James is an English lad whose parents are killed by a giant rhino that materializes out of a cloud. James (Paul Terry) is obliged to live with eccentric and abusive aunts (Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margolyes).
He escapes their clutches by entering a giant peach, where he meets an assortment of talkative anthropomorphic bugs. They include a spider (voiced by Susan Sarandon), a centipede (vb Richard Dreyfuss), a ladybug (vb Jane Leeves), an earthworm (vb David Thewlis), and a glowworm (also vb Miriam Margolyes).
James and his bug friends travel the world in their oversized peach, and because it is a story they accidentally end up exactly where they intended, the top of the Empire State Building. A happy ending is inevitable, no matter how improbable.
How others will see it. Despite producer involvement by Tim Burton, and backing by Disney studios, James and the Giant Peach is less popular than two other Henry Selick-directed stop-motion animated features, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline. At imdb.com, the user vote total is 78K, and the user rating is 6.7 out of 10, compared to the 408K user votes and 7.9 user rating for b>The Nightmare Before Christmas.
James and the Giant Peach did receive one Oscar nomination, for its Randy Newman score. And the user reviews are generally positive, although one commenter wonders how the aunts managed to arrive at the Empire State Building at the exact same time as James and his giant peach. Did they drive their car across the Atlantic Ocean?
How I felt about it. James and the Giant Peach is a dud relative to Henry Selick's two best-known films, The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Coraline (2009). Part of the problem is the live-action scenes that wrap the movie's stop-motion animation core. It is clear that live action is not Selick's strong suit.
But there are problems with the animated scenes as well. We do like the spider, but the other bugs are not as cool to look at it or listen to. The boy is less compelling than his counterpart in another Roald Dahl children's novel, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", and the story doesn't compare well either. It is just near-random fantasy adventure, without the hero-or-villain mystery of Willy Wonka or the provocative moral of spoiled kids and their overly obliging parents.
No, James and the Giant Peach is more like Oliver, where an everyman English orphan is abruptly moved from one environment to another, yet finds a way to become a hero.
We actually wish that James would act like a boy really would when faced with distressing situations. But there are no tears or petulance, just endless earnest pluck.
The Randy Newman songs are beneath his esteemed reputation, and lack the magic of the Danny Elfman tunes from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
James and the Giant Peach does get bonus points for offbeat camp. And there is a fun computer-animated scene featuring James as a caterpillar. But overall, the movie is a disappointment.