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Film: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the second film version of Roald Dahl's most popular book. (The first, released in 1971, was given the title Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory.) This version, directed by Tim Burton and released in 2005, features Johnny Depp as Wonka, and a supporting cast that includes James Fox, Deep Roy, Missi Pyle, Deep Roy, Helena Bonham-Carter, Christopher Lee, Deep Roy, Deep Roy, Deep Roy, Deep Roy, and Deep Roy.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory provides examples of:

  • Acting for Two Thousand: Every single Oompa-Loompa is played by Deep Roy. He had be filmed as each and every individual one of them.
  • Adaptational Attractiveness: Willy Wonka is played by Johnny Depp. Enough said.
  • Adaptation Expansion: The subplot about Willy Wonka's childhood and his relationship with his dentist father was created for the movie.
  • Anachronism Stew: Burton likes making his settings more symbolic than realistic.
    • Therefore, to see Charlie Bucket's family living in near Charles Dickens-style poverty in one scene and Mike Teevee's videogames in the next is a tad jarring for some, despite the Buckets having their own TV.
    • Charlie's grandpa gives him a Peace dollar—An American, silver, 1920s/30s dollar.
  • Artistic License - Geography: Düsseldorf is portrayed as an Alpine wooden-house village, instead of the modern industrial capital of the Ruhr, which is far from any mountains.
  • Art Shift: Music shift to be more precise. Each of the Oompa-Loompa's songs has a different theme. Violet's song as a lot of technological beeps in it. Veruca's has a very Beatles-esque feel to it. Mike's is a hard rock song.
  • Big Door: Again, in the Chocolate Room. Inverted, with the door being incredibly tiny so Oompa Loompas can get in. The space is so small that the normal sized protagonists are slouching.
  • Broken Aesop: Yes, children's movie, tell us all about how you shouldn't let your children watch TV at all. Makes the "Mike Teavee" number somewhat jarring.
    • This is a direct lift from the source material; Roald Dahl simply wasn't anticipating his book becoming a movie when he wrote it.
    • It's telling us not to let children watch TV- it never said anything about movies.
  • Break Up Make Up Scenario: Willy Wonka and his father.
  • Busby Berkeley Number: The Oompa Loompas do one during the "Augustus Gloop" song.
  • Cloning Blues: Not the Oompa-Loompas, but rather the actor playing them.
  • Cultural Translation: Both Mike Teevee and Violet Beauregarde are American in this version (and Augustus Gloop is German) — although since the characters' nationalities were left deliberately ambiguous in the book and the tickets were explicitly said to be available all over the world, this is a relatively realistic touch. On a less thought-out level, though, several of the English characters use Americanisms (like "candy" when referring to sweets), and their currency is, for some reason, dollars.
  • Expy: Willy Wonka's personality, traits and backstory mirrors that of Krusty the Clown.
  • Family Unfriendly Violence: The melting of the singing puppets by pyrotechnics. And it's implied that Wonka had planned it to go like that.
  • Fantasy-Forbidding Father: Willy Wonka is given one of these as part of the Adaptation Expansion. Mr. Wonka, Sr., is a dentist who doesn't allow his son to eat candy, driving Willy to rebel against him to achieve his dream of being a chocolatier.
  • The Film of the Book
  • For Want of a Nail: Because of the increase of demand for chocolate due to the contest Mr. Bucket's job (toothpaste factory) makes extra money and decide to modernize, this results in Mr. Bucket losing his job and later he gets a better paying job at the same factory repairing the machine that replaced him.
  • Foreshadowing: When everyone is entering the factory, Wonka seems to have trouble saying the word "Parents," which at first one might just assume is part of his eccentricity, however, it turns out to be a big plot point, what, with his father issues and all.
  • Freudian Couch
  • Getting Crap Past the Radar
    • "Don't touch that squirrel's nuts! It'll make him crazy!"
    • The Psycho Parody during the Mike Teavee musical number. Though we the audience never see the girl in the shower save her legs and feet, looks like poor Mikey saw a little too much.
  • I Am Song: "Willy Wonka! Willy Wonka! The amazing chocolatier!" Also a serious Ear Worm. Sung by the puppets, before their accidental immolation.
  • I Can See My House From Here
  • Insurmountable Waist High Fence: Literally.
  • I Taste Delicious: In the end, Augustus is rather reluctant to stop licking the fudge coating off of his body, despite his mother's insistence.
  • Lampshade Hanging:
    • Charlie asks how the Oompa-Loompas knew Augustus' name (and personality) in their Crowd Song, a Plot Hole that the book doesn't address with regards to any of the kids. Wonka claims it's skilled improvisation, but...
    • Mr. Salt remarks on how choreographed the Augustus number looks — implying that Wonka researched his victims, planned traps for them, and trained the Oompa-Loompas to celebrate their downfalls in a masterpiece of pre-planning.
    • When Wonka sizes up the kids for the first time, he remarks that Charlie's "just happy to be here, aren't you?"
  • Lyrical Dissonance: (to a Beatles-y tune)
    Oompas: Veruca Salt, the little brute, has just gone down the garbage chute!
    And she will meet, as she descends, a rather different set of friends!
    Oompa: A fish head, for example, cut this morning from a halibut...
  • The Mel Brooks Number: Danny Elfman turns the Oompa-Loompa songs into a gorgeously orchestrated game of Genre Roulette, but the lyrics are still about naughty kids getting their comeuppance, and the visuals spoof everything from Busby Berkeley numbers to heavy metal videos.
  • The Monolith: Featured in a demonstration of Wonka's matter transmutation device...as part of a clip straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, no less.
  • Musical World Hypothesis: Diegetic. The Oompas' "improvisation" is lampshaded, as it was in the first film.
  • Narrator All Along: It turns out it's One of the Oompa-Loompas.
  • Object Tracking Shot: The making of a Wonka Bar.
  • Original Cast Precedent: The 2005 film kept the same nationalities for the children as depicted in the 1971 film, while also giving most of them hometowns — Augustus is from Düsseldorf (which suffers from a bad case of Hollywood Geography), Veruca is from Buckinghamshire, Violet is from Atlanta, Mike is from Denver, and Charlie is still ambiguously British/American. In the book, all the character's nationalities were ambiguous.
  • Production Posse: Johnny Depp and Tim Burton.
  • Revised Ending: There's some pretty crazy Adaptation Expansion here.
  • She-Fu: Violet's movement after the events.
  • Shout Out:
  • Signature Style: Tim Burton likes to create a contrast between places of wonder, which are bright and colorful, and mundane places, which are dark and dreary. In the context of a Roald Dahl adaptation, it works.
  • Spared by the Adaptation: The toothpaste factory where Charlie's Dad used to work. In the book, it was said he lost his job because the factory went bankrupt. In the film, the factory fired him and bought a machine to replace him.
  • Spoiled Brat: Pretty much all of the other kids, but Veruca—DEAR GOD—she takes this up to the prime maximum.
  • Technology Marches On: Mike used his computer to track one of the Golden Tickets. In the first film, people who tried this needed to spend a lot of time and money to develop a huge computer for this very purpose. And it refused to disclose the ticket's location because it wouldn't be honest.
  • Technology Porn: The opening sequence showing the creation of the chocolate bars.
  • Totally Radical: Played for Laughs. As a side effect of having isolated himself from the rest of the world for so long, Willy Wonka tends to speak this way to children, using slang and references that wander from The Fifties to The Seventies.
  • Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000: It's hard not to wonder whether Tim Burton read this. Having Mike be from suburban Denver, Colorado was most likely just the icing on the cake.
  • Up to Eleven: In Willy Wonka's flashback, Willy decides to run away from home after an argument with his dad. Wilbur responds, "I won't be here when you get back." Neither is the house.
  • Where The Hell Is Springfield: Due to the book never being clear on whether Charlie Bucket and the Factory are located in England or America, Burton purposely made it ambiguous in the film; English and American accents are thrown around indiscriminately, people drive on the right in some scenes and the left in others, and paper money consists of bluish-pink "guinea" notes.

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