After the wondrous success of The Nightmare Before Christmas, director Henry Selick and producer Tim Burton reunited for another foray into the playful world of stop-motion animation storytelling.
James and the Giant Peach (1996) is an adaptation of Roald Dahl‘s storybook fantasy of a plucky orphan who escapes his nasty aunts in a peach the size of a house. At first, all he wants a nibble of the unusual harvest, but as he crawls his way in, he meets and befriends a lively group of talking (and singing!) insects, including a wise-guy Brooklyn centipede (voiced by Richard Dreyfuss), a French black widow spider (Susan Sarandon) and a maternal ladybug (Jane Leeves).
It opens as a live action film, with James (Paul Terry) suffering under the cruelty of his aunts (Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margolyes) in a world that looks like a warped fairy tale gone to seed. Once James crawls into the peach, his world transforms into a lively stop-motion adventure fantasy that takes this crew to the bottom of the ocean (where they battle pirate skeletons on an underwater wreck), up into the skies, and finally to the spire of the Empire State Building.
But there is also a dark undercurrent of nightmares and childhood fears runs through it as James is haunted by the accident that took the lives of his parents, which is visualized as a giant rhinoceros that thunders out of the clouds. For all of its imagination and color and wonder, it’s a dark fantasy of escape and friendship in a cruel world.
It costars Pete Postlethwaite and features the voices of Simon Callow and David Thewlis. Randy Newman provides the bouncy (if unmemorable) original songs, which earned the film its sole Oscar nomination.
Rated PG
Also on Blu-ray and DVD and on SVOD through Amazon Video and/or other services. Availability may vary by service.
James and the Giant Peach [Blu-ray]
James and the Giant Peach [DVD]
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On Blu-ray and DVD with a behind-the-scenes featurette and a Randy Newman music video.
