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| Acclaimed director Tim Burton brings his vividly imaginative style to the beloved Roald Dahl classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, about eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka (JOHNNY DEPP) and Charlie Bucket (FREDDIE HIGHMORE), a good-hearted boy from a poor family who lives in the shadow of Wonka's extraordinary factory.
Most nights in the Bucket home, dinner is a watered-down bowl of cabbage soup, which young Charlie gladly shares with his mother (HELENA BONHAM CARTER) and father (NOAH TAYLOR) and both pairs of grandparents. Theirs is a tiny, tumbledown, drafty old house but it is filled with love. Every night, the last thing Charlie sees from his window is the great factory, and he drifts off to sleep dreaming about what might be inside.
One day something wonderful happens. Charlie finds some money on the snowy street and takes it to the nearest store for a Wonka Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight, thinking only of how hungry he is and how good it will taste. There, under the wrapper is a flash of gold. It's the last ticket. Charlie is going to the factory!
Once inside, Charlie is dazzled by one amazing sight after another. Wondrous gleaming contraptions of Wonka's own invention churn, pop and whistle, producing ever new and different edible delights. Crews of merry Oompa-Loompas mine mountains of fudge beside a frothy chocolate waterfall or ride a translucent, spun-sugar, dragon-headed boat down a chocolate river past crops of twisted candy cane trees and edible mint-sugar grass.
Almost as intriguing as his fanciful inventions is Willy Wonka himself (Jonny Depp), a gracious but most unconventional host. He thinks about almost nothing but candy - except, every once in a while, when he suddenly seems to be thinking about something that happened long ago, that he can't quite talk about.
This modern version of the child’s classic is a mesmerizing magical tale from start to finish that is a must for any movie lovers list.
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Here's what our members thought of this title. 5 stars = very good, 1 star = poor.
 |  | "Everything in this room is edible. Even I'm edible. But that is called cannibalism, my dear children, and is in fact frowned upon in most societies."
A magical, whimsical, perfectly wonderful family feature from the unbound imaginations of author Roald Dahl and filmmaker Tim Burton, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is an enthusiastic adaptation of one of the best-loved stories of all time, much closer in tone and plot than the first version. Cleverly cast and magnificently designed with a rousing score from Burton regular Danny Elfman, the movie sounds as good as it looks. If only we could taste it...
A poor boy with a big heart, Charlie Bucket (Finding Neverland's Freddie Highmore) dreams of finding one of the five golden tickets hiding in Wonka Bars worldwide. The prize: a thrilling tour of the nearby chocolate factory, the strangest and most magnificent ever built, and the chance to meet the strange and elusive Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp), an odd sort with an elusive streak...
Published in 1964, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory recently celebrated its 40th anniversary in print. Translated into 32 languages, it has sold more than 13 million copies worldwide, proving how well the author understood, appreciated and communicated to children. Says producer Brad Grey, "He never talked down to his readers or underestimated their intelligence."
"I especially appreciate the unexpected twists in Dahl's writing," says Dahl fan Depp. "You think it's going in one direction and then it slams you with another alternative, another route, and makes you think. At its center, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a great morality tale. But there's also a lot of magic and fun."
Key to the success of the project was the support and collaboration of Felicity Dahl, Roald's wife and the caretaker of his estate since his death in 1990. "Without her blessing," reveals Grey, "we wouldn't have a movie."
Serving as executive producer, Dahl acknowledged the incredible challenge of adapting her husband's best-known and most popular work. "An adaptation like this is daunting because I don't think there's a child in this world who hasn't read the story or knows about it. Every child wants to be Charlie." Delighted at how the creative team came together and how Roald's original images were interpreted on a grand scale, she calls it, "the ideal combination: Roald Dahl, Johnny Depp and Tim Burton, absolutely unbeatable and completely in sync."
When the time came to pick a director, Tim Burton was the obvious choice. "When you look at his body of work," says Grey, "there's a running theme of intelligence and whimsy that's perfectly suited for a story like this. Like Dahl, he never underestimates the sophistication of his audience. In our first conversations it was clear that Tim was a fan and wanted to be as faithful to the book as possible, which was right in sync with how we felt."
"I wish Roald was here to work on it with Tim," laments Felicity Dahl, "because they would have been brilliant together." Producer Richard Zanuck couldn't agree more. "What we have is a blending of two genius minds. Tim has gone back to the specifics of the author's intent and given his own extraordinary spin to it."
Key to the success of the project was finding the perfect Willy Wonka, and having worked with him four times previously, on Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow and The Corpse Bride, Burton had no one else in mind but best mate Johnny Depp. "To be chosen to play Willy Wonka is itself a great honor," says Depp, a long-time fan of Dahl's work, "but to be chosen by Tim Burton is double, triple the honor. His vision is always amazing, beyond anything you expect. Just the fact that he was involved meant I didn't need to see a script before committing. If Tim wanted to shoot 18 million feet of film of me staring into a light bulb and I couldn't blink for three months, I'd do it."
"Johnny is a great character actor in many ways," explains Burton, "a character actor in the form of a leading man. That's what struck me about him from the very beginning and it's what makes him such an intriguing actor – the fact that he's not necessarily interested in his image but more in becoming a character and trying different things. He's willing to take risks. Each time I work with him he's something different."
(c) 2005 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved.
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