Product Description

Import Blu-Ray/Region A pressing. Every night, in their tiny, tumbledown, drafty old house, the last thing Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore) and his family sees from their window before drifting off to sleep, is Willy Wonka's (Johnny Depp) extraordinary candy factory. One day Willy Wonka makes a momentous announcement. He will open his famous factory and reveal "all of its secrets and magic" to five lucky children who find golden tickets hidden inside five randomly selected Wonka chocolate bars. Nothing would make Charlie's family happier than to see him win, but the odds are very much against him as they can only afford to buy one chocolate bar a year. But, sometimes, magic happens and dreams do come true...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #239453 in DVD
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Original language: English

Amazon.com
Mixed reviews and creepy comparisons to Michael Jackson notwithstanding, Tim Burton's splendidly imaginative adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory would almost surely meet with Roald Dahl's approval. The celebrated author of darkly offbeat children's books vehemently disapproved of 1971's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (hence the change in title), so it's only fitting that Burton and his frequent star/collaborator, Johnny Depp, should have another go, infusing the enigmatic candyman's tale with their own unique brand of imaginative oddity. Depp's pale, androgynous Wonka led some to suspect a partial riff on that most controversial of eternal children, Michael Jackson, but Burton's film is too expansively magnificent to be so narrowly defined. While preserving Dahl's morality tale on the hazards of indulgent excess, Burton's riotous explosion of color provides a wondrous setting for the lessons learned by Charlie Bucket (played by Freddie Highmore, Depp's delightful costar in Finding Neverland), as he and other, less admirable children enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime tour of Wonka's confectionary wonderland. Elaborate visual effects make this an eye-candy overdose (including digitally multiplied Oompa-Loompas, all played by diminutive actor Deep Roy), and the film's underlying weirdness is exaggerated by Depp's admirably risky but ultimately off-putting performance. Of course, none of this stops Burton's Charlie from being the must-own family DVD of 2005's holiday season, perhaps even for those who staunchly defend Gene Wilder's portrayal of Wonka from 34 years earlier. --Jeff Shannon

From The New Yorker
In Tim Burton's adaptation of the book by Roald Dahl, Johnny Depp plays Willy Wonka and Freddie Highmore plays Charlie, who, having found one of five golden tickets hidden in a chocolate bar, wins a tour of Wonka's chocolate factory. Depp, as Wonka, dresses like Oscar Wilde, smiles like Michael Jackson, enunciates like Tootsie, and wears rubbery purple gloves to keep away the germs-and is far more of a child than the actual children around him. The movie is surprisingly unwild, though often astounding-Burton summons succulent and strange details such as a thunderous, cocoa-hued waterfall and bulging pink sheep that are sheared for their fleeces of cotton candy-but the eye, no less than the palate, is at first dizzied, then acclimatized, then jaded, and, finally, semi-sickened. To chide a movie that oozes so many gags may sound churlish, but you can't help feeling that a fantasist as accomplished as Burton can manage this kind of project with his eyes shut.-Anthony Lane -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker