Jumanji

In 1869, near 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 meets Carl Bentley, an employee, who reveals a new shoe prototype he made by himself. Alan misplaces the shoe and damages a machine, but Carl takes responsibility and loses his job. After being attacked by the bullies, who also 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 brings it home.

At home, after an argument with his father about attending a boarding school, Alan plans to run away. Sarah Whittle, his friend, arrives to return his bicycle, and Alan 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 center of the board. Sarah rolls her first turn 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. Afterwards, 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 died in an accident on a ski trip in Canada the winter before. The next day, Judy and Peter find Jumanji in the attic and begin playing it. Their first 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, a five, releases a lion and an adult Alan. As Alan makes his way out, he meets Carl, who is now working as 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 1991 death. Eventually, the factory closed which caused Brantford's economic decline.

Realizing that they need Sarah to finish the game, the three locate Sarah, now haunted by both Jumanji and Alan's disappearance, and persuade her to join them. Sarah's next roll releases fast-growing carnivorous vines, and Alan's next roll releases a big-game hunter named Van Pelt, whom Alan first met in the jungle. Judy's next roll summons a herd of various animals, causing a stampede, and a pelican steals the game. Peter retrieves it, but Alan is arrested by Carl. Peter tries to finish the game himself but turns into a monkey after attempting to cheat. Later, the stampede wreaks havoc in town, and Van Pelt steals the game. Peter, Sarah, and Judy follow Van Pelt to a department store, where they battle him and retrieve the game, while Alan, after revealing his identity to Carl, is set free and comes to their rescue. When the four return to the mansion, it is now completely overrun by jungle wildlife. They release one calamity after another until Van Pelt arrives. 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 the events that took place. Alan reconciles with his father and Sam tells his son that he does not have to attend boarding school. Alan admits that he was responsible for the shoe that damaged the factory's machine. Alan and Sarah throw Jumanji into a river, then share a kiss.

In 1995, Alan and Sarah are married and expecting their first child. Alan's parents are still alive and successfully running the family business. He and Sarah see Judy and Peter and meet 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, averting their deaths.

On a beach, two young French-speaking girls hear drumbeats while walking, as Jumanji lies partially buried in the sand.

• Robin Williams as Alan Parrish
  • Adam Hann-Byrd as Young Alan Parrish
• Kirsten Dunst as Judy Shepherd
• Bradley Pierce as Peter Shepherd
• David Alan Grier as Carl Bentley
• Bonnie Hunt as Sarah Whittle
  • Laura Bell Bundy as Young Sarah Whittle
• Jonathan Hyde as Samuel Parrish and Van Pelt
• Bebe Neuwirth as Nora Shepherd
• James Handy as The Exterminator
• Patricia Clarkson as Carol-Anne Parrish
• Malcolm Stewart as James Shepherd
• Annabel Kershaw as Martha Shepherd
• Gary Thorup as Billy Jessup
• Frank Welker provides the special vocal effects

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".[2] 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.[3]

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.[4] 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.[4]

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.[5] Additional filming took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, where a mock-up of the Parrish house was built.[4]

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.[6][7] ILM developed two new software programs specifically 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.[6] 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.[4]

The film was dedicated to visual effects supervisor Stephen L. Price, who died before the film's release.[8]

Jumanji was released in theaters on December 15, 1995.

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

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.[1][15]

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 54% from 37 reviews, with an average rating of 7/10. The site's consensus reads: "A feast for the eyes with a somewhat shaky plot, Jumanji is a good adventure that still offers a decent amount of fun for the whole family".[16] On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 39 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[17] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.[18]

Roger Ebert rated the film 1.5 out 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".[19]

Van Allsburg approved of the film despite the changes from the book and it 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".[2]

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.[31]

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

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Jumanji

• Official website
• Jumanji on IMDb
• Jumanji at Box Office Mojo
• Jumanji at Rotten Tomatoes