Publication Date: 03-04-2026

The Pagemaster (1994) review

Dir. Joe Johnston and Maurice Hunt

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★

When Catherine picked up The Pagemaster at the library this weekend, I had to do a double-take. I’ll be damned if I find a movie with recognizable names that I didn’t know existed, but this was a new one for me. Doing a little bit of research, I see a lot of 90s kids watched the film in school. I can’t be too jealous. In elementary school, I was treated to such gems as Recess School’s Out (adapted from one of the greatest kids shows ever); Shiloh (the best dog movie ever); and The Hoboken Chicken Emergency, the equivalent of a NyQuil dream.

But I wasn’t aware of The Pagemaster a week ago, and having now seen it, I contend that it would be a lovely movie to show elementary school students. It’s the kind of freewheeling fun that kids love, with the gravitational pull of “every-boy” Macaulay Culkin, some dynamic voice actors playing memorable characters, and the anchor of the importance of reading tying the entire production together.

The live-action framework of this mostly animated movie concerns a 10-year-old boy name Richard (Culkin), whose parents (Ed Begley Jr. and Mel Harris) are at a loss due to his behavior. He’s not a bad kid, but he’s royally pessimistic and nervous for his age, eternally fearful of the world around him. For example, his father is building him a treehouse, but the boy is too scared to climb into it because “seven percent of all accidents involve ladders.” There’s reason to believe that without the experiences he has in this movie, Richard would grow up to be Lester the Unlikely.

On the way to the hardware store when a storm hits, Richard seeks shelter in a cavernous library run by the titular man of mystery (Christopher Lloyd). Not long after entering the building, Richard is transformed into a cartoon — he sort of resembles a blonde version of Arnold from The Magic School Bus — and has to make his way through various settings ripped directly from famous books. More on those in a moment. He has help along the way, as a trio of genre-books come to life, including the fearless Adventure (voiced by Patrick Stewart), the sweetly imaginative Fantasy (Whoopi Goldberg), and the contrarily timid Horror (Frank Welker, who sounds like an amalgam of Igor and Ed from Ed, Edd n Eddy).

Richard and his new book friends have to navigate arenas ripped directly from classics such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Treasure Island, Moby Dick, and Jack and the Beanstalk. There’s very little rhyme or reason in terms of the story offering connective tissue for these particular narrative choices, but the three writers (David Casci, David Kirschner, and Ernie Contreras) do their part to make each of the four characters have equitable fun in the adventure. If Stewart, Goldberg, and Welker’s voices don’t immediately connect you with their characters by virtue of the accents they adopt, they will based on how each are forced to evolve and work together over 67 briskly paced minutes.

I got a kick out of Welker’s Horror, who seems to be a victim of his genre moreso than emblematic of it. It’s an interesting screenwriting move to make the face of frightening literary classics so dopey, but the comic relief Welker achieves livens up the ensemble. Consider that when you have archetypal stand-ins for characteristics such as anxiety, bravery, and kindness, you could indeed use comedy to balance the scales.

The end result is The Pagemaster being affable and, dare I say, mature in its message to children about broadening their horizons and finding joy in reading. Too often I think reading is seen as a chore by young kids, and even teenagers, in part because before they can even find out what they like to read, school makes the choices for them, thus turning something that is often done for joy into another obligation.

It’s also a shame that not only did The Pagemaster catastrophically bomb in theaters over the long Thanksgiving 1994 weekend, but a few years later, Turner Animation‘s Cats Don’t Dance all-but put the nail in the coffin for the upstart studio trying to find its footing with gentle, colorful creations ala a new age Hanna-Barbera (one of the production companies behind this film). The film clearly enjoyed a life in classrooms and libraries around America, and that kind of relevance is hard to buy, but it didn’t elongate the lifespan of a studio with two laudably original films under their belt.

Voiced by: Macaulay Culkin, Patrick Stewart, Whoopi Goldberg, Frank Welker, and Christopher Lloyd. Starring: Macaulay Culkin, Christopher Lloyd, Ed Begley Jr., and Mel Harris. Directed by: Joe Johnston (live-action) and Maurice Hunt (animation).