Mixed-media adaptation (live action, cartoon, stop-motion animation) of the Roald Dahl children's book, from the Disney studio, and more specifically from Henry Selick of Tim Burton's The Nightmare before Christmas. The self-consciously "dreamlike" narrative concerns an unloved orphan who, accompanied by oversized English-speaking insects, sails off for the Big Apple in a huge peach attached by spider-threads to a hundred seagulls. The villainous aunts (the warty tubby Sponge, the wrinkly cadaverous Spiker) and the comical-sidekick animals (vampirish spider, ladylike ladybug, etc.) are well within the traditions of Disney animation, but the entire thing is so unremittingly weird and bizarre that no single thing in it can stand out as distinctly weird or bizarre. (By its own words, it is not intended to make sense "up here," but instead only "in there.") A couple of possible highlights: the moment when the night lights of Manhattan appear through an opening in the clouds, and the moment immediately thereafter when a fast-closing storm cloud unleashes the Great Rhinoceros of Death. With Paul Terry, Miriam Margoyles, Joanna Lumley, and the voices of Susan Sarandon, Richard Dreyfuss, Simon Callow. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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