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It’s a shame we lose Dahl’s creepy anecdotes, especially as the most famous one about a girl being trapped inside an oil painting and eventually dying of old age was unforgettable. An incident that also creates a simmering grudge between our hero and villain, which is new territory. This is possibly because the spooky tales Grandma tells about witches are sadly missing, although we get a new one about a little girl being turned into a chicken when Grandma was younger. The broad sweep of Dahl’s story survives intact, although it feels like Jack and Grandma arrive at their opulent hotel sooner than expected. It only seems to be set in the late-’60s because it gives Zemeckis a chance to play Motown hits on the soundtrack, and perhaps wallow in nostalgia for a period he grew up in. A black bellhop refuses a tip from Grandma out of solidarity for their lower-class status, but that’s about the only time racial politics plays any role. Reimagining these characters as black peopple living through a tough time for race relations is intriguing, but it doesn’t factor into the story much or add a fresh thematic layer. Our orphaned boy hero is now Jack (Jahzir Kadeem Bruno), who moves in with his spiritual Grandma (Spencer) after his parents are killed in a car crash.
#The witches roald dahl oil painting movie
I’m not sure exactly what survived from Del Toro’s animated vision, but The Witches certainly deviates from Dahl’s book and Roeg’s movie in some ways.Ībandoning Dahl’s then-present-day setting of 1980s Norway and England, The Witches instead whisks us across the pond to Alabama, 1968.
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Del Toro now gets a writer and producer credit (alongside compatriot Alfonso Cuarón), evoking memories of what happened to him on The Hobbit. Originally intended to be a stop-motion animation from Guillermo Del Toro ( The Shape of Water)-which perhaps explains Octavia Spencer’s presence?-Zemeckis later took over the project. Sadly, The Witches has been shunted onto HBO Max in the US and will only be released digitally everywhere else thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Zemeckis remaking a children’s movie feels like what it is a surefire way to make a quick hit and put recent flops like The Walk (2015), Allied (2016), and Welcome to Marwen (2018) firmly behind him. Robert Zemeckis sounds like a director Dahl would have preferred over Roeg, back when his nascent filmography was dominated by the Back to the Future trilogy (1985-89) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1987), but a lot has changed in the intervening decades. And it’s a childhood favourite of mine, only tarnished by a tepid performance from its young star Jason Fisher and a cowardly ending. Even if Dahl thought it was “appalling” and in “bad taste” due to how terrifying parts of it were! That was perhaps to be expected from the filmmaker behind Don’t Look Now (1973), but ’90s kids still remember Roeg’s The Witches as a waypoint to grownup horror. The porpoise spoke and laughed with his brothers and sisters whilst giving them all rides on his back.Roald Dahl adaptations have been hit and miss, but most people rate Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches (1990) as one of the stronger interpretations. How did Leif’s parents know that the porpoise who replaced their child whilst swimming in the fjord really was Leif?
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The fourth child in the grandmother’s story was a young boy called Leif who was turned into a porpoise by witches. Visitors to his parent’s house would lean umbrellas and walking sticks up against him. What did visitors use Harald for, after he turned to stone?Īn umbrella stand. The third child who came into contact with a witch in the grandmother’s story was called Harald. The second child who disappeared in the grandmother’s story was called Birgit Svenson. From time to time she would move her position in the painting. Her father saw that somehow she was now a part of a painting which hung in the sitting room. She came home from school eating an apple which she said a nice woman had given to her. The narrator’s grandmother tells a story about how a number of children vanished after encounters with witches. Their car skidded on the icy road and went tumbling down an icy ravine. From which country did the first witches come from?