Having just read “James and the Giant Peach” aloud to my son over the course of a week or two, I went looking for the movie version.
Tim Burton was involved. It’s an odd movie. Are those sentences redundant? Probably.
But then I started thinking again about the book. Roald Dahl was odd himself, of course. Big, friendly giants, reclusive chocolate factory owners, heroic thieving foxes . . . it was a strange and fascinating world Dahl painted, and children got it. Overgrown centipedes and spiders inhabiting a nuclear- enhanced peach is just par for the course.
The movie takes a few departures from the book, but nothing that constitutes a deal-killer. Abusive aunts Sponge and Spiker deserved the flattening they got in the book, but the movie goes easier on them, much to my disappointment.
The film makes an inventive but sometimes awkward mix of highly stylized live action and stop-motion animation of the Burton School. When James climbs into the magically overblown peach for the first time, he becomes a stop-motion puppet, better to showcase the morphed bugs inside the peach pit.
The school of peach-eating sharks becomes one mechanical shark of the “Jaws” variety, a nice touch. The peach does become airborne and makes its way toward New York City and a resting place in Central Park. The giant bugs aren’t as cuddly on screen as Dahl was able to make them in the book, but Burton’s visuals are always a treat for the brain.
Don’t skip the book — reading the younger Roald Dahl books out loud is a rite of parenthood as well as of childhood. But the movie will make a nice follow-up.
Rated: PG, for the abusive aunts and some slapstick violence
Best suited for: Children ages 6 to 9, and any parents still enthralled by Roald Dahl
