James and the Giant Peach (1996)

From Producers Tim Burton, Denise Di Novi and Director Henry Selick, the creators of the 1993 smash hit THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, comes Roald Dahl’s beloved 1961 children’s book called JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH. Released in 1996, the film tells the story of a young English orphan boy named James Henry Trotter, who lives with his horrible aunts Spiker and Sponge, enters into a gigantic and magical peach where he meets and befriends a group of enormous human like bugs and embark on a fantastic journey, filled with thrills and adventure, to New York City. As the film is shown both live action and stop motion animation, Academy Award winners Richard Dreyfuss (1977 – Best Actor, The Goodbye Girl) and Susan Sarandon (1995 – Best Actress, Dead Man Walking) provide the voices of the boisterous Mr. Centipede and the sassy but decent Miss Spider. The film also features a cast of well known English actors: Jane Leeves (TV’s Frasier) as the motherly and good-natured Mrs. Ladybug, Joanna Lumley (BBC’s Absolutely Fabulous) as the cruel, malicious, and thoroughly repulsive Aunt Spiker, Miriam Margolyes (Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence) as both the selfish and morbidly fat Aunt Sponge and the voice of the quiet but little deaf Glowworm, Simon Callow (Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls) as the voice of The Old Green, music loving Grasshopper, Pete Postlethwaite (The Lost World: Jurassic Park) as the mysterious stranger/Old Man, David Thewis (the Harry Potter trilogy) as the voice of the shy and timid Earthworm, and one time actor Paul Terry as James. Twelve years it took for this book to get to the big screen, Selick initially considered doing the whole film in stop-motion, but decided to blend it with using live action and to cut down costs. With an award winning team of animators, illustrators, set designers, camera operators on twenty two soundstages, and an estimated budget of $38,000,000, the making of this film was made over a three year production schedule from November 15th, 1994 to January 19th, 1996 in San Francisco, California. When it was released three months later on April 12th, the film grossed over $7,539,098 its opening weekend and domesticated over $28,946,127 in North America alone. As USA TODAY says its “A Stunner with a Breathtaking Array of Eye-Teasers”, Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman gave the film a positive review, praising the animated part, but calling the live-action segments "crude". Randy Newman, the award winning composer for the TOY STORY films, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Musical or Comedy Score and his song “Good News” is one of my favorite songs of Newman’s. This is one of my childhood favorites growing up; I even remember watching the VHS trailer preview so many times on some of my other Disney videos and the day it was released: October 15th, 1996. As I said before about Paul Terry acting only one time in this film, the then nine year old quit after being bitten by a spider in the live action scene when we see James finding it building a web by his window. JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH is to me one of the greatest Disney movies of all time and it’s a true favorite to all movie lovers whether you’re a kid or a grown up.