As a diligent child of the 1990's, the VHS's for both "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "James and the Giant Peach" on regular rotation on my family's VCR. Even though "Nightmare" was populated by monsters and ghouls and skellingtons, the film that scared me more was "James and the Giant Peach," because unlike "Nightmare", that film interacted with deep fears that I carried through my childhood about being abandoned, about being alone, about being undefended from the stormy forces of the world that wanted to trample and obliterated everything that made me feel safe. "Nightmare" was spooky up until the characters started actually talking but its central conflict was basically a midlife crisis; "James and the Giant Peach" was legitimately upsetting.
Both films are full of singularly beautiful images that are so different they seem to compel your mind to pursue them. It's a type of world-building that all great animation does that eschews logic in favor of something like a self-perpetuating dream, where the mind shows itself an image so strange and possessing that it automatically does the imaginative work of generating a rationale for that image. When we see a graveyard under the arctic sea teeming with sunken ships and menacing skeletons or a massive rhino made of storm clouds and smoke come galloping out of the horizon or the kindly woman's face of a giant spider tucking our hero into sleep, we don't just take those images at face value, we follow them and they bloom into something greater than the sum of their parts.
Selick leaned further into the macabre, the grotesque, and the uncanny for this film, and it makes for a more emotional and ultimately affirming story. James is confronted with deep terrors from without and within, a rhino made of storm clouds and smoke as the chaos of an unreasonable world, and the aunts that neglect and starve and beat him as the hell of an abusive homelife. James's test is to create an entire life for himself, a shelter with his magic peach, a family with his human-sized insects who would be monsters to anyone else.
Rewatching the film as an adult, I loved the first two thirds of the film, but the third act felt underwhelming. James defeating the rhino by basically just telling it that he isn't afraid of it felt limp when the rest of the story was so filled with such potent metaphor and association. It may have worked better on the page, but cinematically it fell flat. The same goes for the dispatching of the aunts, although I think that would have been forgivable if we'd gotten a really strong confrontation with the rhino.
Also, Randy Newman's score felt at odds with the look and tone of the film. Selick may have thought the film would benefit from moving in a different direction than the work that Danny Elfman did on "Nightmare," but looking back now, the choice for Elfman just seems so obvious for "James and the Giant Peach." It would have give a necessary sense of dread while also providing a upbeat counterpoint. Also, I don't think I would miss the songs if they were removed. Animated musicals were the order of the day in 1996, but the songs add nothing that the dialogue isn't able to do on its own.
Both films are full of singularly beautiful images that are so different they seem to compel your mind to pursue them. It's a type of world-building that all great animation does that eschews logic in favor of something like a self-perpetuating dream, where the mind shows itself an image so strange and possessing that it automatically does the imaginative work of generating a rationale for that image. When we see a graveyard under the arctic sea teeming with sunken ships and menacing skeletons or a massive rhino made of storm clouds and smoke come galloping out of the horizon or the kindly woman's face of a giant spider tucking our hero into sleep, we don't just take those images at face value, we follow them and they bloom into something greater than the sum of their parts.
Selick leaned further into the macabre, the grotesque, and the uncanny for this film, and it makes for a more emotional and ultimately affirming story. James is confronted with deep terrors from without and within, a rhino made of storm clouds and smoke as the chaos of an unreasonable world, and the aunts that neglect and starve and beat him as the hell of an abusive homelife. James's test is to create an entire life for himself, a shelter with his magic peach, a family with his human-sized insects who would be monsters to anyone else.
Rewatching the film as an adult, I loved the first two thirds of the film, but the third act felt underwhelming. James defeating the rhino by basically just telling it that he isn't afraid of it felt limp when the rest of the story was so filled with such potent metaphor and association. It may have worked better on the page, but cinematically it fell flat. The same goes for the dispatching of the aunts, although I think that would have been forgivable if we'd gotten a really strong confrontation with the rhino.
Also, Randy Newman's score felt at odds with the look and tone of the film. Selick may have thought the film would benefit from moving in a different direction than the work that Danny Elfman did on "Nightmare," but looking back now, the choice for Elfman just seems so obvious for "James and the Giant Peach." It would have give a necessary sense of dread while also providing a upbeat counterpoint. Also, I don't think I would miss the songs if they were removed. Animated musicals were the order of the day in 1996, but the songs add nothing that the dialogue isn't able to do on its own.