James and the Giant Peach

If you dig deeply enough into your childhood memories, most likely, the name "Roald Dahl" holds a special place in your heart. Mr. Dahl wrote an amazing array of children's stories, seemingly harmless on the surface, but filled with somewhat unusual and sometimes strange undertones, which make his books all the more loveable. So it's a no-brainer that any movie based on the books would have to be equally quirky, loveable, and inventive. So who better to do so than Tim Burton and Henry Sellick, the duo behind the stop-motion masterpiece, "The Nightmare Before Christmas"? Sellick, who directs, and Burton, who serves as a producer, each offer their own signature touches to the film, "James and the Giant Peach".

The movie begins as live-action, and we follow young James (Paul Terry) as he transcends from a happy, content life with his Mummy and Daddy on a surreal English shoreline house, to a miserable existence with his Aunts, two hideous beasts of women that go by the silly names of Spiker and Sponge. James' life becomes a basic child's nightmare, chores, beatings (none shown on screen, but it is implied) disgusting fish heads for food, and just trapped in a loveless house.

But, like clockwork, a mysterious old man comes to James bearing a gift of luminous green Crocodile Tongues, boiled in the skull of a dead witch for 20 days and 20 nights. The gift, says the old man, promises James a lifetime free of misery, but thanks to a bout of clumsiness, James instead gets a Mammoth sized peach growing in his front yard. The little boy's curiosity is spiked, and he crawls inside a hole that appears in the enormous fruit, beckoning him in.

At this point, the movie changes from live-action to beautiful stop-motion, dazzling to behold, creating a surreal world that I'm sure Roald Dahl would have been proud of, and we are introduced to the insect characters of the story, that is, wise-ass centipede, a cultured grasshopper, an exotic spider, a maternal ladybug, a miserable earthworm, and a partially deaf glow-worm. The movie is now weakened slightly, mostly by being peppered with Randy Newman's irritating tunes, but the visuals continue to compensate for it, as we journey from one amazing adventure to another on a trip to reach James' dream destination: New York City, building up to a final face-off between him, the rhino who slayed his parents, and the Aunts who made him miserable.

All in all, the film is an excellent product, but a few flaws remain clear. The movie is unfaithful to the book in some parts, the songs are campy (where was Mr. Elfman when we needed him?) and it's pretty obvious to the trained eyes of veteran Burtonites that the studio (Disney) wrestled a good portion of creative control from Burton, who, if I'm sure had had his way, would have made the movie more faithful to the book. An overall beautiful film, suffering from minor pockmarks.

Leah Grantham (A.K.A, morbid_lydia) 2005

DVD:
Disney has released a "Special Edition" DVD of James and the Giant Peach. Sadly the extra features are quite minimimal, the dvd contains only a promotional "making-of" documentary, a music video and some stills.

You can purchase James and the Giant Peach dvd on Amazon through this link.