From the (Sub) stacks: Labyrinth 40th Anniversary Retrospective
he thing about the 1986 puppet fantasia Labyrinth is, you could easily dismiss it as a girl learning to finally share her toys in a fluffy kids picture that never raises the stakes enough for true danger to rear its head.
But Labyrinth has become a cult classic for a multitude of reasons. In an age where creativity has rapidly been swallowed by CGI, green screens, and now AI, it has a handmade care which has all but vanished from filmmaking. But in the 80s, George Lucas and Jim Henson could collaborate without massive global corporate beasts getting involved, and family fare could have a certain grittiness, even sexual under (or even over!) tones, and Jennifer Connelly was as yet mostly undiscovered.
It’s not like women weren’t a presence in 80s pop culture. A few years prior Kathleen Turner got dowdy and dirty before being molded into a sexual adventurer in Romancing the Stone, Linda Hamilton came into her own as the mother of human resistance itself in The Terminator, Sigourney Weaver fought otherworldly threats in Aliens the same year, Elisabeth Shue would play a teenage girl who quickly finds herself in over her head in the big bad city of Chicago in Adventures In Babysitting, and Return to Oz proved that nightmare fuel and family viewing could actually mix the year prior.
