Monday, August 9, 2021

James and the Giant Peach with Taika and Friends (2020)

On the whole, I haven’t gone too deep into pandemic-made content. During 2020 and beyond, I’ve dabbled a little in professional content filmed remotely (such as Staged,) as well as special events (the Sondheim birthday concert) and fun extras made for charity (Community’s Zoom table read.) But I know there’s a lot more out there that I haven’t checked out. That said, one of my favorites out of the pandemic content I have seen is this short series that Taika Waititi put together of celebrities reading James and the Giant Peach.

We’ll start with a summary of the book itself. Like so many chapter-book protagonists, James is a clever young orphan being dubiously raised by his horrible relatives. However, a chance encounter with an old man carrying a bag full of magic is the impetus for James to go on a magnificent adventure. The magic causes a tree in his garden to grow a massive peach the size of a house, and James, along with a host of similarly-gigantic talking insects, worms, and arachnids, is able to ride it on a fantastic journey.

Especially in the spring and summer of 2020, there were a lot of DIY creative projects like this. Actors and filmmakers, like so many others, were feeling restless and stir-crazy in quarantine. They wanted something to do, and they wanted a way to contribute. So they organized remote collaborations and mounted their own ramshackle little productions, a way to give folks in quarantine a bit of entertainment while also raising money for a worthy cause (in this case, the organization Partners in Health.) It emphasized the “we’re all in this together” atmosphere of those early quarantine days (what a long, infuriating trip it’s been since) and gave people something to hold onto.

This project, I think, is an especially good one. Waititi assembles a truly-impressive bunch of celebrities to read the roles of the book’s various characters over the course of ten 15-20-minute segments, with him reading the narration and, mainly, the role of James himself. There are perhaps the more “usual” suspects, people who’ve appeared in films he’s directed: both Hemsworth brothers, Tessa Thompson, Cate Blanchett, and Benedict Cumberbatch all make appearances riding on the back of Thor: Ragnarok, and the final installment features Roman Griffin Davis and Archie Yates from Jojo Rabbit (which is an utter delight and feels like a sneak peek into what it might have been like to see Waititi directing the two young boys.) But there are plenty of other famous faces, from Ben Schwartz to Meryl Streep to Lupita Nyong’o to Nick Kroll. Sometimes particular guests are paired to a character very deliberately, like rapper Utkarsh Ambudkar reading for the Centipede during a segment when the character performs a song, or Yo-Yo Ma reading for the Old Green Grasshopper during a segment when the character gives a concert for the others.

The whole thing is at once very simple but also highly developed. There’s nothing really in the way of costumes, sets, or props, and there’s nothing to dress up the fact that it’s just people doing a reading over Zoom. While Waititi provides his own foley artistry and other “special” effects, they’re delightfully basic: shaking a water jug to represent ocean waves, for instance, or bringing a peach closer and closer to his webcam to show it “growing in size.” There are also some inserts of illustrations from the book. But as the story goes on, the production gets slightly more sophisticated, with a score being added in. And most of all, the overwhelming majority of these actors give it their all. They’re performing rather than just reading, and plenty of the “castings” are wonderfully unexpected. I didn’t know that Chris and Liam Hemsworth reading the roles of James horrible aunts in full panto-villain mode was something I needed in my life, but it absolutely is. Ditto to Ryan Reynolds’s Centipede,Sarah Paulson’s Old Green Grasshopper, and Billy Porter’s Earthworm. Other celebrities making appearances include Cynthia Erivo, Beanie Feldstein, Josh Gad, Mindy Kaling, Kumail Nanjiani, Eddie Redmayne, Olivia Wilde, and Ruth Wilson.

One final thing I really like is just how much all the actors are enjoying doing it. Whether they’re jokingly critiquing each other’s performances, laughing at Waititi’s ridiculous asides, or adding in their own banter, they’re having a blast, and I love the moments where they’re clearly getting caught up in just watching the fun performances their fellow actors are giving. For me, the level of devotion and mutual appreciation on display takes the whole thing from being entertaining to being weirdly heartwarming to watch. It’s a great example of how genuine connections can be felt across technology and how people can come together to continue making art under incredible circumstances.

Warnings

Scary moments for kids, plenty of “don’t try this at home,” and a little suggestiveness.

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