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A vast maze rises up against a painted summer blue sky, luring a young girl deeper into its heart, towards the seductive palace of the Goblin King. Her way is fraught with unexpected perils and pleasures, but as she encounters the terrors of this strange new world, she is aided and befriended by a wise old wizard, a gigantic but lovable monster named Ludo, and a spry old dwarf called Hoggle. You won't find this mythical land on any map, but in the fertile imaginations of Jim Henson and Brian Fraud, two magicians who once before combined their artistry to create the fantasy universe of The Dark Crystal.
Henson maintains that Labyrinth, resembles The Dark Crystal only in its attention to detail and fantastic characters and situations - but its tone is much lighter. "With Labyrinth, we started off to do a much smaller film, we started off to do a more intimate thing about the relationships between these characters, and also, we intended it to be lighter weight because of Terry Jones' (of Monty Python fame) screenplay. One of the best things about Labyrinth is it enabled us to do something like the muppets and slightly like The Dark Crystal - a nice middle ground." While The Dark Crystal depicted a world completely divorced from our own, Henson has wisely chosen to incorporate two human characters into Labyrinth.
Fantasy artist Brian Froud, whose beautifully illustrated volumes, Gnomes and Faeries, became an international publishing phenomenon, was not only responsible for designing the film's muppet characters, he also developed the original concept for the film. "It started with an idea of Brian's about a journey through a labyrinth," Henson remarks, "and then we went through a lot of different configurations of the story before we ended up with this one. Since The Dark Crystal, Brian did a little pop-up book of goblins, a delightful little book, and I wanted to get the feeling, the wit and the whimsey of these goblins into the film."
"We wanted to do something different from The Dark Crystal and create another world," Fraud concurs. "We came up with the idea of goblins and a labyrinth, which we thought was a very interesting area to draw from. It's got a...