Roald Dahl Film Adaptations: Ranked From Worst To Best

2. James And The Giant Peach

Even by Dahl's oddball standards, this story of a boy who crosses the Atlantic in an overgrown piece of fruit, accompanied by a bunch of oversized insects, is a strange one and required an individual approach. Tim Burton acted as producer on this Disney project, one that perhaps better showed his affinity with Dahl's style than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The director, meanwhile, was Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas helmer Henry Selick. James and the Giant Peach gives some indication of what a more Dahl-esque Fantastic Mr. Fox might have been like had Selick remained involved in the project.

Selick's method with James.., a mix of live action for the "realistic" world of the beginning and end and stop motion animation for the more surreal scenes in the peach, creates something truly original with a real sense of imaginative offbeat fantasy.

It is probably fair to say that Selick, one of the finest stop motion animators there has been, is less adept at directing live action than he is with animation, but it is the transition from one to the other that gives the film its magic. Once the peach takes flight, tied to hundreds of seagulls and escaping a brilliantly designed robotic shark, so does the movie. The stop motion anthropomorphised bugs are full of character, undoubtedly helped by a voice cast of quality character actors - including Simon Callow, David Thewlis, Susan Sarandon and Richard Dreyfuss. Not a commercial success at the time, James and the Giant Peach nevertheless is a great attempt at capturing Dahl's fevered imagination and macabre sense of children's storytelling. Dahl did not live to see it made, but his widow described how he: "would have been delighted by what they did with James."