Patch Town Review: Quirky Film On How Toys are Born
Patch Town
A lost child of Disney hatches from writer-director Craig Goodwill in Patchtown, a musical fairy tale of lost children who try to find where home truly is.
In the film, we are taken into a world were a father finds kids in a cabbage patch and decides to make dolls to send them out to kids and parents around the world. Now if you’ve never heard about Cabbage Patch dolls, either you weren’t a girl in the 80’s, you weren’t into dolls growing up, or you were too afraid to watch Chucky.
We follow optimist and former adopted toy Jon (Rob Ramsay) as he lives an oppressed life as a slave in the cabbage patch baby factory. It’s a horrible world where no singing and especially no stealing cabbages from the factory are tolerated. Jon and his wife Mary (Stephanie Pitsiladis) steal a cabbage so as to have a child of their own. In a quest to find a safe home for their baby, Mary and Jon run from this dismal world and into the real world. We get the feeling that Jon is slowly going through a transition from childhood to adulthood while he seeks his adoptive mother, a girl who eventually grew out of dolls.
Goodwill pokes at racial discrimination when we encounter another former toy, Sly (Suresh John) who says, “I wasn’t the most popular option, you know, being Indian and all.” Goodwill creates subtle layers in the film.
This satire is accompanied by wonderful scores that serve to lighten the mood and truly reach out to that old school fairy tale aspect. As a debut, Craig Goodwill has done a great job even if there are a few points that seem to have gone under the carpet. The obvious Soviet-looking factory CGI, which serves as his establishing shot was not quite there, and was used a few times. Other then small technical issues I had a great time watching this.
Patch Town is on DVD now.
