James and the Giant Peach (1996) on Netflix
PG19961h 19mAdventureAnimationFamily
Orphaned James Henry Trotter lives with his domineering aunts Spiker and Sponge. Crocodile tongues spill in the garden and grow a giant peach, and inside it he finds human-sized insects.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb6.7/1079,354 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes91%
Trailer
Plot summary
English boy James Henry Trotter loses his parents to a rhinoceros and is left with his two domineering aunts, Spiker and Sponge, who mistreat him. When he rescues a spider from them, an old man hands him a bag of magic crocodile tongues that make anything they touch grow. James trips and spills the bag in the garden, and an enormous peach swells from the old tree. The aunts turn it into a paying attraction. That night James eats his way inside and meets the spider again, along with Mr. Grasshopper, Mr. Centipede, Mr. Earthworm, Mrs. Ladybug and Mrs. Glowworm, all human-sized. When the aunts come looking for him, Mr. Centipede cuts the peach loose. The peach rolls into the Atlantic, and the insects tie seagulls to its stem to steer it toward New York City.
Cast
- Susan Turner-Crayas James' Mother
- Cirocco Dunlapas Girl with Telescope
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about James and the Giant Peach (1996)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- At Walt Disney Animation Studios in the early 1980s, Joe Ranft tried to convince staff to produce a film of Roald Dahl's book, but Disney refused, citing a potentially expensive animation process and the weird subject matter. Ranft later pitched it through Pixar, and the studio settled on a different pitch, which became Toy Story.
- Selick approached Elvis Costello to write four songs for the movie and Costello showed an interest in doing the film, but Disney's music division did not: "Their alarms just went off, and they said, 'No, that's too weird'", said Selick.
- Dennis Potter was hired to write a draft, which Rosen described as "slightly black and bizarre" - a tone Disney did not approve of, particularly with the sharks being Nazis.
- Felicity Dahl, Roald's widow and executor of his estate, began offering film rights to the book in the summer of 1992, and among those interested were Steven Spielberg and Danny DeVito.
- Selick had originally planned James to be a live actor through the entire film, then later considered doing the whole film in stop-motion, but ultimately settled on entirely live-action and entirely stop-motion sequences, to keep costs lower.
- The film went on to gross $28,946,127 in the United States and Canada and $37.7 million worldwide, which against a budget of $38 million made it commercially a box office bomb.
