James and the Giant Peach

1996 animated Dahl

Rating: 13/20 (Jen: 13/20; Emma: 14/20; Abbey: 20/20)

Plot: Orphaned James lives in a sad, gray (actually, grey) world with a pair of ugly aunts, one who has similar facial expressions to my mother-in-law. They mistreat him, underfeed him, and work him to death while he dreams of someday escaping and traveling to New York City to be find playmates. A passing hobo gives James some magic glowing worm things which, because he's a clumsy fool, James spills. The worm things work their magic, and a giant peach grows on a tree where nothing grew before. The aunts exploit financially until one night, James crawls inside the peach, meets a bunch of insect friends, and attempts to travel via peach and seagulls to New York, New York.

Interesting visuals with a mix of live action and stop animation. Like in Selick's other feature films, he does a good job with the creation of some nifty settings, all bleak when it needs to be bleak and rosy when it needs to be rosy, but there's sometimes so much going on at the same time on the screen (especially when all the insects are around) that things get blurry. The story's great, but none of the insect characters are. They look fine, but the voices bringing them to life don't do nearly enough to, well, bring them to life. So while the bizarre plot points (the whole rhinoceros thing, the cool-looking shark robot thing) and setting textures work great to create a wonderful fairy tale world (I love when the weirdness isn't toned down in kid flicks), the characters, especially for puppets, are really pretty two-dimensional. It makes the movie almost simultaneously fresh and visually exciting and kinda bland. There are a few really beautifully animated moments, including the How-the-Heck ghost pirate scene, but this also lags a lot for a movie that is barely 70 minutes long. It's also not one of Randy Newman's best efforts. I really wanted the handful of songs that had vocals to end seconds after they started. It's likely that the biggest problem with James and the Giant Peach is that it's sandwiched in between Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline, but I didn't like it much when I saw it in the theater either.