Hollywood hueS
A visual feast

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a remake of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, is an
out-and-out delight for kids as well as adults, says Ervell E. Menezes

What do kids want more than being thrown open to their dream world? …A scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

CHILDREN and chocolates, as we know, are quite inseparable. At times even adults join the club. That’s why Roald Dahl’s kiddie book is still so popular. In the early 1970s, they made a film on it called Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. This time they’ve stuck to the original title of the book and Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is an out and out delight — a delicious, sumptuous slab of pure dairy milk chocolate.

Gene Wilder played the chocolatier in the earlier film and is replaced by Johnny Depp, he of Edward Scissorhands and Pirates of the Caribbean fame, whose versatility has now become legion in and out of Hollywood. And what does this recluse do? Open the gates of his long defunct factory to five randomly selected children, one of whom naturally is Charlie (Freddie Highmore of Finding Neverland fame), modelled on the underdog "please sir, I want some more," immortalised by that Victorian genius of a novelist, Charles Dickens. What do kids want more than being thrown open to their dream world. Or is it never land ?

In the factory there is a maze of candy-floss rivers, edible grass and trees like lollipops run by diminutive workers, all thanks to digital cloning and enacted by tiny Deep Roy. But that is once you get an "open sesame" to the factory. Before that you have director Tim Burton weaving a web of super-imaginative visuals he has become so famous for. The result is a visual feast for kids as well as adults.

Burton has the viewer in a trance from the word go and the first hour is sheer delight. Maybe after that it gets a wee bit predictable but with Freddie Highmore endearing himself to the viewer like Mark Lester did as Oliver, now over three decades ago, and Johnny Depp his usual slick self (though one has seen him doing better before), especially his take-off on Michael Jackson, the fare is not surprisingly truly sumptuous (or should we say scrumptious?). The others also do their bit but it is the creation of this "other world" and the ones that inhabit it that make Charlie and the Chocolate Factory such a feast.

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