Word: selick
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fully anticipate the wrath of several generations of possessive children when we declare that the new Disney film of James and the Giant Peach is an improvement on Roald Dahl's 1961 backyard fantasy. Director Henry Selick and his team of screenwriters (Karey Kirkpatrick, Jonathan Roberts, Steve Bloom) and technical specialists have given the story balance and emotional heft. Mixing stylized live action with stop-motion animation, they have reconciled the tale's realistic and surreal elements and, in five sprightly Randy Newman tunes, made the story sing...
...page 1 of the book, Dahl kills off James' parents--they are devoured by a rhinoceros--and, soon after, the wicked Sponge and Spiker. The story then lurches picaresquely amid near catastrophes. Selick gives this all a bit more focus by making sure the early events, including the rhinoceros, resonate throughout the film. He also gives James (winningly played by Paul Terry) a mission: to find his dream city, a Deco-delicious Manhattan. Spider (voiced by Susan Sarandon) here has the melancholy hauteur of a Garbo femme fatale; and the Centipede, obnoxious in the book, is now a Leo Gorcey...
Harryhausen was a master of stop-motion, the laborious, handmade form of animation that lives today in the work of Oscar winner Nick Park (A Close Shave) and Selick, whose previous feature was Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. This is a jauntier piece--more Disneyfied, perhaps, but still apt to leave a haunting impression on the children who see it. And when they finally read the Dahl book, they may be annoyed. Why, they will wonder, couldn't it be more like this movie...
Though not directed by Burton, "Nightmare" is the most fully realized execution of his brooding fantasies. Director Henry Selick and composer Danny Elfman have produced a Christmas special gone terribly wrong. All the expected cliches are here: the despairing soul who doesn't understand the holidays, the possibility of a Christmas that almost isn't, a jolly but befuddled Santa Claus and...a mad scientist with a flip-top skull? "Nightmare" is a decidedly different celebration of the season...
...Nightmare Before Christmas; directed by Henry Selick; based on a story by Tim Burton; Touchstone Pictures; Rated...