James and the Giant Peach

After his parents are killed, young James Henry Trotter is sent to live with his two cruel aunts, Sponge and Spiker, in a house on the English coast. Miserable and longing for the New York City his parents once described, he meets a stranger who gives him a bag of magic crocodile tongues. When James spills them near an old tree, a peach grows to enormous size. He crawls inside and discovers a group of oversized talking insects living there, among them a grasshopper, a centipede and a glowworm. Together they set off on a voyage across the sea toward the place James has dreamed of.

Henry Selick directed the film, his second feature after The Nightmare Before Christmas and the second of the five features he has directed. Tim Burton and Denise Di Novi produced, and the screenplay is credited to Jonathan Roberts, Karey Kirkpatrick and Steve Bloom. The cast mixes live action and voice work: Paul Terry plays James, Miriam Margolyes and Joanna Lumley play the aunts, Pete Postlethwaite appears as the Magic Man, and Simon Callow and Richard Dreyfuss voice the Grasshopper and the Centipede.

The film had a budget of 38 million USD and took about 29 million USD worldwide. On IMDb it holds a rating of 5.2/10 from 125 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.6/10 from 1,482 votes. A film critics' rating of 7.2/10 from 75 reviews places it considerably higher with critics than with IMDb users.