Lavish, Fabulous-Looking, Funny, Touching Film Of Classic Children's Novel

Rating: 6/10 (30 July 2009)

Charlie Bucket is a little kid from a poor family who wins a dream ticket to visit the astounding factory of famed but reclusive chocolatier Willy Wonka. At first, Charlie is amazed at Wonka's incredible inventions, but slowly he starts to feel a little bit sorry for this strange and lonely man
I guess Burton was a natural to adapt Roald Dahl's classic children's book about the wild, harebrained, rather loopy Willy Wonka - and Depp is an obvious choice to play him - but neither disappoint in this groovy, eye-popping, spectacular adventure. Okay, Depp may be astonishingly ridiculous, with fake teeth, a grey pallor, a pudding-bowl haircut, garish sixties clothes and a squeaky high voice, but that suits the character and the story, and he is so strange and funny you spend the whole movie agreeably double-taking at him. The other huge challenge with this material of course is the design, and Burton's artists and effects people have created an amazing fairy-tale universe which both creates Dahl's mad world visually and seamlessly transports us away to a magic movie place; before the first scene is over we have already left our chairs for a glorious Somewhere Else. Particularly inspired is the idea of having one actor - the talented Deep Roy (check him out in a great old Dr Who story called The Talons Of Weng-Chiang) - play all the Oompa-Loompas. Roy is funny, scary, does lots of crazy dance routines to the toe-tapping Danny Elfman songs which accompany the other four children's demises and must surely beat the record for most characters played in any one movie. The cast are all good, but for my money the best performance is by twelve-year-old Highmore, who is pretty much perfect as Charlie; humble, fun-loving, endearing and resolute - for another fine movie featuring him and Depp, check out Marc Foster's Finding Neverland. Stuffed full of silliness (see if you can spot the repeated reference to Plan 9 From Outer Space), this is a fantastic, absurd, heart-warming story about imagination, family and chocolate. It was the fourth of Burton and Depp's film collaborations (they've already made a fifth and are working on a sixth) and they have easily the most creative director-star relationship of modern cinema; I hope there are many more yet to come. Previously filmed (equally well) as Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory, starring Gene Wilder, in 1971.