Stap 2: Kapotte schoenen

[Music] Hello, my name is Spencer Wright, and this is episode 138 of The Waltz Elise's Podcast. On this show, I discuss animals and the people helped create them from the world of Disney. The topics come from the world of animated and live-action film, shorts, parks, documentaries, and more. Please follow the podcast on Instagram, my personal page, and Spencer Wright, 1989, and the show page at Walt Oasis. And feel free to email me at [email protected] with any feedback, questions, or episode suggestions. And if you could please have a rating and review on my listening platform with choice, they'll be greatly appreciated as well. And this week is part two of three of my serious featuring the 1996 film, James and the Giant Peach. And if you've not listened to last week's episode, I recommend giving that a listen first, where I discuss the original book, as well as the early story development of the film. And the final film he sees is available on Disney Plus. Stays true to the spirit and basic form of the book, but does make alterations as is to be expected. For example, the film needs a strong dramatic thrust, giving a solid reason for James's desire to travel to New York City. Kirkpatrick said quote, "James needed a really strong reason to go to New York. In the book, they just sort of land there. We camped with the notion of James's father showing him this travel brochure of New York," unquote. And the dreamlike, almost wistful tone of the book had to be more grounded and more deliberate in order for there to be more clear, compelling plot throughout the film. One inside character was dropped, that being a silkworm, who had a very small role in the book. There are simply too many characters, and the main role that the silkworm plays in the book is using thread created by silkworms, using thread to tie seagulls to the peach, so the peach will float out of the water, and instead spider webs are used. In the original book, James has not even initially noticed the silkworm with the grasshopper stating, "Did you ever notice the silkworm? She's still downstairs. She never moves. She just lies there sleeping all day long." Joe Ramp, the ultimate champion of the book, worked as storyboard supervisor with Kelly Azbury from spring 1994 to fall 1995. Azbury remembered, quote, "Jose creative hand touched every aspect of peach." As with every film he worked on, his impact was immeasurable. Joe possessed firm grasps on structure, character, emotion, and entertainment, and always kept the big picture in mind, unquote. The involvement of Tim Burton seems to have been quite minimal. In a May 1996 article in "Sinophantastic Magazine," Selik indicated that while Burton was instrumental in making the deal happen, making Disney agree to move in forward with the film. Burton did not lean on to any moral support during creative battles, which inevitably occur as part of the process. Selik said, quote, "Tim helps set up the film, and after that he had nothing more to do with it." He took a huge amount of money and then gave me no protection. I don't think he's even read the script, unquote. Selik did note that quote. It was really Denise Denovie, who stayed involved in the project. While Tim doesn't have interest to do films like this, it's a little too sweet for him, unquote. Because the feature was planned with the PG versus G rating in mind, the artist involved had a little more freedom to include scarier elements, although they still had to tread quite carefully. Selik told Entertainment Weekly, "We shut down while doing rewrites. We laid off people. But I've never heard of great movies coming from party atmosphere productions." Disney wanted quite a few changes to the content, but Selik did not hesitate to put his foot down as needed. For example, he refused to quote, "Manufacture happy ending in which James' parents come back to life," unquote. But he did degree to remove the glowing red eyes of the ants, which were deemed to be to frightening the ants of James, the human ants. Selik did bulk at Joramph's suggestion that quote, "James Grubb ants munches back and clip ants' spikers toenails," unquote, with which Rampft later admitted was too kinky. The PG rating did provide more opportunity to allow for scary imagery, such as a sequence in which James is transformed into a bug and chased by a rhino. The sequence we see in the final film would probably not be permitted in a PG film. Selik was conscious of creating a family-friendly film, indicating his own son was more scared by Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, or more traumatized by the Lion King, than scared by any elements in James and the giant Peach. In the end, Selik acknowledged she created a somewhat scary film in a 2000 interview comparing the Nightmare to the Nightmare before Christmas stating, and then James and the giant Peach, which definitely is a sweeter and more of a kid's story, turned out to be a lot more frightening to a lot of little children in terms of loss of the parents and then the rhino that James sees in the clouds. In the book, James' parents were eaten by a rhino, which escaped from the zoo while shopping in London, versus in the movie where a giant terrifying rhino emerges from the clouds. The beginning of the film is live action as we see James with his loving parents on the English seashore, taken by monstrous rhino who emerges from the clouds. We then transition to James living on a barren hillside in a ramshackle house with his abusive and unsightly ants. Ants' sponge was played by Miriam Margalees and spiked by Joanne Lomley. Selik wanted the live action settings of a very stylized look. One of the inspirations for the live action opening of the film was the documentary "Great Gardens," which showed the lives of two former society living, women living in isolated squalor and the Hamptons. This helped inspire the decaying world of the ants, again the human ants. The stark settings also are partially inspired by the film war film "Light of the Hunter," starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lilian Gish. James is given a bag of magical glowing green crocodile tongues by a mysterious man passing through. They have the power to go anything to a colossal size, and James trips spilling the bag to the grounds. Hoppe ground like worms, one leaps into the ground underneath a barren peach tree and a massive peach grows, which the ants exploit as a tourist attraction. James, one night, synaptically rubbish left by the visitors, who swarmed the peach, eats a slice without a crocodile tongue in it, and he follows into a hole in the peach created by the part that he took out to eat, and into the pit were several human-sized anthropomorphic insects live. This can be interpreted as sort of a hallucinogenic state, similar to some aspects of Alice in Wonderland, which Ramp did not deny. He noted, "There's a truly psychedelic undertone to it. We have a lot of surreal images, and I think it's a true San Francisco film." Rampwood here people at Disney speculate that those working on films like 1940's Fantasia must have been using drugs, but he countered that stating, "You can't do animation when you're high on drugs. It takes all your faculties to be doing this kind of work." [Music] Two decommissionable stations in San Francisco were used for live action filming. Treasure Island is a man-made aisle in San Francisco Bay, where massive hangars, houses, sets on the English hillside where James lives with his ants. These are highly stylized, meaning they have a design, which is not necessarily fit nature's pattern or tradition, but are more loyal to a specific design or pattern, often being exaggerated or unnatural, and highly unique. Selic explained, "I wonder the live action to look a little phony, like opposites and be slightly monochromatic. I like the idea of going into a dream world and having the colors really intense, then at the end, coming back into the reality of live action, but having James bring a little bit of the dream with him." He had a pelvic fluid in England and auditioned about 500 boys between the ages of 7 and 12, casting Paul Terry to play James, and he had not appeared in a movie before. The spider used in the live-action portion of the film was a baby tarantula, and its body was covered with painted eggshell, so it would match the spider used in the stop-motion segments. Paul was bitten during one take, leaving two very painful marks. For the peach itself, as seen in the live-action sequences at the beginning and end of the film, Selik wanted to make it as realistic as possible. To create a soft look over a bed foam interior, about two inches of soft foam rubber was then covered with a fiber-fill fuzz. Peach's six-feet and height were created for the animated sequences which were covered in a felt covering, which turned out to be very animation-friendly. Experiments were done on the peach fuzz to avoid switching fibers when characters were moving around on the top of the peach, eventually matting it down, getting close to the surface. Regarding the interior of the peach, production designer Harley Jessup recalled, "We started out with a very organic interior and then tried the exact opposite, where it looked almost like the inside of a steamship cabin or a blimp." In the end, we went with the idea of making it look like a kid's treehouse with many levels. Inside, items swept up from the garden were depicted as enlarged. For example, the floor was a big sun dial, and we seen enlarged seed packet and other plate things from the garden, with a lot of experimentation done playing with scale. As part of creating the inside of the peach, Jessup cracked open the pit of a peach to see what it looked like, but found it was not suitable for an interior set. It is totally smooth, so instead, Jessup made the interior look more like a walnut shell, which the insects had shoot out. Jess nooks and crannies and trans lucent edges allowed for a soft backlight and off-screen holes allowed ambient light to stream inside. The peach as a device, the insects and james used to travel to New York City, was turned into a jewel's veren like craft. It is lifted out of the water and directed by seagulls who are roped to the stem of the peach using the spider's web. Not wanting to simply have the seagulls direct the characters to New York, the stem of the peach was turned into a sort of rudder or steering wheel, serving the same purpose as the wheel of a ship. This gives the characters additional agency in how their journey progresses. As the peach rolls out of the ants' barren yard and into the ocean, it rolls over a wooden fence which wraps around the peach, creating a platform. Having all the characters on top of the peach at any given time would be confining in claustrophobic. The fence wrapped around the peach creates a platform and a lookout and room to move about, as well as extra dimension to the structure. When all-live action filming of the peach was complete, it was time for the scene when it rolls down the hill crushing the ants' car and heading out to the ocean. This could only happen once as the peach would be destroyed in the process. A huge crane with a semi-circle attached was placed at the bottom of the hill to catch the peach. Six members needed to push the peach down the hill. As final preparation was made for the scene, Lucy Doll remembered quote, "Suddenly there was a loud snap. And without any warning or pushing from the crew, the peach crashed through the fence and began rolling down the hill, heading directly for ants' spike and ants' sponges' car. It was out of control, but amazingly on course and inches before it hit the car, the peach came to a complete stop right in the arms of the crane." Everyone looked at Director Henry Sallick for some sort of explanation and he shrugged it and said, "That peach is alive." Harley Jessup initially wanted to do all of these scenes in miniatures, but Sallick vetoed the idea, wanting the real peach to roll down the hill. Jessup then thought that the crushing of the car by the peach could be done in miniatures, but Sallick also wanted that filmed in-life size. Jessup recalled the 20-foot high peach used for live action filming was created out of bed foam and even being hollow, it still weighed over a ton. You need to be brought to this studio on Treasure Island. It cannot be transported on the freeway and instead was brought in on a barge. Six months were spent designing the puppets and the insects seen in the film. In creating the design and look of the insects, Sallick rated children's book Illustrator Lane Smith was brought in. I know Lane Smith best from the book, The Stinky Cheeseman and other fairly stupid tales, which I write dozens if not hundreds of times as a child. Sallick wanted to work with Smith for many years and described his style as "glowing paintings that are just wonderful and filled with lots of mystery and style. His work looks like a cousin of my own, only a little sweeter." Lane Smith did want to work all the night before Christmas, however Tim Burton wanted the characters to look like his own original designs. Smith was a long time fan of Rualdal and remembered that quote, "Contractually, I was only supposed to do 20 inspirational paintings and designs, but I ended up doing 50. It was also supposed to be just a six month job, but I stayed on for a couple of years just because it was really fun." His design is much more surreal and fanciful than what we see in the original book and in original illustrations. I hope it was a design bug which we're very bug-like and clearly insects. In other words, the Grasshopper is clearly a Grasshopper versus Pinocchio's Jimny Cricket, for example. So you wanted to avoid characters that had human-like arms and legs. Smith made changes from the book's illustrations as the script dictated. For example, the centipede in the book walked on each of his legs, having 42 total and repeatedly needing assistance having them removed and maneuvered. However, in the movie, the centipede walks on his back legs and the other legs serve sort of as arms on which he wears gloves. Having the centipede stand up allows him to be a little more cocky and expressive. When he did about 9 or 10 variations for each insect, and typically his favorite was also Celix. Smith said, "I kept coming up with the designs that were too freaky or else too anthropomorphized. Most designs were settled on pretty quickly. A collaboration between Selik and art directors Harley, Jessup and Kendall Cronkite resulted in the final designs. Cronkite came up with the idea of making the centipede allowed American in contrast to the other British bugs. And this also aided in having characters who are not too similar. The blind earthworm was given sunglasses to help provide additional expression, otherwise a creature not really having a face. The number of limbs involved in many of the insects would be a challenge when animating the film. But Smith stated, "I didn't care though because I wasn't going to be doing it." Some of Smith's paintings were later included in a story book version of The Book James and The Giant Peach, and Doll's family were so impressed and thrilled with his work, they commissioned an addition of the original novel, using illustration Smith completed independent of the film. And that's all for this week and we're back next week with part three of three of my series, featuring 1996's James and The Giant Peach. I hope you enjoy this episode of Waltz Oasis. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Please follow podcast on Instagram on my personal page at Spencerite1989 and the show page at Walt Oasis. And feel free to email me at [email protected] with any feedback, questions or episodes suggestions or episodes suggestions and always welcome me. Thank you for listening. (gentle music)