Successful children’s movies generally have two things going for them — an abundance of eye candy and accessible storylines for the young’uns; winking satire and sugar-coated life lessons to satisfy the parents.
It’s the formula that keeps the Dreamworks and Disney/Pixar juggernauts rolling, and it’s the same one that prevents director Chris Columbus’ sappy brand of mish-mash from earning any respectability. Coming in at just over two and a half hours, his “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” looks more like a Kubrickian epic than a family diversion, but early reviews and numbers (its weekend gross was a whopping $93 million) indicate the franchise could end up in the pantheon of kiddy classics.
But before we dub “Harry Potter” the “The Never-Ending Story” of Generation Y, it will help to examine one of the hallmarks of children’s entertainment, “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.”
Quite simply, this movie has everything — a sprightly, asexual protagonist to whom kids of any age or gender can relate, none-too-subtle references to the burgeoning drug culture of the early ’70s and lots and lots of little people dressed in the height of Oompa Loompa fashion.
The story, adapted from Roald Dahl’s book, is like a Horatio Alger myth sponsored by M&M/Mars — by finding golden tickets in their chocolate-bar wrappers, a group of children earn the chance to run around like kids in a candy store, or in this case, kids in a fantastical confectionary wonderland owned by a reclusive man-child who may or may not have malevolent plans for his young visitors.
Although the film teaches its different morality lessons by having each child represent his/her own vice (Veruca Salt’s musical number “I don’t care how/ I want it now ?” foreshadows the punishment for her greedy ways), the narrative focuses on Charlie and his grandfather’s quest to survive the numerous tests of the establishment’s proprietor. In the end, it doesn’t provide a moral as much as it vicariously fulfills every pre-teen’s dream of owning a candy factory manned by a personal army of little people.
But the legacy of “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” also includes elements that probably sailed right over the heads of its target audience; namely, the performance by Milwaukee-native Gene Wilder as the enigmatic Wonka. He was the perfect man to deadpan comments like “Please. No. Stop.” as his visitors were dragged away to their cartoonish demises, drawing out humor so black it makes the Coen brothers look like Shirley Temple. It’s hard to imagine the role working with anyone else, especially when it came to the boat-ride sequence that has since inspired so much stoner oeuvre.
The film undoubtedly set a new standard for children’s filmmaking, one in which kids’ short attention spans could be satisfied at the same time as their parents’ grown-up tastes. Hopefully, Chris Columbus has been taking notes so that the trend can continue. If he hasn’t, the Oompa Loompas are already planning ways in which to exact revenge.
