James and The Giant Peach (1996)

Children are an easy market for movies, but they can also be the hardest to cater to. So many times their tastes change; what is popular one day will pass by the wayside the next. Never is that more true than when trying to guess what kids will watch on the movie screen.

Walt Disney Studios has made a practice of second-guessing (if not dictating) children's entertainment proclivities. Dinosaurs hot for awhile? They released the movies Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend and Dinosaur. TV-nostalgia kick? Watch their versions of My Favorite Martian and George of the Jungle. Love the old Disney classics? Hang in there; they'll either have a remake of or a sequel to your favorite any day now. Naturally they'll bomb every so often (The Black Cauldron, Treasure Planet, The Emperor's New Groove) but then they usually rebound with that old standby: Children's Story Adaptation.

And you can't think of "Winnie The Pooh" or "The Wind In The Willows" without having Disney enter your brain at one point of another due to this fact.

Author Roald Dahl is familiar to most of us for "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", and the movie based on it (Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory). Ask some people and they'd be hard-pressed to name another book Dahl had written, let alone another movie based on his works. If anything, Dahl told stories with a jaded adult's sensibilities and a very sharp wit. Not all that easy to adapt. Nevertheless, Disney Studios sought to widen the public's knowledge of Dahl's work...and widen their own wallets at the same time. And so came about the title we look at today: "James and the Giant Peach" was a lesser-known work of Dahl's but if Disney had anything to say about it, it wouldn't be for long.

James (Paul Terry), the young boy of the title, is a child of most unfortunate luck; he has lost his parents to a charging rhinoceros while on a picnic at the beach (!) and now lives with two of the most horrific aunts in the history of aunts: Sponge (Miriam Margolyes) and Spiker (Joanna Lumley). They work him day and night to clean and upkeep their desolate mountain-top cottage. Then, one night, a mysterious old man (Pete Postlethwaite) introduces him to the magic contained in a asmall canister he gives him. The magic conjures up James' salvation in a rather unassuming package: a peach.

After it is discovered by Sponge and Spiker, having grown to mammoth proportions, the aunts try getting rich off of it, keeping the profits from James of course. But just when things seem at their darkest, James takes a bite of the forbidden peach to discover....

But no, why describe it? Part of a child's fascination with a story like this is watching it unfold before their own eyes. And indeed, it is here where James and the Giant Peach succeeds.

Directed by Henry Selick, an old hand at this kind of thing with his previous success with The Nightmare Before Christmas, he does a good job with the desolate gray and drab daylight in the beginning of the film, but once things start REALLY happening, the colors are bright and the animation itself is as wondrous as it was in Christmas.

And the voices supplied are fantastic! Margolyes, Simon Callow, Jane Leeves and David Thewlis are extremely expressive in their vocal work. And the heretofore untapped vocal contributions of Richard Dreyfuss and Susan Sarandon make their aural appearances all the more enjoyable.

I can't go too much into the story without giving you the full plot, so suffice it to say that Selick and his team of stop-motion animators and artists have created a world that is altogether magical and endearing. There is also a great deal of humor, as with a scene involving a rooster and a giant peach rolling towards it. But for animated characters like these, you can't help but feel as if they have more expressive faces, limber motion and more expressive qualities in their carefully-posed frames than any cadre of Oscar-winning actors. And there in the midst of all the technical wizardry lies a truly heartbreaking look into what children want and expect from grown-ups (parents or not) as well as their own small lives: a chance to make the most of themselves.

Again, Dahl is something of a nihilist in starting out his stories. You can bet if e-coli were around at th etime of this book, he would have worked that in somewhere, too. But then again, once the good starts happening, it erases ALL of the bad. So Dahl was never entirely a pessimist; true, you need a certain amount of pessimism to allow the bad to happen in the first place. But he also had hope in all of his works, as well. In the end, the evil in his children's lives are eradicated, the pure heart wins out and everything works out for the best, as it does here (Oops! Sorry to spoil it).

Of course, James eneded up with another sad tale to tell at the box office - IT NEVER MADE BACK ITS INITIAL BUDGET! And for that, I have absolutely no explanation whatsoever; technically it was a failure, but it had no reason to be. Anyone who's enjoyed any of Dahl's books or movies based on them, or even enjoyed Selick's Nightmare Before Christmas would most certainly enjoy a sweet, simple tale like this. There's enough imagination, creativity, smiles and triumph of a young child's soul to make anyone wish they were young again and reading Dahl for the very first time.

Needless to say, Disney stuck with its traditional 2-D animation and live-action kiddie films to make up their loss (rest assured, there'd be more losses to come) after their failure here. And that's a shame, seeing as how they got the look and feel for a story such as this just right. I guess it's just a mater of not having enough faith in your end product to see it through thick and thin, good and bad. just like not every movie can be a Snow White or a Bambi, neither is it a Black Cauldron nor a Treasure Planet.

But if only all of them could have the heart and soul of a James and the Giant Peach, perhaps there would be more reason for children (as well as the parents) to have faith in Disney's product.

And if that be the case, perhaps it's time we all took a refresher course in children's literature, starting with Roald Dahl.