why did anyone let their kids watch James and the Giant Peach?? 

3:25 If you're wondering why Dahl's children are all plucky heroes and his adults are negligent monsters, he went to an English boarding school in the 1920s. that really does explain everything

Whoever did the makeup for the aunts needs an award.

As a kid who was growing up in an abusive home with an addict Father, and no access to outside help, stories like James and the Giant Peach saved my life as a child. The story taught me that you can grow in a place, amongst people who do not value you, love you, or protect you, and still break free. That I could find a place, one day, around people who heard me and saw me and cared about me, and that we can build our own idea of family. And that even though nobody else may believe in me, that I could face scary, real things and survive them. The overarching theme of JatGP is that it is never too late to find friendship, love, and family, no matter how unworthy of these things you've been made to feel by others. All of RD's books focus on themes of fear, loss, abuse, hopelessness....and then finding your own joy and peace on the other side of them. While it would be wonderful if no child could ever relate to these themes, the reality is books and films like these are super important for the kids (and adults) who can. I dreampt of getting swept into a giant peach; I still do at 37 years old.

I don't know about anyone else, but the scenes with the shark and the pirates scared the shit out of me as a child, and they haunt me to this day.

Did anyone else think the peach looked SOOO good as a kid? It gave me unrealistic expectations for peaches

I love how it blended live action with stop motion animation, which really holds up for 1996.

this movie is in such a niche genre. It's like on the line of looking like claymation and computer animation and they're so creepy 😭. They always have the most wild storylines too. Coraline, The Box Trolls, Dogs, and Kubo definitely fall in this genre too.

This was a _huge_ comfort movie for me when I was younger, and if that doesn’t paint a picture of the type of kid I was then idk what does 💀

This movie definitely scarred me as a kid. That rhino was terrifying when I was 8

I always thought that the rhino death part was something that James' brain translated to him because the real reason was too complex for a kid to understand. Like, as if Rhino is the name of some brand that makes machines or whatever and he understood as and imagined the animal cuz he is a kid and that's what he knows.

5:20 direct quote from the book, I'm not joking, the man says: "Come closer little boy, and I will show you something wonderfull"

This was one of my favorite movies as a kid and I never questioned how the aunts drove across the ocean either. 😅

After expecting the death of the parents I was not prepared for just hearing the narrator say with 100% seriousness “an angry rhinoceros appeared out of nowhere and gobbled up his poor mother and father” I lost it

Ok the Rhino was one thing, but the truly scary part was the aunts arriving in New York. That scared the life out of me as a kid. Their bodies moved and looked like zombies.

6:56 oh my god he's going back up the woooomb😂😂

I was obsessed with this movie when I was little. I was always fascinated by creepy stuff like this though, like coraline for example, my lil brother at the time was not a fan, and every night for a few years was “scared of the big peach” which was just the shadow of his lampshade, and would have it moved every night😭💀

As bizarre as Roald Dahl stories are, they actually helped me through a lot of tough times as a kid, specifically Matilda (Harry Potter was a big part of this as well). I was bullied a lot as a kid, and there were a lot of fights going on at home, so the idea of something miraculous happening to me that would change everything just sounded amazing. The thought that I would wake up one day and everything would somehow be okay, really kept me going through the years. Even if they don't hold up as much these days, I will never view these books/movies with anything but fondness.

James and the giant peach was an actual fever dream.

As a kid, I thought James’ parents were killed by a rhino-shaped cloud

Its ironic that a company that makes money off of terrifiying children would be upset with having that pointed out.

James and the Giant Peach probably stuck with the most but I swear its the most obscure fever dream of a movie I ever watched as a kid lol

I was OBSESSED with this movie as a kid. Terrified, of course, but also completely obsessed. To this day it's still very comforting to me, even if it remains deeply unsettling as well lol

I still got that "we're family song" stuck in my head. Was this movie weird yes? But is it classic yes! Movies like this made me like that stop motion claymation style. Such as chicken run, Wallace and grommet, Carlin, nightmare before Christmas etc(clay fighters). It was fun being a kid in the 90s.

11:30 there was a part in the book where they see the peach in the sky and call the president who answers in his pajamas while eating cereal

The last Unicorn is another children's movie that absolutely terrified me when i was a kid. Would love to see that review.

I love the stop motion animation style that goes kind of under the radar nowadays

I was absolutely terrified of the rhino! Also never realised Miriam Margolyes was one of the aunts!!

I loved this movie as a kid. I also watched it again recently as an adult and man, so terrifying lol. I'm also into horror movie and the tall/thin Aunt is one of the scariest things I've ever seen. Props to the makeup team.

It's crazy how me and many other 90's kids would watch so many effed up movies and shows and didn't even bat an eye. I remember watching this movie in theaters when it came out and I loved it. I even slept like a baby that night. No traumas :) But now that I watch this video, I wonder how I didn't get more scared.

Interestingly, _James and the Giant Peach_ was my first stop motion film I watched, prior before watching _"The Nightmare Before Christmas"_ and the funny thing is at the time when I first watched this film It didn't occurred to me that the Pirate Captain that kidnapped Mr. Centipede was Jack Skellington, so when I re-watched the film for the second time years later after seeing _The Nightmare Before Christmas_ for the first time ever, I said to myself, _"Hey that Pirate Captain looks like Jack Skellington._ Even Jack Skellington wasn't the only Disney cameo, cause Donald Duck himself also appears in this film as a Skeleton Pirate. Finally, this film was my introduction to Roald Dahl, however when I was a Kid when I first watched _James and the Giant Peach_ I wasn't to familiar with Roald Dahl nor did I realize that this along with the film adaptations of _Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,_ _The Witches_ from 1990 (starring Angelica Huston) and _Matilda_ were also books and also by the author, Roald Dahl. So it wasn't until the 3rd/4th grade during Elementary School years later when our class read The BFG and James and the Giant Peach where I became familiar with Roald Dahl as an author and that both Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, James And the Giant Peach, The BFG, The Witches, The Twits, Fantastic Mr. Fox and his various children's books he's written were done by the same person.

4:15 I think Mr Myers is one of those people who finds the karate kid scarier than the texas chainsaw massacre

James And The Giant Peach is an absolute classic, and the original The Witches film is brilliant too! I loved reading Roald Dahl books when I was a kid! Flat Stanley was probably my favourite!

I was obsessed with this movie as a child I'm pretty sure I watched it 50+ times

I clicked on this video faster than I ran away from the TV when I first watched that movie.

2:25 bro i’m dying i never realized how random that was

I still remember first seeing of/hearing about this movie by finding it in the VHS tape aisle in Target back in the late 90s. My mom saw me looking at the tape for a really long time and knew that I wanted it, so when we turned to leave, I looked back and she was waving the tape at me with a smile. I was so excited because we rarely ever got to receive things that we actually wanted AND were able to afford in those times. My sisters and I watched it immediately when we got home. This movie still has a special place in my heart today.

James and the Giant Peach was my favourite movie as a kid! The animation really appealed to me. Didn't even know it was a Tim Burton movie but I get that explains a lot lol

I was one of the aunts in the musical and it’s definitely the most fever-dream nightmare inducing thing ever but I‘ve never had so much fun doing a show lmao

The ending makes perfect sense to me. Your a new Yorker going about your daily happily convinced there's no such thing as magic or monster. Then this kid arrives on a giant peach accompanied by sentient talking bugs and pursued by mysterious undead women who's skin cracks. Are you going to be the one who tells him to leave or are you just going to leave him alone with the hope he'll one day decide to take his bugs somewhere else?

I adored this movie as a child. I didn't realize it scared people until I got to college and someone mentioned it was the only movie they could not watch.

These kind of movies always hurt the most as adults cause you look back at the kid you were as that time that related to how these kids were treated, with adults not just being abusive but down right went out of their way to humiliate you, and you feel so bad for how helpless you were. I love this movie. It hurts to watch the older I get but I still like to go back to it every now and then. I love Roahl Dahl books overall.

Hell yeah! I loved this movie as a kid. I wasn't scared by it as a kid since I was already exposed to The Dark Crystal, Beetlejuice and such, but this was a movie I would love to watch religiously as a kid, and especially near the fall season, so it does hold a special place in my heart. And I would even go as far to say it's an extremely underrated gem of 90s Disney movies and stop motion movies in general. Oh, sidenote, wanna know how James's parents were killed in the book? They were taking James to the zoo and a rhino broke out of it's cage and ate them. And no, it doesn't even appear in the rest of the story. it's somehow more jarring than the movie because rhinos aren't carnivores. How the peach lands in NYC Is by the military. (Like how they did in Nightmare Before Christmas.) But there were no villains or any risks during their journey at the end so the movie benefited this with a real antagonist to create conflict. I always interpret the rhino as a manifestation of James's fear that the aunts made up and perhaps his parents died in an accident or whatever, and since then, James was always haunted by this entity since then until he learns to stand up to his literal childhood trauma.

I'm really glad I'm not the only one who finds the spider hot.

I LITERALLY LOVED THIS BOOK SO MUCH AS A CHILD IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL WHEN OUR 3RD GRADE TEACHER READ IT TO US THANK YOU ‼️‼️‼️

I loved this movie as a kid and it was the first novel I ever read as a kid. My dad bought it for me and wrote little notes on all of the pictures. It's one of my prized possessions to this day.

10:04 maybe it’s referencing The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The children’s book lol

This was one of my favorite stop motion movies as a kid growing up in the 90s! I had fond memories of both this movie and The Nightmare Before Christmas. They actually first gave me a newfound appreciation for these types of stop motion animation with gothic aesthetics. There used to be a lot of stop motion animation in the 90s and that decade seem like the golden age for stop motion. The medium sadly kind of became less common after the mid-2000s. However, I think this decade is starting to feel like a small comeback for stop-motion animation films (mostly through streaming services).

I love this movie, it's weird, but heartwarming. It's a great movie and it was a masterpiece. There needs to be more movies like this. At first its scary, but over time it gets more beautiful. All of my favorite movies are weird, but cool. What I watch is Alice in Wonderland, This Movie, and Coraline. Tim Burton movies are masterpieces.

When I was a teenager and I rewatched this, I thought it was a metaphor for a kid getting into drugs but with a happy connotation. He unfortunately turns to drugs at a young age due to the death of his parents and abusive home life and thus meets a group of drugees that were very close knit like a family. Each one of them were very strange, like a band of misfits, but they were all very kind and took him into their group, letting them stay at their lil makeshift shack and getting him away from his abusive aunts.

As a kid, I remember just wondering why the magic stuff the guy gave James was in an unopened popcorn bag lol! XD Loved this movie growing up!

Joke at 4:38 had us heaving 😂😂😂

LOL ALEX LAUGHING AT THE RHINO PART!

The movie that terrified me as a kid was "Chicken Run" I haven't seen it since I was little. But it'd be interesting to see a review of it now

7:25 Alex trying to maintain our innocence but at the same time trying his hardest to not say Vore

When I was younger the peach made me crave one every time I watched it , but every time I had one I was disappointed 😂

7:10… I feel embarrassed for not understanding this 😂

I remember watching this on VHS, it’s my family’s classic kids movie 😂 I plan on traumatizing my son by having him watch it to carry on the tradition

I adored this movie as a kid. It was horrifyingly comforting.

I remember watching this when I was a kid and even then it felt like a fever dream

"We're Family" was such a heartwarming song for me back then. It still holds the same emotion for me to this day.

I remember watching this movie back in 5th grade, my whole class including me watched it and had to do a project about it. I vaguely remember having a nightmare after that day about the movie and I never wanted to eat or be in close proximity with a peach, mainly because I was scared if insects were in them and I wouldn’t know So this brought back some good old memories Keep up the good work Alex, you never fail to amuse me when watching your videos

5:40 Wow, they predicted Twitter.

Straight up traumatized me as a kid. I literally got the *worst* fear of bugs after watching this movie.

I always wanted to be able to try that peach, despite the sound effects they made it look so delicious lol

I swear James and the Giant Peach and The Never Ending Story are the biggest fever dream films from my childhood.

Made my mom take me to see it in theaters no less than 6 times. It was my first time seeing stop motion animation and I've been in love with the art form ever since.

i actually have an original memory from when i was about 5-6 and it was being at ymca camp watching james and the giant peach on my birthday

You just unlock a piece of my childhood memory with this movie! Speaking of 90s animated movies that felt like fever dreams, I'd like to see you review The Pagemaster next! It stars a certain Home Alone kid...

It didn’t dawn on me how truly old Miss Glow Worm was until my 30s when it clicked that she said “God bless THE COLONIES” when she was addressing the crowd in New York. Also, this is the first movie where I saw an end credit scene. The scene is a kid playing a game of Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker being knocked around. I own the dvd and Disney+ but original VHS is still at my parent’s house.

7:02 I'm nowhere near as cultured as u are, but that is a _birth canal_ lol

I'm so glad to see your video about this movie!!! I saw this as a kid and was so terrified.

I remember disney show it on disney channel once when i was real young, and I watched it. I was so mortified as a little kid! I was traumatized and surprisingly became terrified of slow motion animation.

i wish more movies looked like this one in the way the direction is pretty camp and dreamlike, they really play around with colors, textures, props and setting. it looks very homemade and endearing while standing out, like what you would imagine while reading the book

these kind of creepy stop motion animation movies have always been my favourite. yes they absolutely scared me, but that's what i loved about them.

Thinking back on it, a lot of movies during 80s and 90s were surprisingly dark and horrifying. The Secrets of Nihm use to give me lots of nightmares. And it was a family movie.

Alex has the greatest laugh of all time

I used to love this movie, I hoped you'd do a video on it, this movie was practically my childhood Also, you're very right about how 90% of grown-ups in Roald Dahl books are monsters [I should know, my Mum named me after one of the characters so I had to read all the books a million times] Roald Dahl's childhood had a lot of nasty sweetshop owners, teachers etc, so that's probably where he got the inspiration

In the book, the narrator described that James' parents went to the zoo in London where a rhino broke out in distress and "ate" them. On the other hand, best James shouldn't consume crocodile tears otherwise he'd be in a massive size, so I dunno become Britain's Ultraman and defend the nation from kaiju? The stopmotion blended with live-action felt like a genuine concept, especially towards the end. Sure six foot bugs sounds terrifying, but they became the true family of an orphaned kid like James. And yeah I agree, the spider is hot af.

i have literally fallen down a rabbit hole watching your videos. your takes are hilarious and i appreciate them so much!

Omg I feel so relieved that you made this video, I thought I was going crazy for years because no one I knew knows this movie, not even my mother and brother

"They never did catch that rhino" haunted me as a child.

This movie and The Pagemaster were some of my favorites as a kid. 90’s and early 2000’s movies and really hit diff.

In high school we did this play and I was costume and makeup! I gave everything a slightly modern spin but I was so fun to do this darker visual theme with whacky antics haha, I also played glow worm and he had a giant peach set piece 💕

12:14 unpaid labor of course

I never was scared of these things as a kid. I actually have fond memories of watching this movie. Now that I'm older and actually notice a lot more of the details, I do see the scare factor in it. But before I watched this video of yours and you asked me the plot of the movie, I would have given you a giant shrug. All I remember from it is the giant peach and the insects with some weird kid. I probably would have thought the kid was shrunk, despite the tittle saying it's a giant peach.

This was one of my favourite movies as a little kid. I watched it for the first time in 1st grade, which was in 2001. I don't remember why we watched it but I was one of the few kids that just absolutely loved the movie. I've always been into the "scarier" stuff as a kid even when they'd give me awful nightmares that I still think about to this day, so it's not surprising that I loved this movie so much

I remember I’d get emotional seeing him take a bite of the peach and seeing the pleasure on his face for the first time 😢 I hated the thought of a child being starved and neglected. I was so little at the time when this came out. I was obsessed with it and still am.

I am so glad you did this video. My dad who was an avid van of Henry Sellick's work played this for me as a small child and it terrified for me life. Even now nearing 30 that I am still terrified of the rhino in the thunder.

The hot goth spider explains a lot about my adult personality and I don't know how I feel about that.

This was one of my favourite movies as a kid! My mom thought I was weird af because she found it creepy and unsettling! But all the “kids movies” I liked she didn’t. Iron Giant, where the wild things are…(and more) such great movies mom! 😁

The rhino was in most of my childhood nightmares and I can't explain why

THIS MOVIE WAS DEFINITELY A FEVER DREAM!

James and the Giant Peach was more traumatising any of us would like to admit

This was always one of my favs as a child. Had it on VHS and watched it almost every weekend. It made my day to hear you talk/rant about the absurdities in it.

My maiden name is Spiker, I remember finding “Aunt Spiker” funny as did the kids in my class when the book was read aloud to us.

I watched this movie so many times as a kid and somehow remembered none of this but the peach texture and sounds

This brought back memories. I remember my dad reading me the book and watching the movie a couple times as a little kid but man I could not tell you anything beyond kid escapes abusive family in a giant peach with bugs

This was actually my favorite movie as a kid! I would watch it on repeat almost every day. I think it just gave me hope as a kid, sometimes real family can let you down but you can choose your friends and create a chosen family and some day you will be an adult and move far away from that place that brought so much sadness

Now that you mention it, the Dursleys do feel like characters from a Roald Dahl story

Another movie that gave me nightmares as a child was the 1990s live action teenage mutant ninja turtles but for some weird reason I kept watching them and I still do till this day