The BFG

I like Roald Dahl.  He has a fantastic way of using made up words which are more expressive and explanatory than the “proper” ones.  He has a way of appealing to the imaginations of kids (and big kids) in a way that means his stories and suggestions stick with you throughout life.  In “Boy”, he writes about how he used to believe that liquorice was made by boiling and steamrollering the rats that would be caught in factories.  In “The Witches”, he describes the telltale signs of how to spot a witch (they have unfeasibly pointy shoes because they have no toes, they’re always scratching their heads because they’re bald and wear wigs, they wear long gloves because their fingernails are long and pointy and grow very fast), meaning that readers start looking with suspicion at shoes, at gloves, at hats.  Steven Moffatt is a master of this – his episodes of Doctor Who mean that viewers now have a very different relationship with shadows, statues and the dust in sunbeams.

Don't blink...

The opening scenes of Steven Spielberg’s The BFG are like this.  We see Mark Rylance’s eponymous giant move around late night London completely unseen, hopping onto the back of a parked truck to look like a pile of masonry, pulling his cloak across the gap between buildings to look like the entrance to a building site.  Does it look like there’s an extra lamppost in your street?  Might be the BFG.  Are the trees rustling?  Or is it the BFG.

For those unfamiliar with the story, Sophie is a sad and neglected orphan who happens upon a Big Friendly Giant (BFG) one night and he whisks her away to Giant Country, where she learns that he is the only non-cannibalistic giant there is.  He protects her from the other giants (with typically Dahllian names as Fleshlumpeater and Bone Cruncher) and teaches her the secrets of catching dreams and blowing them through the bedroom windows of sleeping children. 



In 1989, The BFG was made into an animated film 

I found  a dream in London...(part of the BFG Dream Trail)

by Cosgrove Hall (their only animated film) and it balanced whimsy and horror brilliantly.  For every flash of Fleshlumpeater’s long, sharpened fingernail poking in through a sleeping child’s window, there was a sequence in Dream Country where Sophie and the BFG tried to catch squirming dreams, or drank fizzy Frobscottle and flew on their explosive farts (Dahl really knew how to appeal to kids!).  The most chilling part of that film, for me, was the Queen reading the headlines: “Tragic horror as children slain.  Bones found beneath dormitory windows“.  The film has rightly become a cult classic.  Bizarrely, you can watch the entire thing on YouTube.



"This is Dream Country.  This is where all dreams is beginning"

In 2016, we have the Spielberg version.  Spielberg has a brilliant mind for appealing to kids, and Dahl and Spielberg should be a match made in heaven.  And it almost is.  Dream Country is there and looks beautiful – the dreams are colourful, tangible things that dash around the screen like Tinkerbell.  Snozzcumbers are revolting, warty, maggoty looking vegetables (the BFG’s only food, but necessary for making Frobscottle).  The fart jokes are there in abundance (*snigger*).  John Williams’ score is magnificent, and (as always) captures the chaos, mischief and wonder (it’s reminiscent of Maggie’s song from Hook) that seems to be specific to the children’s films he works on (see also: Harry Potter, ET).  And Mark Rylance is an excellent Big Friendly Giant, childish and lonely with sad eyes, wanting to make the world a little better with beautiful dreams.  For me, what this film lacks is a little bit of horror.  It all feels very safe.  There’s hints towards it, but it’s adult horror – the BFG has had a child living with him before and Sophie finds his clothes – a little red jacket – and his drawings, but doesn’t particularly question it.  The assumption is that this child met with a chewy end at the hands of the “canningball giants”.  The nightmare set upon those giants is an adult one: “Looks at what you has done – there is no forgiveness”.  Dahl appealed directly to children – the humour is for children, the horror is for children.  Spielberg has captured one, but shied away from the other.

Fleshlumpeater...

This begs an interesting question, and I throw it open because I’m interested.  Is there room for horror for children?  Should children be scared?  I’m not saying to throw them in a cellar full of rats, or chase them with knives, or make them watch endless loops of Thomas and the Magic Railroad.  If we want children to use their imaginations (we still want that, don’t we?), can we limit that imagination to only the good things, and protect from the bad?

Over to you…