‘James and the Giant Peach’ Is the Most Underrated Animated Classic of the ’90s

The single best adaptation of Roald Dahl's work, Henry Selick's stop-motion and live action hybrid is a small but flavorful treat.

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Roald Dahl’s legacy is something of a contradiction. Me’s one of the single most beloved and iconic children’s authors of all time, and yet his work deals with topics that modern media would hesitate to ever show to kids. Dahl’s books are fanciful and imaginative, but also dark, cynical, and mean (and, unfortunately, often reflected his real-life ugliness), spinning stories in which gruesome and unpleasant fates befell rotten kids, and adults were frequently selfish, cruel, and not to be trusted. 

When Dahl’s stories are adapted to the screen, they’re frequently sanitized and airbrushed of their less savory elements: 1971’s “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” is a beloved children’s classic, but it lacks the bitterness that made “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” so satisfying. The recent Netflix film adaptation of “The Twits” altered Dahl’s nasty parable about two assholes getting their cruel comeuppance with a much more optimistic and conventional ending about the importance of empathy. 

There’s many reasons why “James and the Giant Peach,” the 1996 stop-motion/live action hybrid celebrating its 30th anniversary this Sunday, is the best Dahl adaptation to ever make it to film. But it helps that the movie, already adapting one of Dahl’s least venomous novels, is so faithful to the bizarre, imaginative, and whimsically dark streak that makes Dahl’s novels enduring classics. 

Directed by Henry Selick and based on Dahl’s 1996 novel, “James and the Giant Peach” was his and producer Tim Burton’s followup to the massively successful “Nightmare Before Christmas.” While that spooky Halloween classic grossed $100 million upon release and quickly became a culturally enduring goth favorite, the trippier, hallucinatory “James and the Giant Peach” bombed at the box office and briefly put Selick in director jail. Disney, which distributed the project, canceled his next film “Toots and the Upside Down House,” after its failure. 

But “James and the Giant Peach” is better than “Nightmare Before Christmas,” and Selick’s best movie besides his masterpiece “Coraline.” And the strange, gorgeous movie may be the most underappreciated animated classic of its decade. 

Unlike a lot of hybrids between live-action and animation, which rely on a contrast between the mundanity of the real world with the beauty of animation, “James and the Giant Peach” looks equally gorgeous in both mediums. From its opening sequence, in which the titular James (Paul Terry) stands out on a small beach with a lighthouse just beyond him, the film is a stylized marvel, using strange perspectives and painted backdrops to resemble a storybook come to life.

When James transforms into his stop-motion form when he escapes his cruel aunts via the titular peach, and encounters the bugs who become his friends and companions as he escapes his abusive family, the character designs represent a subtle evolution of the iconic gothic creations from “Nightmare Before Christmas” (Jack Skellington makes a cameo here as a ghost under the sea the group encounters). The bugs are stylized, memorable creations, with beady eyes and ’40s-inspired costumes that perfectly evoke their characters: the maternal Mrs. Ladybug (Jane Leeves) an adorable elderly mother figure, the braggart Mr. Centipede (Richard Dreyfuss) dressed as a New York street barker. Their adventure takes them through a variety of set pieces that are nearly hallucinogenic in their abstraction, from a nightmare constructed to look like a paper storybook to a journey in the air through golden-colored clouds. The songs, by Randy Newman, are simple but charming little ditties, particularly the ensemble numbers where this makeshift band of misfits express their devotion to one another. 

“James and the Giant Peach” is slight movie, barely running an hour and 20 minutes with credits. But in that time, it tells a compelling fairy tale about escaping abuse and a broken home in favor of a chosen family. The movie never sugarcoats the abuse that James experiences at the hands of his horrible aunts Sponge and Spiker (Miriam Margolyes and Joanna Lumley, clearly having a blast hamming it up), making them some of the most detestable antagonists in any a Dahl film.

While their comeuppance at the end isn’t quite as macabre as their fate in the book, it’s still darkly satisfying to see their humiliation and defeat as James achieves his dreams of reaching New York City with his new friends. The wish-fulfillment it offers is a world where hardship and pain exists, but the bullies and creeps abusing their power can face rightful karmic consequences. That’s a notion that, watching the film 30 years later in a world that’s only seemed to have gotten meaner, feels more like a hopeful fantasy than ever. 

“James and the Giant Peach” is currently streaming on Disney+.