The gimmicky picture book charm of “Giant Peach” [Mizumaru Kawahara’s CINEMONOLOGUE Vol.53]

Index

• Film adaptation of Roald Dahl's work using stop motion and live action
• Grasshopper, Spider and Captain Jack
  
• A fairy tale feeling that lives on even in the live-action parts

Film adaptation of Roald Dahl's work using stop motion and live action

Speaking of Roald Dahl, he is a children's literature author known for `` The Secret of the Chocolate Factory '' and the original work of `` The Witches, '' which was remade into a movie last year, but one of his masterpieces, `` The Adventure of the Haunted Peach, '' has been stopped as a live-action movie. ``Giant Peach'' was made into a movie using a combination of motion and animation. This is a very cute fantasy story in which James, a boy who lost his parents, travels to New York, a city where dreams can come true, together with a peach that has become gigantic due to a mysterious power and the insects that lived inside it.

After the death of his parents, James was taken in by his frightening aunts, and was treated badly with little food.One day, a mysterious old man gave him a mysterious object (the old man said it was a crocodile's tongue), and he was forced to die on a dead tree. The dark days changed completely when I looked at the peach. The peach becomes huge as you watch, and inside it are wonderful insects that have grown as well. The insects are drawn using stop-motion animation, but when James joins the cast, he also transforms from a live-action boy into a doll, a beautiful and wonderful introduction to the anime version of Bart.

The director was Henry Selick, a former Disney animator, and this is an ambitious work that he brought together to produce The Nightmare Before Christmas together with his former Disney colleague Tim Burton. While ``Nightmare'' was an original draft by Burton and bears the Burton seal throughout, this work has a strong impression of being Selick's work. The insects wearing fashionable clothes, the props inside the peach, and the mechanical shark that suddenly appears in the middle are all great, but even though it's cheerful, there's a darkness that hangs in there somewhere, and the contrast between the live-action parts that sandwich the animated parts before and after them is great. The balance is also exquisite.

The insects are anthropomorphized and are not made to be any cuter than they need to be.The insects are beautifully sculpted, but the motif of the insects and the figure-like dolls with metal skeletons seem to go well together, and their slender limbs move in a hurry and in detail. There is a very insect-like atmosphere in places. In this series, the earthworm voiced by Thewlis, who was introduced in the 17th episode , ``The Charming Shadow of David Thewlis, '' is also well done. Its movement is rather similar to that of an inchworm, but its texture is exactly that of an earthworm. The ladybug is cute, and the centipede with its 12 moving arms is interesting, but my personal favorites are the grasshopper and the spider.

Grasshopper, Spider and Captain Jack