Slumberland Trivia | 30 facts about the movie

«Slumberland» is a 2022 American fantasy adventure film directed by Francis Lawrence and written by David Guion and Michael Handelman.

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1. Slumberland is a 2022 American fantasy adventure film.
2. It was directed by Francis Lawrence.
3. It was written by David Guion and Michael Handelman.
4. Based on the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay.
5. The film stars Jason Momoa, Marlow Barkley, Chris O’Dowd, Kyle Chandler, and Weruche Opia.
6. Raised alone by a single father in a lighthouse, a young girl comes to be age 11. Nemo’s father is fun and eccentric and full of imagination. One night her beloved father leaves to help a boat on the ocean and he dies at sea. He has left instructions to give custody of Nemo to her single uncle as there is no one else. The uncle is an uninspired, stodgy, uptight doorknob entrepreneur who has no clue how to raise a child and lives in a very metropolitan city where Nemo does not fit in.
7. Thanks to a dream, Nemo discovers a secret map to the dreamworld of Slumberland, and with the help of an eccentric outlaw, she traverses dreams and flees nightmares in an attempt to see her late father again who was lost at sea.
8. Slumberland was released on November 18, 2022, by Netflix.
9. It received generally mixed reviews from critics.
10. Filming began on February 18, 2021, in Toronto, and concluded on May 19, 2021.
11. On March 3, 2020, it was announced that Jason Momoa would star in a live-action adaptation of the comic strip series Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay from director Francis Lawrence, with Netflix distributing and production starting in the summer of that same year.
12. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, filming for the project was postponed.
13. On October 12, 2020, Kyle Chandler joined the cast of the film, where Chris O’Dowd and Marlow Barkley had already been confirmed to star.
14. The following year, on February 18, Weruche Opia and India de Beaufort were cast.
15. Winsor McCay receives no onscreen credit for creating the characters and elements upon which the film is based.
16. Flip’s line “sometimes a pig is just a pig,” is a reference to Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s famous statement “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Flip mentions Freud in the next scene.
17. Based on the Sunday comic strip series “Little Nemo in Slumberland” by Winsor McCay, which ran from October 15, 1905 to January 9, 1927. In January 2020, it was announced that a new live-action film adaptation will be made exclusively for Netflix, directed by Francis Lawrence and featuring a gender-swapped version of the title character Nemo.
18. Jason Momoa stars as a radically altered version of Flip who is described as a “nine-foot tall creature that is half-man, half-beast, has shaggy fur and long curved tusks”, while the plot focusing on Nemo and Flip traveling across Slumberland in search of Nemo’s father.
19. In Winsor McCay’s comics, Flip is short and fat with a green face and a cigar with the overall appearance of a circus clown.
20. The “walking bed” sequence pays homage to one of the most iconic images from Winsor McCay’s comic strip.
21. The seagull’s name is Bugsy, a reference for Bugsy Siegel, the gangster who helped create Las Vegas. His story was told in Bugsy (1991).
22. Flip is played by Jason Momoa, famous for playing Arthur Curry/Aquaman, in which he lived with his father in a lighthouse. Just like Nemo does in this film.
23. In the comic strip on which the movie is based Nemo is a little boy.
24. Jason Momoa plays a very different version of the character Flip, who was voiced in an earlier film adaptation by Mickey Rooney. Momoa is 6′ 4″ (1,93 m), while Rooney was famously of below average height. He was 5′ 2″ (1,57 m).
25. First Francis Lawrence film not to be scored by James Newton Howard, with Pinar Toprak take over him as composer. Lawrence and Newton Howard will be reunited on the upcoming The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023).
26. Second adaptation from Winsor McCay’s comic after Little Nemo (1989) (not counting the three Japanese shorts made in 1978, 1984 and 1987 that led to the film). Third if counting the Nintendo Enterntainment System’s game Little Nemo: The Dream Master (1990), which followed the 1989 movie.
27. There are a few subtle hints that Flip and Philip are connected. They have similar sounding names, and also there’s Philip’s interest in doorknobs and locks while Flip is constantly looking for doors in Slumberland.
28. The poem read out at Nemo’s father’s funeral is Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar.”
29. When Nemo, with the help of Pig, finds the map that Flip has been looking for, audience can see at the bottom of the map, “Property Of Bureau of Subconscious Activities”.
30. In the movie Agent Green establishes that in Slumberland every living person has a personal safe place for dreaming and a personal nightmare. Nemo’s nightmare is a giant octopus, a hint for Jules Verne’s novel “20.000 Leagues under the Seas”, published in 1870. At a point of it, Captain Nemo fights against a giant octopus. In addition, Kyle Chandler’s look in this movie pays tribute to James Mason’s look as Nemo in 20000 leagues under the sea (1954).