Josh Spiegel
On paper, the Disney adaptation of James and the Giant Peach should have worked. The film, which turns 30 this month, had the benefit of big names and high expectations in more ways than one. It was from director Henry Selick and producer Tim Burton, who had previously collaborated on The Nightmare Before Christmas, the modern holiday favorite that’s only grown in popularity with each passing year. While the new film’s premise didn’t originate with Burton, adapting a beloved Roald Dahl book seemed like a slam dunk, too. The voice cast included well-regarded actors like Richard Dreyfuss, Susan Sarandon, and Simon Callow, and boasted new original songs from composer and musician Randy Newman, fresh off his Oscar-nominated work on the inaugural Pixar film Toy Story. Yet that last bit speaks to a problem at the core of James and the Giant Peach. In theory, the songs should work. In reality, all they show is that Danny Elfman’ incomparable musical work in telling the story of Jack Skellington is what makes Nightmare stand the test of time that this film is unable to pass.
Set in the late 1940s, James and the Giant Peach focuses on the eponymous James (Paul Terry), an orphaned boy forced to live with his two awful aunts (Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margolyes), who treat him horrendously. One day, James is gifted a bag of magical crocodile tongues by a mysterious old man (Pete Postlethwaite) that, when planted in the ground, makes a regular peach grow to mammoth proportions. Those same crocodile tongues also anthropomorphize a group of insects who treat James with kindness and grace once he enters the interior of the peach and they embark upon an adventure with sharks, pirates, and more. Dahl’s inherent spikiness as a writer is present in this whimsical story, but the finished film still feels like it lacks some of the bite of The Nightmare Before Christmas (and of other Dahl adaptations). It’s rarely more obvious than in listening to the songs.
It should come as little surprise that Selick apparently did not choose Newman, who was foisted onto the project by Disney. The director had initially wanted Elvis Costello, who was deemed too odd by Disney, as was Andy Partridge of the band XTC, the latter of whom wrote a few demo songs Disney rejected. It’s entirely possible that neither of those musicians could have done much better than Newman and the five songs he wrote, including one, “Eating the Peach,” with lyrics pulled straight from Dahl’s book. Elfman may not have been involved for personal reasons, since he and Burton reportedly had a brief falling-out when his speaking voice wasn’t used for Jack Skellington in Nightmare, in place of actor Chris Sarandon. (This is nothing compared to the very real and disturbing sexual assault allegations levied against Elfman over the last decade.) But his presence is unmistakably missed, not least because the attempt to play a cute in-joke midway through the film falls flat, when James and his insect friends face off against a group of skeleton pirates, whose silent leader is a dead ringer for Jack Skellington himself.
The sense of over-familiarity extends to Newman’s music. If you know his Pixar work well enough, you may find enough similarities between his score here and that of his work in the 1998 Pixar film A Bug’s Life. The songs feel very Newman-esque, but all that does is throw into sharp relief how at odds his musical stylings are in both a Henry Selick film and a Dahl adaptation. The closing-credits song, “Good News,” is performed by Newman with a jaunty choir behind him; while it broadly explains the story of the film, it does so in a cheery way that feels extremely off-base with Dahl’s literary voice. Of the in-film songs that don’t owe a direct debt to Dahl, the best is “Family,” an ensemble number in which the various insects pay homage to James for his kindness and youthful ingenuity. But even that feels like a weak attempt to put a smile on the audience’s face after some blandly adventurous exploits.
Hindsight pays both the film and its music no favors. As of April 1996, you could have fairly said that Newman wrote one truly great Disney song in Toy Story (the others are all better than anything in this film, but they’re not world-beaters). But three decades later, you can also think of “When She Loved Me,” “If I Didn’t Have You,” and just about every song in The Princess and the Frog.
Selick and Burton, in their separate ways, moved onto better things. For Selick, it was Laika’s Coraline. For Burton, it was the 2005 stop-motion animated film Corpse Bride, which has perhaps not had the same cultural footprint as The Nightmare Before Christmas. But by then, he knew well enough that if he was going to do another stop-motion film with songs, the person most important to connect with was one of that film’s co-stars, the musician and longtime collaborator, Danny Elfman.
“James and the Giant Peach” is streaming on Disney+.
