Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)

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A lovely classic film that interprets a wonderfully creative children’s book, it incorporates the magic outlined in the story while adding its own stamp on Wonka’s factory. Gene Wilder’s performance is perfectly quirky however his performance is the only one of note as many of the other actors seem to just be waiting for their turn to talk, this is often the case with a film with a lot of children cast members.

The choice to musicalise this story is quite obvious as it is a story for children and already full of ridiculous elements so a few songs only add to the oddness. The Oompa Loompa’s songs are wonderful and as is the Candy Man song however it seems almost unfair that only one child gets a song.  The sets are very colourful and unique to this film, they show the amount of imagination and dedication that went into realising the imagined world of Roald Dahl.

Some odd changes to the original story, during the search for the tickets the film makers decide to add in a few extra tales to add humour but it is just quite distracting and detached from the story. It is difficult to make a fairly short children’s story into 1.5 hours of a film and this is probably why some random, and unnecessary, things were added.