Netflix announced that it’ll be making animated films based on Roald Dahl’s books and we can’t contain our excitement. Get ready to have your heart broken if they bring James and the Giant Peach to life.
If you are a part of the Dahl clan then we hate to break it to you but this deal doesn’t include all our favorites. However, here are some of known bestsellers that will be getting the animated treatment from the online streaming service:
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
- Matilda,
- The BFG,
- The Twits,
- Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator,
- George’s Marvelous Medicine,
- Boy: Tales of Childhood,
- Going Solo,
- The Enormous Crocodile,
- The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me,
- The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More,
- Billy and the Minpins,
- The Magic Finger,
- Esio Trot,
- Dirty Beasts,
- Rhyme Stew.
Netflix announced that, all these adaptations are set to be “event series and specials,” rather than ongoing shows.
We all want good things to last but maybe some of these stories could benefit from a shorter run-time. But for books like Matilda and the Charlie series, they could work when adapted for a longer format.
Case in point, the Matilda movie from 1996 missed out key details from its book version because they had to cut the story down to a ‘cinematically digestible size’.
Netflix said that they will start production on these stories in 2019.
Another issue we’re facing is the lack of love for all Dahl’s creations, such as The Witches. The book was first adapted into a film back in 1990 (man we’re old) and there’s also a reboot in the pipeline.
Thing is that Netflix will only be doing animated adaptations of the books. So with the exception of James and the Giant Peach, Danny the Champion of the World and Fantastic Mr Fox, we don’t have animated versions of these stories. Since Henry Selick and Wes Anderson did an amazing job with these, we’ll leave those out but we’d like the whole animated experience for the rest (maybe this is just our inner child speaking here, but yeah).
If the Witches was weeded out due to the fact that an adaptation is already in the pipeline that shouldn’t stop Netflix because they’re working on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and The BFG.
Truth be told ever since the we saw Willy Wonka and his chocolate factory with all those Oompa Lompas and colors, we’ve wanted to know what all our beloved Roald Dahl characters look like outside the black and white pages of a book.
And now we might not have to wait too long to find out.
