James and the Giant Peach is one of Dahl’s strangest and most macabre stories, and the film perfectly channels that outlandish atmosphere.ĭahl himself wasn’t a fan of Mel Stuart’s 1971 musical and how it deviated from the book, and to be fair, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is not quite a faithful adaptation.
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The gorgeous animation lends an otherworldly and zany edge to Dahl’s twisted tale, plus a stellar voice cast including Richard Dreyfuss, Susan Sarandon, and David Thewlis. Soon, the barren peach tree in his yard sprouts the largest peach in the world, and when James crawls inside, he meets a group of enormous, anthropomorphic, and rather polite bugs, who join him on an airborne adventure across the Atlantic Ocean.
Poor James lives with his horrifying aunts, Spiker and Sponge, but his luck changes when he’s given a bag of mysterious “crocodile tongues,” which he inadvertently spills in his garden.
So, it’s no wonder that director Henry Selick ( The Nightmare Before Christmas) decided to tackle these bugs, pirates, and robotic sharks with a clever mix of live action and stop-motion animation. Anjelica Huston is at her most sinister and dramatic as the villainous Grand High Witch, and The Witches captures both the hilarity and horror of Dahl’s best.ĭahl imbued all of his stories with some sense of magic, but James and the Giant Peach is perhaps the most outright fantastical. The Man Who Fell to Earth director Nicolas Roeg helmed this Dahl adaptation, with help from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and their delightfully wacky effects. When they find Luke listening in on their evil machinations, they turn him into a mouse, and it’s up to Luke and his grandmother to take on the witches once and for all. Our heroes are the tiny Luke and his grandmother Helga, who visit a seaside hotel only to accidentally stumble upon a meeting of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children - aka the annual meeting of all the witches in England. There are plenty of terrifying antagonists in all of Dahl’s work - as a child, we had nightmares about the Vermicious Knids from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator - but few are as chilling as the Grand High Witch and her coven of bald, toeless, and infanticidal witches. Read on for our ranking of seven timeless Dahl movies.
(This doesn’t include his original scripts like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and we decided to focus only on theatrical releases, excluding made-for-TV adaptations like last year’s Esio Trot, starring Judi Dench and Dustin Hoffman, or the 1989 film Danny, the Champion of the World, starring Jeremy Irons and Robbie Coltrane.) 13, 2016 marks Dahl’s 100th birthday, and to celebrate, EW decided to rank the seven best movies based on his work. So, it’s no wonder that Hollywood has mined Dahl’s extensive bibliography to create some of the best book-to-movie adaptations of all time. Dahl may have written about witches, giants, and anthropomorphic bugs, but all of his characters have a richness that makes them extraordinarily human. As one of the most iconic children’s writers of all time, Dahl imbued all of his stories with a sense of imagination and wonder - and, more often than not, a little bit of nastiness. Roald Dahl was many things, including a fighter pilot, a screenwriter, and a novelist, but he is undoubtedly best known as the man who introduced us to unforgettable characters like the eccentric Willy Wonka, the brilliant Matilda, and the cunning Mr.
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