Dear Readers,

today there is something new: I am not Aly, I’m a friend of hers and I’m here to help her. My account nickname is d3im0z but that is just an alteration of Deimos. Up until now I helped Aly only slightly with a few of her posts but this one is written in its entirety by me. Since this advent calendar is quite a workload it may be that I’ll write further posts. I hope that this won’t upset any of you. I just want to support her with this christmas mission and with all the other stuff. For today I’ll start with a film which I connect with christmas time:

Even tho „Charlie and the Chocolate Factory“ is not really a Christmas film, since it is set in february it still conveys the feeling of one: It is a deep winter and the film revolves all around family. It is based on and shares its name with the 1964 childrens novel by the british author Roald Dahl. After the 1971 film „Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory“ this is actually the second live action adaptation of the story. The film was directed by Tim Burton and it shares the somewhat excentric feel and darkness which are characteristic of many of his works. „Charlie and the Chocolate Factory“ has quite the star cast with names like Johnny Depp (Willy Wonka), Freddie Highmore (Charlie Bucket), Helena Bonham Carter (Mrs. Bucket) and Christopher Lee (Wilbur Wonka), Depp and Carter being recurring names in Burtons films. All throughout the story we are presented with great visuals and the very beginning of the film is no different. It starts with somewhat of a „walktrough“ of the factory, we see some of the intricate machinery which is quite excentric and a little bit reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg machine. All of this is accompanied by an excentric, awesome and rather fitting theme composed by Danny Elfman. Almost at the end of this first scene we get to see a mere hint of Willy Wonka in the form of his colorful, gloved hand, placing five golden tickets on five brown chocolate bars in the halls of the grey factory. This proceeds to trigger the plot and is a great example of the awesome visual language and the distribution of color or respectively the lack thereof.

This, just to give a taste of the film, I don’t want to spoil it for you so I’ll proceed to just give a little plot summary in order for you to be able to decide, if the plot appeals to you.

Charlie Bucket, the name-giving, main character is a generic, quite nice little boy, who lives with his poor family in the near vicinity of the factory. One day Willy Wonka, the owner of the factory and the best chocolatier in the world, decides to distribute five golden tickets all over the world. Every kid that ends up getting one of these is invited to visit the factory and Charlie is one of them.

Since I very much like this film I’m most likely to be biased, but let me tell you, it is great. It has an awesome visual language as well as a supporting equally awesome sound design in the form of language, music and other noises. Throughout the film there are multiple metaphores in spoken as well as visual form. The character design is excellent, there are some characters with substance and some with a fitting lack thereof. Sometimes the visual language is very obvious but I think that is rather appropriate for a childrens film. It is also quite funny and has jokes for children and adultes alike. „Charlie and the Chocolate Factory“ is a film for the whole family which tells the story of the importance family can have.

I hope you liked it and I wish you well,

Deimos