James et la Pêche géante

I saw this 12 years ago when it was new. I was profoundly disappointed. The pieces just don't hang together. And most of the pieces by themselves are unengaging. But a friendly reader reminded me to go back for another look. It exploits redheads (not young women). It has folding in the ordinary nesting sense: it has a real life frame, a stop motion magical internal section, and a cartoonish dream within, each the same apparent distance from the other. But most wonderfully, it has at about the 57 minute mark, a wonderful orrery. This is a sort of totem for me, in my study of narrative folding techniques. An orrery is named after an early sponsor. Its a model of the solar system in its simplest form, but has a special if rarely used cinematic presence. Here its rendered as a model of the inner stop-motion world. That's not exactly right. Its the musical number variant of that world, where normal conversation among the characters stops and entertainment for us begins. Within that we have this orrery. Its the best I know. You see the group singing on top of the peach. Then you see appear behind them a ring orrery. This is the kind that instead of planets with less obvious machinery, you have rings that show the orbits and they are pivoting within each other. Then we zoom back and see that this is a planet on another orrery, with the peach as its sun. This is a mobile sort of orrery. Then a giant James picks the peach out of its center (with now tiny set of characters including himself) and we see he is on a larger peach. Its wonderful, especially since that same peach elsewhere appears in such suggestive sexuality that I am amazed it was allowed a PG, and that only for "frightening images." Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.