By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
April 12, 1996
"James and the Giant Peach," the delicious new film from Disney animator Henry Selick ("The Nightmare Before Christmas"), is the latest in an impressive string of first-rate movies for kids.
Based on the popular 1961 children's book by Roald Dahl, the movie is as wondrous as "A Little Princess" (which also presents the imagination as an escape from harsh reality), as innovative as "Toy Story" and as endearing as "Babe." (Well, almost.)
Like the adventures of that justly famous pig, this visually intoxicating film begins when its 9-year-old British hero, James (Paul Terry), is separated from his beloved family. He is sent to live with a pair of evil aunts, Spiker and Sponge (Joanna Lumley, from "Absolutely Fabulous," and Miriam Margolyes).
In this case, though, James's parents were gobbled up by a giant rhinoceros in the sky, and if James doesn't behave, his aunts tell him, it's coming back to get him, too.
As bleak as this sounds, James does have an outlet-his crayons-and with them he creates a whole world of his own. One day, while James is attending to his chores, a stranger (Pete Postlethwaite) gives him a paper bag full of crawly green crocodile tongues that he says are capable of making wondrous things happen. James accidentally drops the bag and the magic tongues scatter everywhere, and one wiggles its way inside a peach hanging alone on a branch. Instantly, the fuzzy fruit begins to grow and grow until, finally, it's the size of a house.
This first part of the film-in which James is a real flesh-and-blood boy-is a sort of live-action prologue. But when James takes a whopping bite out of the giant peach, one of the magic tongues causes a tunnel to open up in its side. And, as James crawls toward the center of the peach, he is transformed somehow into a puppet. Once James arrives at the center, he discovers a group of insects, as large as he is, hanging around the pit.
At this point, Selick's off-kilter creativity begins to soar. Before he was rhinocerosed, James's father used to tell him that New York was the place where dreams came true. And, together with Grasshopper (Simon Callow), Centipede (Richard Dreyfuss), Ladybug (Jane Leeves), Glowworm (Miriam Margolyes) and Spider (Susan Sarandon, doing her sexiest Marlene Dietrich), James commandeers the Peach, leashes a flock of migrating sea gulls for power and sets out across the Atlantic for the Big Apple.
Along the way, the Peach and its crew drift off course, landing at the North Pole, and have to fight off a vicious mechanized shark. Randy Newman has written a handful of funky-bouncy songs that Selick and company stage as full-fledged puppet musical numbers. The puppets themselves are not just amazing-looking, they're remarkably expressive as well (especially the bugs). By modern standards, the stop-action technique the film employs is Jurassic compared with the computer-generated stuff most animators have embraced. In this instance, though, doing it the old-fashioned way gives the film and its creatures an appealing handmade quality. Also, Selick's shadowed sensibility dovetails nicely with Dahl's lurking menace.
In making "James and the Giant Peach," Selick has reunited with producers Tim Burton and Denise DiNova, the same creative team that worked on "Nightmare." So far, they've made two films together, and both are destined to become classics.
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