Being a film buff isn’t easy, so we people that watch many movies tend to be more or less organized about our watching habits – or at least act like it. We create list after list of movies we ‘have to watch’ and at the same time know that we will never truly reach the bottom. Which isn’t a bad thing. But sometimes, it’s nice to just watch something completely by chance – just let an algorithm of some sort decide your movie of the day. For example, do a random search at Netflix and watch the movie that pops up. Since I have to be organized about it at least a little, I will do a search for each color of the rainbow at Netflix every month. And in the end, maybe Kermit will write a song about it.
Apparently, Orange isn’t the most popular color to be used in film titles – the only result that showed up on my Netflix search was Orange Is the New Black. So, after fruitless tries with synonyms like ‘apricot’, ‘carrot’ and ‘coral’, my search of the word ‘peach’ finally gave me a film result: James and the Giant Peach. Conclusion: orange food is more interesting than its color.
Produced by Tim Burton in his Disney years and scored by Pixar’s darling Randy Newman, James and the Giant Peach is a partly live action, partly stop motion 1996 children’s film. The slightly dark yet children-friendly picture is Henry Selick’s second feature film after 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, however it feels like a step back from that. Based on the book by Roald Dahl, the film centers around James (Paul Terry), a young boy whose parents are killed in an accident supposedly involving a rhinoceros. After the terrible event, James is adopted by his evil aunts, who use him as a laboring slave and treat him like dirt. Through a lucky incident, James finds a giant peach, enters it (this is where the film changes to stop motion) and finds it inhabited with humanly bugs. James seizes his chance to escape his aunts and sets on a journey to ‘the best city in the world’: New York.
No matter how many films you have seen and how many reviews, analyses or other film related articles you have written, there will always be films that baffle you by inducing an emotion you can’t completely account for. James and the Giant Peach was like that for me – as soon as it changed to stop motion, a strange dislike formed inside me. I tried hard to fight it and concentrate on the film at hand, muffling illogical feelings that have nothing to do with the product itself. Still, there was something about Paul Terry’s overly distinct British accents, the slightly unsympathetic bugs and the stark lighting that bothered me.
This aside, James and the Giant Peach is a decent children’s film that doesn’t do anything utterly original – it’s rather predictable, the characters are caricature-like and the soundtrack isn’t very memorable for a children’s movie. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to watch this with children and perhaps if you do remember it from your own childhood, you might find some nostalgic enthusiasm for it. From a non-nostalgic and – I admit – emotionally biased viewpoint, it’s merely all right.
