CH Essay"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

This was an evaluation essay assignment of last year. (06.Dec.2011)

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Crystal Hsiao-Ting HSIA

The film I decided to write about is “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, which directed by one of my favourite auteur -Tim Burton. There is a variety of reasons for me to choose this film as the topic of long essay. Although Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are the mainly one, I think there is some theme more thinkable hidden behind the genre of children’s fantasy. The Tim Burton's Films are really easy to tell, like all of the auteur, he has his own style and it is fairly obvious. We can clearly see it at the opening sequence. Tim Burton usually uses a long opening credits sequence, so I would like to analysis the opening sequence separately. Rather than introducing any of the characters to the audience, he chose to set the scene by showing the inside of the chocolate factory. 

Johnny Depp is the first actor to be introduced- well known, the main reason for audience to watch this movie. Point of view shots of the factory pipe makes audience feels like they are being taken into the film. Dark surroundings - cloud, dusk, representing darker themes to the film. Film title appears in the chocolate, gold writing stands out from brown chocolate. POV shot then continues showing the chocolate bar making process. The machinery noise in the factory is making the audience feel like being in a real chocolate factory. The balloons then give the opening a calm and dreamlike feel, and contrast the stressful music. Then we could see one chocolate bar placed on a wrapper, a hand covered in a purple glove with a red jacket sleeve place a golden ticket on it. The colours make the person looks important, although the audience does not know who it is yet. Thus, this is an enigma code which makes the audience carry on watching the film. 5 golden tickets are placed on the chocolate bars. As they are being placed, the music changes, it came less tense makes audience wondering why are the tickets so important. The stickers being placed on the boxes show that Wonka is a worldwide company. The pan shot shows the red Wonka vans, the red is used again, like on the chocolate wrapper, which matches what the hand and arm were wearing. At the end of the opening credits a young boy is shown standing on the street. As he is the first character to be properly introduced to the audience, he is the main character of the film, Charlie. 

Willy Wonka, a chocolate production genius, has the largest chocolate factory in the world, which has not even one worker go in or out for 15 years. Wonka presents 5 golden tickets and tells the world that the kids who get the golden ticket can visit his factory. Charlie, a little boy who is kind but poor luckily got the chance to visit Wonka’s factory with his grandfather. The story is been presented by the narrative device voice over and we could finally know that the voice is from one of the factory workers - an ethnicity called Oompa-Loompas. The narrative is mainly linear, but with flashbacks appears sometimes to explain something in the past. All of the families of those five lucky children love their little kid a lot no matter they were good or bad, and this makes Wonka really confused about his failed relationship with his father. The flashbacks are mostly to introduce Wonka’s experience, and it shows the comparisons between 5 children’s families’ love and the way Wonka’s dad loves him. There are a lot of enigma codes in this film. An obvious one was about who is the one who wins the chocolate factory at the end. Although the enigma codes had been set, the main reason encourages audiences to watch this film is still Johnny Depp. The ending was extremely exciting and surprise, we did not expect this would ever happen. Those kids who were spoiled by their parents end up with different disgusting situation and got nothing from Wonka. Charlie refused the factory and shows how important family is to Wonka. 

A lot of different types of representation have been perfectly used in this film, apart from the colours which I mentioned in the opening part, there were a lot of thing trying to make us being positioning. Start from talking about those characters, the pants of Charlie were way too short for him and the shoes were oversize, this represents him as a poor little boy. The endless chewing gun of Violet and her same sport clothes with her mom show that they have the same sight and the same ambition on everything. The behaviours of Mike were obviously aggressive and the words he used were nothing about respect, these showed that he was a violence kid who was always extremely mean to everyone. About the chubby boy Augustus and his chubby mom, they were definitely the representation of gluttonous eaters. Wonka wore suit which is a representation of rich man, but with his bizarre hairstyle and those unusual suit colours purple and red, which give us the idea that he might not just a normal billionaire. Also, he always looked like about to throw out whenever he tried to say the words ‘parents’ could be seen as an enigma code, why did not he like the word ‘parents’? Apart from all of the characters, iconography is extremely important in the film. Inside the chocolate factory there was a brand new world with everything eatable, it was a representation of the fact that Wonka was so rich that he could even create and live in a world with Oompa-Loompas and chocolate waterfall, but it also showed that he is lonely and still struggling with the problem between he and his dad. The askew house of Bucket’s family represented the poverty situation.

I think the main audience of this film could mainly be ABC1, but the range of audience group of this film is quite wild. Both of the ABC1 and the C2DE group might be interested in this film, because of course they have got a family, but furthermore, in this film it involved both the rich and poor families. This makes this film wildly applied by both ABC1 and C2DE groups. And it is thinkable because it is about the relationships between families and greedy. A mother who expects her daughter be the best one in every different parts, the rich father who gives his daughter whatever she wants, the father who does not allow his son to eat any sweet to protect his teeth disappeared after his son left the house, a poor family which can only give their kid a chocolate bar for birthday gift love each other so much and share the best relationship in the world. Those kids who have everything are terribly mad in their own ways, but what it is in common to all of them is that they all want something so badly. For example the over spoiled girl Veruca, she wants to get what she wants immediately; Violet just kept chewing the same piece of chewing gum, and her mom was even proud of it. Charlie was an obvious comparison with other kids, even he lived in such a poor family, he was not greedy at all, and he finally end up with has both the factory and his family with him.

There were two main themes in this film, family relationships and greedy. Just think about in nowadays society, this is also happening in every corner of the world. Parents love their children in their own ways and it does not always work. Although the main idea might be for children's own good, parents sometimes ignore if their children are happy. On the other hand, most of the people are greedy in some way, whether about the wealth, about foods or about to always be a winner. Even if they are successful in their business, they still could not feel the warmness of the family. After Charlie refused the factory ownership, Wonka Charlie returned to the factory and was so confused about the reason why. So he went back to find Charlie and Charlie accompanied him to find his father. Wonka finally found the warmness of the family.

The sequence I chose was when Wonka first made the request about let Charlie own the factory after his flying glass elevator landed in Buckets’ house, which was always covered in gray colour and chiaroscuro. The chiaroscuro, Tim Burton used a lot in most of his gothic style movies. Wonka then walked and looked around, pan shots followed his movements around in the house, camera then closed up with the position of his hands and the emotion of his face, the non-verbal codes, we could tell that he could never ever imagine the life in this kind of situation. The rest three elders were still laying in their bed smiley. Wonka was the only one who wore good clothes in this sequence, red flannel suit, which represents wealth, compared with others’ clothes. He then made his request to Charlie. Bucket family was surprised and happy of course, but Wonka suddenly made the condition that Charlie could only own the factory alone. Charlie immediately refused the present as what all the main characters would do, this is a stereotype. Wonka went back and found him again, this time Charlie was cleaning others shoes to earn money and help his dad, which represented that he rather clean shoes than owning an enormous chocolate factory without his family. This was the sequence which I thought has a direct effect to the ideology of this film.

The family is one of the most important parts in everyone's life, even if sometimes we do not really aware it. Once after we got to the reality, we get hurt in different situations, our hearts are hurt and feeling painful. Our minds concerning with gaining advantages from other people. We felt tired about scheming with others; we finally realized that we need something or someone to fall back on, to let us rely on. We turned back and see our families are still there, ready to support us in anytime. Last but not least, to avoid being greedy and selfish is another message which this film wanted to communicate with us. Those people who want less, always get more at last, at least they get more happiness than those who are greedy.