Slumberland Review: Netflix’s Little Nemo Adaptation Is the Jason Momoa Show

Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland remains a touchstone in the history of comics, having set a standard of artistic quality with its formalism and command of scale. Slumberland, Francis Lawrence’s live-action adaptation, aims to replicate the surreality of the comic strip’s images, and its blend of the wondrous and terrifying, but it ends up an unremarkable, drab approximation of McCay’s idiosyncratic and often moving vision.

Little Nemo in Slumberland never shied away from the darker subjects of so many classic children’s stories, and Lawrence’s film initially promises to do the same. It introduces young Nemo (Marlow Barkley) as a girl who lives in an island lighthouse with her father, Peter (Kyle Chandler). Her boundless imagination is communicated early when a fabulistic tale that Peter makes up about a harrowing sea adventure causes her to see the shadows on her magic lantern start to move of their own accord and act out the drama, all before her father’s talk of a monster from the briny deep leads to a squid-like shape manifesting out of hallucinated smoke.

That Peter intends this tale as a soothing bedtime story would be funny if Nemo didn’t take comfort in it, with her delight in visualizing the narrative outweighing the occasional fear that she feels from the creatures that her imagination conjures. When Peter dies at sea, though, Nemo is sent reeling. Forced to live with her estranged, city-dwelling uncle, the dour and dull Philip (Chris O’Dowd), the girl turns to her dreams as a means of reclaiming what she lost. This subconscious urge is a potentially compelling conceit, honoring the ability of children’s fantasy to confront the harsh and threatening world under the guise of escaping from it.

Soon, though, the film backs away from building on Nemo’s emotional rawness, instead oscillating between one-note depictions of her mourning and the antics of her new companion, Flip (Jason Momoa), a gregarious satyr outlaw whose smug demeanor is undercut by his flailing haplessness. Nemo hopes to find her father, or some figment of him, somewhere in the labyrinth of Slumberland’s dream realm, but Flip’s glib self-amusement regularly throws the film off of its emotional trajectory, blunting its intended resonance with dissonant goofiness.

Lawrence might have been able to juggle these emotional extremes had Slumberland’s visuals embraced the ever-shifting logic of dreams the way that McCay’s comics did. But in much the same way that Pixar films have increasingly defined the most fantastic possible realms as stultifying bureaucracies, the film ends up rendering Nemo’s sleeping imagination in dull terms.

Nemo and Flip end up in an empty metropolis of interchangeable skyscrapers made of polished glass, pursued by a dream police that moves robotically and without purpose. And this realm is presided over by a regulatory body that drearily organizes areas by common dream tropes (tests that one hasn’t studied for, Oedipal fantasies, and so on) and monitors for aberrations. And where McCay’s strips featured bold uses of color, too much of Lawrence’s film adheres to the standards of contemporary digital cinematography, favoring dim yellows and day-for-night blues for easy contrast at the expense of the limitless possibility of the unreal.

Though it puts up a number of obstacles between Nemo and her search for some remnant of her father, Slumberland lacks the sense of danger that McCay so liberally infused into his own stories. Throughout, nightmares take the form of officious people reflective of the buzzkill authority figures who make Nemo’s waking life so suffocating, to the point that one may feel that the most frightening thing that could happen to the girl in a world theoretically full of monsters is to get fined for jaywalking. This take on the material is too sanitized to induce either wonder or dread, and not even Nemo’s attempts to ease her grief land emotionally, leaving the girl as little more than a spectator to bland, unmemorable dreamscapes.