James and the Giant Peach . Tucson Weekly . LET'S FACE IT , kids' movies are for kids. The animation alone is so clever that it's hard not be impressed. God no, not a song .
Giant insects sing perky songs.
To give some credit where it's due, the score, by Randy Newman, is far more engaging than that of The Nightmare Before Christmas , the previous film from the same production team of Tim Burton and Henry Selick. I happened to see James and the Giant Peach with a Marxist friend, who proposed a remarkably coherent political interpretation of the film. Surprisingly, the trajectory of the plot fits quite neatly inside Marxist theory. Yes, this story of an orphan who journeys across the ocean in the belly of a large fruit is in fact a parable of workers coming to consciousness and power. At the beginning of the movie, James lives quite happily in a cottage with his parents.