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Rating: Before Tarantino, Scorsese, and all the others. Before understanding what cinema is, certain cartoons built my (our) imagination from scratch or almost. Everyone has their own. For me, watching The Sword in the Stone again (wonders of channel surfing) is a childhood poem that comes alive in every word, every melody, every unforgettable animation.
Watching it again twenty, twenty-five years later illuminates many qualities of a film that today seems almost intellectual, in fact, without almost. A philosophical film that tells the world, from gravity to love, from the flight of birds to that of squirrels, from one branch to another. Logic, opposites, good and evil, a film that mocks chivalric rules and medieval beliefs in a constant futuristic, cognitive, and ethical tension.
What is good and what is not? Better weapons or books? Is Merlin a charlatan or a teacher? Archimedes is somewhat his amoral counterpart, a teacher who knows but doesn't know how to teach, who huffs and would like to entrust dusty piles of books as the key to knowledge. Merlin, at times equally touchy, is an enlightened tutor who teaches through life, with a great dive into the tumult of existence. But thus knowledge is also danger, life put at risk. Here lies the essence of being a scientist who experiments, whereas Archimedes is the scholar who relies on the principle of authority. On the ipse dixit.
The part dedicated to Madam Mim gives incredible chills, horror chills that are horror memories of a child in front of the television, discovering his emotions and fears, caressing the vertigo of repugnance. Up to the hyperbolic challenge of transformations, which becomes a challenge of intelligence: intellect against strength, cunning against violence. It is a challenge of dishonesty: “Did I say no purple dragons?”
The telling of the teachings is not the only lesson. The film is instructive from the language itself, it is intelligent in its movements (Wart learns the words, and we with him), in its irony and in its perspective reversals. The most stimulating is the temporal one: Merlin makes the mistake (because excessive knowledge can be anachronistic) of evaluating the past from the future, the Middle Ages with the parameters of the twentieth century. And while on one hand this renders everything detestable in his eyes, on the other, it is the only key to trying to dismantle that obscurantist world.
And in the final, definitive reversal, Merlin returns from Honolulu to sit beside King Arthur. Recognizing on one hand that the modern world is not much better (“a jumble”), and on the other identifying in the young disciple Wart-Arthur (who marries his intellectual values but also the honor of arms) the perfect enlightened ruler.
The paradox is partly narrative as well. When Merlin explains to Arthur that he will become a hero and they will even make a movie about him, Wart asks, “What is a movie?” And the wizard replies, “A kind of television, but without commercials.” Final lines that sanction the incommunicability between eras, despite man's constant attempt to evolve his thinking. But certain distances are too great.
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