Book vs. Movie: |

The casting of the film, while it deviates somewhat from the written descriptions, absolutely celebrates the tone Dahl intended. Anjelica Huston is the perfect Grand High Witch, even though Dahl describes her character as, "[T]iny, probably no more than four and a half feet tall. She looked quite young, I guessed about twenty-five or six, and she was very pretty." (65) The same may be said for the boy's feisty cigar-smoking grandmother, played by Mai Zetterling. "My grandmother was tremendously old and wrinkled, with a massive wide body which was smothered in grey lace. She sat there majestic in her armchair, filling every inch of it. Not even a mouse could have squeezed in to sit beside her." (15) Zetterling is younger and trimmer than the description, but the movie kept her spirit. She tells Luke only a portion of the stories she shares with him in the book. One of the biggest differences between the two formats is that the book describes the spit of witches to be blue, so blue they could use it as ink. (31) What a visual! The teeth of the witches are disgusting (though no false teeth are alluded to) so maybe they edited the reasoning out of the film? The film also creates interactions between Bruno and Luke before they are mice, has the witches wearing sensible shoes instead of the written pointy shoes, and changes the color of the witches' eyes. |

