“A film from Sundance’s artsy “Next” series is drawing buzz and raising eyebrows. Billed as Kafkaesque, the movie “Escape from Tomorrow,” which I haven’t seen, was apparently assembled on the sly with footage taken at Disneyland. In black and white images, director Randy Moore portrays the theme park as a hell hole, according to the New York Post.
The movie features “a world of fake castles and anthropomorphic rodents, where an epic battle begins when an unemployed father’s sanity is challenged by a chance encounter with two underage girls on holiday,” according to IMDb.
Beyond the issue of whether or not it has the legal right to exist, however, “Escape from Tomorrow” displays a fascinating ingenuity in its appropriation of the Disney brand. Seeming everyman Jim White (Roy Abramson) awakens at the start of the story to learn that he has lost his job for inexplicable reasons, the first of many hazy events that immediately convey a Kafkaesque feel,” according to Indie Wire.
Indie Wire also reported that “The obvious takeaway is that Disney not only has the power to drive us mad, but it may already have. Save for a canny bleep, the company’s name never gets mentioned — but the movie is littered with the iconography it repeatedly indicts. Considering the conditions of the guerilla production, it’s no surprise that some scenes suffer from a scrappy quality that occasionally distracts from the complex layers of storytelling taking place, although even when “Escape From Tomorrow” shows its seams, the underlying theory holds together: The use of some non-park sets and green screen effects elaborate on the virtual quality of the narrative.”
You can read about the film’s cast here.
Will Disney allow this movie to be distributed? If so, some critics feel that this film could become an underground hit. Cross your fingers!
OC Disney Blog 