I remember being very excited about going to see In Search Of The Castaways when it first came out, mainly because I was completely besotted. And she didn't disappoint me! Neither did the film, a fun romp about two kids, in the company of assorted adults, searching for their missing father. The large part of the search took place in South America and featured, as set pieces, a slide through ice caverns and taking refuge from a flood in a giant tree.Throughout all this, Maurice Chevalier oozed avuncular gallic charm and occasionally warbled a cheery Disney ditty, occasionally accompanied by Miss Mills (whose singing, notwithstanding her hit record Let's get Together, was not her strongest point).The South American search turned out to be largely unsuccessful, mainly because dad wasn't in South America, he was in New Zealand. So the final sequence involved escaping from a Maori tribe, led by singer and totem pole carver Inia Te Wiata.The special effects aren't quite so special these days - like so many films of the time, miniatures were often the only way of achieving certain results, and miniatures are no longer convincing after more than a decade of digital simulation. Even so, the film is still full of charm and excitement, and is well worth watching.

A journey looking for captain Grant (Jack Gwillim) is realized by a teenage girl Hayley Mills (Pollyanna), her little boy brother along with two veterans (Wilfrid Hyde White and singer Maurice Chevalier) and a young man (Michael Anderson Jr.) . During the long travel they find natural disasters as earthquake in the Andes , fire and flood in the ocean and volcano in New Zealand and they attempt to overcome . Besides they encounter different tribes as Araucans (an Indian chief played by Antonio Cifariello ), Patagons (Argentina) and Maoris (New Zealand).The picture contains adventures , humor , emotion , songs , stirring action and sensational outdoors . The film displays some scenes have you on the edge of your seat as the amusing images when the protagonists sledge over floe . Excellent , powerful cast with sympathetic Hayley Mills and Maurice Chevalier and with the cynic George Sanders . Colorful cinematography reflecting marvellous landscapes by Paul Beeson . Lively and evocative music by Willyam Alwyn . Abounds matte painting and special effects by the Disney specialist Peter Ellenshaw . It's a winning Disney effort made by its usual director Robert Stevenson (Herbie , gnome mobile , Mary Poppins) . It's a must for the Disney fans but is beautifully released , being recommendable for all family and especially for little boys public . Rating : Good and entertaining.

After so many attempts by others to recapture the magic of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Disney's own belated return to the Jules Verne genre must have been greeted with tremendous anticipation. When it did finally come however, with 1961's In Search of the Castaways, audiences can only have responded with a bewilderment bordering on stupefaction. Castaways has a scenario so bizarre and features a set of adventures so patently absurd, that it makes Journey to the Center of the Earth seem like cinema verité. The fact that the makers appear to have been perfectly aware of these illogicalities and may have been indulging in some kind of a rarified joke only makes things worse in my opinion. You tell me: The children of a marooned sea captain receive from him a message in a bottle—a bottle found in the stomach of a shark. Unlikely, you say? So do about five characters in the film itself--repeatedly. Later, the party decides to rest overnight in "The Land of Many Earthquakes." The hut they sleep in seems, nonetheless, to have been standing for hundreds of years so they feel confident it will make it through one more night--and they tell us so. An enormous tremor strikes within moments and shakes the entire building down before our eyes. During this quake, the stone ledge the party has been standing on breaks loose and becomes a bobsled hurtling down the mountainside. Do the explorers cling to it for their lives in mortal terror? No, they laugh and yodel and enjoy the ride as if nothing at all were at stake--which the audience has now begun to realize is in fact the case. Soon, they come to the broad, treeless landscape of the Argentine pampas; here, the earth is parched and cracked, the sky cloudless. In spite of this, Indians warn them to beware of floods. The Europeans take pains to point out the extreme unlikelihood of such an eventuality--and are, of course, shortly interrupted by an 8-foot wall of water that reaches from horizon to horizon. As Disney expert Leonard Maltin remarks, "There seems no earthly purpose for throwing in a giant condor or a massive flood, and the slightly off-center feeling is only amplified when Maurice Chevalier starts to sing about their troubles!" On and on it goes until about the midway point of the film, at which time the searchers learn that their whole expedition has been a wild goose chase to begin with and that they've been looking on the WRONG CONTINENT. And the audience throws up its hands. If we could write In Search of the Castaways off as a low-budget quickie like Valley of the Dragons, padded out with stock footage, the whole thing would be easier to figure. But no—-extreme care was taken with Castaways. It has lush Technicolor photography, stunning miniatures, and a non-stop parade of the most gorgeous matte paintings you ever saw (Peter Ellenshaw). The special effects are, in fact, some of the best in any Verne film and were accomplished by the very same people who did similarly magnificent work for 20,000 Leagues. Yet the situations these effects are called upon to depict are so far-out that they would have been more appropriate in something like This Island Earth or First Spaceship on Venus. The aforementioned "sleigh ride" for instance, really does play out like an attraction at Disneyland, and would probably be interpreted by today's critics as a crass send-off for the inevitable theme park tie-in. (Actually, it seems to have been the other way around, with a Disneyland ride providing inspiration for the movie; the park's Matterhorn Bobsleds attraction opened four years earlier and was based on a different film, 1958's Third Man on the Mountain). Most curious of all, however, is the way this script actually rubs your nose in each of its many improbabilities and underlines every deus ex machina. In retrospect the filmmakers do seem to have tried to warn us in advance; the title work introduces the movie as "Jules Verne's Fantasy Adventure." This might have been our cue that it was all intended as some kind of a spoof of the genre, or "live action cartoon," and ought to be taken as such. Still, the joke sails right over my head. Make no mistake: In Search of the Castaways has plenty going for it. But the screenplay (based on Verne's 1865 book Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant) ought to have been sent back down Dopey Drive to the Story Department for some heavy revision. (Incidentally, the George Sanders villain in this movie, Thomas Ayerton, reappears in Verne's L'Île mystérieuse—which happens to be a sequel to both this book and 20,000 Leagues). Director Robert Stevenson, at any rate, did get another crack at Verne-flavored adventure for Disney—-1974's Island at the Top of the World—-and he fared much better there.

Theowinthrop should check the Disney Catalogue very thoroughly for the Captain Hattaras tale. We have that very movie available on DVD here in Australia. Or at least something with a similar storyline written by the same author. I'm not sure whether it is live action or cartoon though. Quite apart from the above though "In Search Of The Castaways" was in my opinion a very enjoyable movie. Hayley Mills as always is precocious in a serious way. Maybe it's me but I do not think that she was ever a good singer as I consider her voice too thin for singing. I also do not think that she really matured until after her Disney contract expired - compare her later movies to the earlier ones. From the land down under.