't quite the real world, one where magic is an accepted part of life.

An incredibly imaginative and totally involving film.

I saw this film on the A&E Channel in 1991 and have bitterly regretted not taping it then. The late Angela Carter herself wrote the screenplay and included elements of magical realism not present in her novel, which made it even more intriguing and absorbing. The cast includes the great Tom Bell as Uncle Philip and the terrific Irish actors Kilian McKenna and Lorcan Cranitch (of "Cracker" fame) as Finn and Francie. It is a fantastic adaptation of a difficult, strange and wonderful book, and I wish SOMEONE at Granada or the BBC or wherever would release it on all regions DVD already!

I have recently found this film on one of my husband's VHS tapes (the blank variety which he uses to record stuff from the telly). The film looks as if it was last shown in the eighties and I don't remember having seen it since. It has not (to my knowledge) been released on DVD or VHS although I shall browse around for a copy.

The film tells the story of three young people: two girls, one on the edge of puberty and the other much younger, and a young boy who go to live with their mother's brother and his young, mute Irish wife. His wife also has two brothers who live with them. The children's uncle is an unpleasant control freak who forces his young wife to wear a silver collar whilst she watches a marionette show put on by him and her brothers in his toyshop.

The eldest girl and one of the Irishmen (the younger) develop a love for each other whilst they live in the same house. The girl helps her aunt out in the shop whilst her brother helps his uncle to make things in the workshop.

There are a lot of very disturbing elements to the film. There is the uncle's treatment of his wife as some kind of dumb (literally) possession (illustrated by the collar) whilst the Irish indulge dancing, drinking and somewhat forbidden love. Interestingly, though, I have seen far more explicit themes played out in other movies made in Hollywood today.

Makes you wonder whether the British film industry and the BBC have some kind of hidden agenda going on.

Still, despite it not being a children's movie, there are a lot of playful, magic moments in it and the one Irishman does some beautiful paintings.

The romantic longings of adolescence confront the sexual urges of adulthood after an orphaned English girl and her two younger siblings move into the toyshop of their malevolent, misogynist uncle, a tyrant who stages debased one-act plays in his basement theater using life-size puppets. Fans of Angela Carter's hothouse Freudian writing will know what to expect, but her screenplay here was directed with a bum eye for mock-poetic effect: the magic realism slips into portentous fantasy with little transition and even less subtlety. The uncle's amusing stage production of Leda's encounter with the swan (the girl is real; the bird is a puppet) is more or less typical of the film's transparent symbolism, which reaches its zenith in an early scene meant (presumably) to represent the young heroine's impending womanhood. Locked out of the house one night while wearing her mother's (white) wedding dress, she climbs an apple tree (get it?) to arrive, conspicuously bloody, at an upstairs window

A beautiful film about the wonderment and mysteries of childhood and the developing young girl in a mystical backdrop of the sinister toymakers house and family. Many contraversial topics are touched upon without any hint of moral lecturing or the political correctness of later years that we have grown to hate.Very worth seeing and worth the BBC reshowing if they have the courage for it.I would love to get hold of a PAL video copy.

When I was 10 years old (in 1986) the school i attended at the time performed parts of the audio sound track. We were in the award winning school choir of Saint Elizabeths Primary School in South Manchester.

In the summer we always used to perform in the RNCM (Royal Northern College of Music) in some competition i no longer remember the name of. After the event we were asked to contribute vocals to the music score of an up and coming film produced by Granada TV.

I remember the day coming and ten or so of the top choir singers, of which i was one (pre my voice breaking), went down to the studios in Manchester City Centre on a coach, with our now long since deceased teacher John Dennision. (a great man!) We spent what i remember to be a very tiring and very very long day repeating the same bars over and over again in a studio. These were then to be cut and arranged into sounding like a very large group of children singing the track.

I remember then being very excited about the film being released only then to be told the school had found out it is an adult theme film and we were not allowed to see it.

Further to this the school was outraged at the children's choir being used in a film of this theme and demanded that our school be completely uncredited from the film and it was kind of never mentioned again.

I did watch it in 1988 but don't really remember the story. However I can still remember some of the bars we sang! I'd love to see it again. Not only to see it as a film but to hear the music again. (there are 3 VHS copies on amazon.co.uk for £39.99, which is a bit steep) I'll keep looking....

This is movie is based on a novel by Angela Carter made soon after the renown British author had collaborated with Neil Jordan on the cult horror/fantasy film "The Company of Wolves". This movie does not benefit from the directorial talent of someone like Neil Jordan, but it is still a pretty interesting film about a privileged adolescent girl who becomes orphaned and has to move with her younger siblings to the dreary London home of her tyrannical toy-maker/puppeteer uncle, his mute wife, and the wife's wild Irish brothers, one of whom she develops an attraction to.

Angela Carter basically writes fairy tales for adolescents, but not really fairy tales in the present-day sense. Today "fairy tales" are associated with Disney and Pixar and other saccharine kiddie films. You could also consider comic-book movies and "Star Wars" reboots to be "fairy tales" for older children and teens, Hollywood rom-coms as "fairy tales" for adult women, and perhaps even porno movies could be thought of as "fairy tales" for male adults. All of these are alike in that they're ALL really escapist fantasy. But Carter's fairy tales mine the older, more literary fairy tale tradition of the Grimm Brother or Hans Christian Anderson and have a darker, more disturbing and much less escapist tone to them (and certainly more literary gravitas). But Carter also adds an element of more overt coming-of-age female sexuality. The fifteen-year-old heroine here (played by a twenty-something Caroline Milmoe) is first seen admiring her own full-frontal nakedness in a full-length mirror before trying on her mother's wedding dress. Later when her uncle tries to turn into a living puppet in one of his bizarre puppet shows, he--perhaps not coincidentally--has her play "Leda" a wood nymph who in Greek mythology who is raped by the god Zeus in the form of a swan. And there is an intimation (made much more clear in the book) that he actually wants his young brother-in-law to deflower his orphaned niece in order to degrade her.

Not that this movie is in any way graphic or that it ever entirely leaves the realm of fairy tale and metaphor. There have been plenty of "adult" fairy tale movies (ACTUAL porn adaptations of things like Cinderella or Snow White) over the years, but that is not anything that has ever interested Carter. Her work is probably closest to the tradition of "magical realism" that is popular in certain kinds of literature, but is very difficult to translate into cinema. But even so, she brings a more adolescent, more female perspective that is uniquely all her own.

The main problem with this movie is it simply can't compare with the book (and it is certainly less successful in that respect than "Company of Wolves"), but I still think it compares pretty well to most movies.

The Magic Toyshop is a rich and by turns sensual and disturbing adaptation of the Angela Carter book, to which the film stays particularly true.

At the heart of the story is the young Melanie, who after her parents die tragically is sent to stay with her Uncle Philip, Aunt Margaret and her cousins Francie and Finn. Aunt Margaret is mute, and Uncle Philip is a control freak who stages plays with life size puppets and when not doing so treats his family as little more than an extension of his marrionette collection. Through a series of strange and often surreal events the perverse dynamics of this family begin to reveal themselves to Melanie.

SO WHY CAN'T WE WATCH THIS FILM?

Since it was screened on BBC1 back in 1988 it has never been repeated, or released on video or any other format, anywhere. I know this because I've been trying to hunt down a copy for over a decade, it is not only unavailable but seemingly unheard of to the point where I've sometimes wondered if the film was never really made and I dreamed the whole thing. I can understand some of its themes being considered contraversial, such as Uncle Philip's symbolic molestation of Melanie with the swan puppet, or his need to assert his dominance over Aunt Margaret by making her wear a silver collar, but suppressing films that bring these themes out into the open is only reinforcing the old taboos.

I guess we can only hope that it gets some kind of release, somewhere, sometime in the future...

I'm trying to collate the recorded works of erstwhile treble singer James Rainbird and have arrived at this particular credit. But the plot thickens! In the rolling credits there appears 'Peter Roberts, boy soprano' – no mention of James Rainbird who was at his brief recording zenith at the time.

There was no such reticence when putting out the contemporaneous 33rpm LP record; the sleeve is prominently annotated on the face with "Featuring JONATHAN'S SONG sung by James Rainbird" – and no mention of any 'Peter Roberts'. According to the British Library this LP is an 'Original 1987 film soundtrack recording'.

So who the hell is Peter Roberts? There is one of that name on Yahoo! Movies with a media career - but the dates don't tally. He is credited to The Magic Toyshop as 'Music Performer (boy soprano)' but was purportedly a location manager and production scout at the same time! Improbable to say the least. IMDb credits show neither Rainbird nor Roberts.

Could 'Peter Roberts' be a disassociating pseudonym dreamed up for the same reasons quoted by sheepfarmer-2 above? Followed by a re-think for the LP? Incidentally the other juvenile contributions on the LP are cited as "St Catherine's Roman Catholic School Choir" and "Manchester Boy's Choir". I suspect the latter might be a portmanteau title chosen for the same reasons cited by sheepfarmer-2.

Can anyone unravel this one?

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Since transmitting the above I Googled 'Manchester Boys' Choir' - oh what a can of worms that was! No further comment.