Willy Wonka and the Chocolate

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Roald Dahl famously complained that the first film version of his seminal work, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a corruption that neutered the sting of his parable. The book is simply drawn and was intended to be in the vein of the traditional cautionary tales. The story, centering on a clearly eccentric and out-of-the-mainstream adult, presents the reader with a simple idea - that if you pursue your passion with honor, integrity, and with a clear sense of purpose, you will be successful. Were that all the book discussed, it could have been seen as a mere pro-business tract. However, given the context of the time of publication (1964) and the burgeoning counter-culture movement that would explode just three years later, it is not too hard to understand the other themes of this book - that defiance of authority gets you in serious trouble, that respect for authority, art and elders gets you rewarded, this book also could be interpreted as a pro-social tract aimed at keeping the kids of beatniks in line and brought back to the fold of the establishment. However, Dahl had no such direct intentions with this story, regardless of the social or economic implications of the work, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory stands as a testament more to the author's personal take on a child's moral tale. The first movie, however, takes many of the central elements of the book and turns them into a post-Vietnam psychedelic experience in which musical numbers, swirling and disturbing colors, and a direct focus upon a child's message packaged in a seemingly adult-centric film. These two versions of the story stand as unique entities and deserve separate reviews.

The original (a much-edited revision was published in 1973) book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is told in third-person narrative and is peppered with cultural idiosyncracies (such as referring to the Oompa Loompas as "black pygmies"), real-life-inspired industrial sabotage (as experienced during his own career working within the candy industry as a young adult), and of the simple economics of supply and demand - all carried out on the shoulders of little Charlie Bucket (our protagonist and "everykid"). Dahl makes nods to the standards of English literature about children - they must either be from the uppermost or lowest classes, and those characters such as Oliver Twist and Charlie Bucket must be of the honest, rarely swayed, highly and genuinely moral caste - he also focuses his work on three separate phases of childhood and adolescent development: infantilism (and the escape from it), hyper self-interest (as is demonstrated by the children in the story's dedication to their personal gluttonies at any cost), and the transition to adolescent individualism (as is described when each of the children, including Charlie, question and challenge the authority of the adults).

By painting a surreal world in which all things are edible, all things are able to be indulged in, and all "childhood" fantasies of a world made of candy come into play, Dahl is clearly poking fun at children's infantilism. When he describes cavity-filling caramels that remove the need for dentists, cows that produce chocolate milk, glowing lollipops so that children can eat in bed at night, and magical places such as a lake of chocolate, coconut-ice skating rinks, and the rock-candy mine, Dahl immerses the reader in an absolute overload of stimuli - we become sick of the descriptions of candy as they simply pile on each other. Clearly, a child's tendency to over-indulge is seen as something that must be curtailed.

Finally, we have the Oompa Loompas - our Greek chorus. After each tragedy befalls one of the children or their parents (or both) the Oompas recite a poem. "Dear friends, we surely all agree / there's almost nothing worse to see / Than some repulsive little bum / Who's always chewing gum." These poems seem to act in opposition to the basic business sense of Wonka. but, the Oompas are there not to make money, but to fulfill their master's dream. So, they are free to make judgements of others as they do not take part in the commerce. The Oompas are singular to children's literature in that they allow for the kind of criticism often leveled at children by adults to be accepted by the audience. The Oompas, then, in the book, are an acceptable conscience who, though quite morbid, have no intention of helping or teaching children - just pointing out their faults.

The first movie version of this book, retitled Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and released in 1971, restructured the story, removed all of the elements of back-story involving Wonka, the Oompa Loompas, and changed Wonka into a man without child-like pretensions who sings rather than proselytizes. The film took the concepts of the book and made them less cartoonish, less dark, less moralizing and condensed to the point that though the subject matter is the same between book and film, they are really quite different stories with similar beginnings and endings.

For the film adaptation, we begin the story with the announcement of the five Golden Tickets. This allows Wonka to be a mystery. Here, Charlie Bucket is the primary character who we are immediately sympathetic to, and Wonka is simply a name behind iron fences. Without knowing why Wonka creates candy or why he's so reclusive, Wonka suffers a bit against the novel Wonka whom we know and sympathize with. The film Wonka, then, has no standing to take moral positions - he's just some weirdo in a factory that makes candy - his position of authority is rather socially shaky. The result, then, is that where the book hammered particular behavioral patterns into children, the movie seems more interested in painting a Technicolor universe.