Just as the sweetness of the title fruit belies the bitter cyanide-laced pit within, so does this colorful adaptation of Roald Dahl's beloved book conceal the darker, nightmarish hues underlying most classic children's tales. With Tim Burton as the producer and Henry The Nightmare Before Christmas Selick as its director and utilizing the spooky, surrealistic designs of illustrator Lane Smith,, the same type of digital animation techniques that brought Toy Story to riotous life combined with stop-motion photography, and sprightly songs and scoring by quirk-meister Randy Newman, Disney's James and the Giant Peach is a film guaranteed to delight both older children (small ones may find some scenes a bit scary) and their parents. The magical tale begins in live action as the idyllic British life of young James is shattered when a fearsome rhinoceros gobbles up his parents. Orphaned James is then forced to move in with his cruel aunties who abuse and starve him. To ease the misery of his new life, poor finds solace in dreaming of visiting New York City. He imagines going there in the balloon he fashions from a paper bag and a candle. It drifts out the window and disappears. One day an enigmatic Old Man happens by. In an effort to console poor James, he hands him the lost bag filled with squirmy, green-glowing crocodile tongues, promising James that all will work out for the best. Unfortunately, James accidentally spills the magical tongues in his aunts' desiccated garden. The tongues immediately burrow into the roots of a long-dead peach tree and the next day the tree bears an enormous peach. One night, James, too hungry to care crawls into the peach (which the aunts used as a tourist attraction) and accidentally ingests a crocodile tongue. Suddenly he turns into an animated creature and runs into six lively insects that include a genteel grasshopper, a proper ladybug, an earthworm, an ingenious glowworm, a cynical wiseacre centipede with a Brooklyn accent and a Garboesque spider. The peach rolls into the sea and thus begins a fantastic journey to the Big Apple. Once afloat the travelers encounter a scary mechanical shark with a circular saw in its mouth that nearly devours the centipede until quick-thinking glow worm saves the day. The shark is not the only danger that awaits the disparate friends. Before reaching their destination they will also encounter a terrifying sunken ship populated by a real skeleton crew led by Captain Jack (Nightmare Before Christmas' Jack Skellington in a memorable cameo).
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