In developing the film's striking visual style, Selick turned to illustrator Lane Smith, creator of such acclaimed children's books as Math Curse, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, and the wonderfully wacky The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. Selick, who had long wanted to work with Smith, describes his style as "glowing paintings that are just wonderful and filled with lots of mystery and style. His work looks like a cousin of my own, only a little sweeter."

James and the spider. © Walt Disney Pictures

Smith, a long-time fan of Dahl's writing, recalls that, "Contractually, I was only supposed to do 20 inspirational paintings and designs, but I ended up doing 50. It was also supposed to be just a 6-month job, but I stayed on for a couple of years just because it was really fun." Smith's first experience working on a big screen film seems to have been a positive one for him, as he is finally considering developing The Stinky Cheese Man as an animated film.

The inspirational paintings Smith created for the film have been published in a Disney "storybook version" of the book, and it's worthwhile buying it just to see Smith's fantastic artistry. Dahl's family was so pleased with Smith's inspirational artwork that they commissioned a set of illustrations for a new edition of the original novel, wholly different than those used for the film.

Lately, there has been a growing trend of feature films combining animation and live-action. The challenge they all face is how to bring about a unity of design. Harley Jessup, Peach's production designer, notes that, "A big issue in terms of production design was how to blend and relate the live-action beginning and end with the animated world. We wanted the live-action world to be much more monochromatic and the animated sequences to be rich in saturated color and much more expansive in feel." Jessup did a notable job of marrying the two worlds by adding a sense of the surreal to the live-action using forced-perspective sets, and a sense of the hyperreal to the animated sequences through the use of computer-generated effects.

"We made a decision early on," Selick recalls, "that we would start our film in a very stylized and muted live-action world that would look almost like a stage play or an opera set. That way, when we entered the world of animation, it would be more magical. By saving animation for when James enters the peach, it adds to the strength of the fantasy."

One of the film's most impressive scenes is when James faces his ultimate fear--a terrifically terrifying and huge rhinoceros--emerging from the clouds towards him. In the book, the rhinoceros situation is inherently nonsensical to begin with, and the seriousness with which they represented it in the film embraced its delightful ridiculousness. This scene was actually produced in a relatively old-fashioned manner, with an underwater puppet, cloud tanks and cel animated lightning effects.

The shark scene, however, seems rather gratuitous. What happened to the school of real sharks described in the book? Although technically impressive, the gigantic computer-generated mechanical monster (i.e., shark) seems to be more of a drastically out of place World War II metaphor than an integral part of the story. It is a pretty long scene, and after awhile I found myself seeing the shark as a visual metaphor for the overbearing technology which is replacing traditional, organic techniques of animation.