The Oompa-Loompas characters in the movie “Wonka” open up an old debate
New York: Robert Ito*
What do we do with the Oompa Loompas?
This is the question that filmmakers and writers have grappled with since 1964 for the first time since the largely unpaid young workers appeared in Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s book “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”
In Dahl’s original novel, the Oompa-Loompas were starving African pygmies who lived largely on a collection of green grubs and tree bark until they were “rescued” by Willy Wonka. He smuggled the entire tribe out of Africa in packing boxes to live and work, and sing and dance, in a chocolate factory.
“It never occurred to me that my depiction of the Oompa-Loompas was racist,” Dahl said in a 1988 interview.
In the five decades since their literary emergence, the Oompa-Loompas have undergone a series of transformations to shake their story from its colonial roots. Some of the reforms were clearly cosmetic (in later editions of the book, the illustrators simply made the tribesmen white). As for other attempts, they cannot be considered reforms at all: in the 2005 film “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” director Tim Burton switched continents, transporting the Oompa-Loompas tribe from Africa to a place that vaguely resembled South America, as envisioned by an adventure filmmaker from The fifties of the last century.
Poster for the movie “Wonka” released this month
In Warner Bros.’s “Wonka,” which opened this month, the filmmakers address colonial aspects directly.
In many ways, the prequel — which depicts Wonka’s (Timothée Chalamet) struggle to get his chocolate business up and running — allowed the filmmakers to avoid the book’s more disgusting elements. Instead of smiling servants, there is a single Oompa Loompa, more like a lone wolf, a more alien enemy and eventual teacher than a submissive servant. Simply put, it’s Hugh Grant. As for the Oompa-Loompas’ superficial working conditions (does he just pay them in chocolate?) and the questions about how and where Wonka gets all those cocoa beans to make delicious chocolate, he’s unwittingly stealing them – from the Oompa-Loompas! -And he makes his own candy (at this point in the story, he’s still a small-batch candy maker).
“I was really interested in the idea of the Oompa-Loompas judging Wonka for stealing their cocoa beans and imposing punishments on him,” said Paul King, the film’s director and co-writer.
The new film finally presents the Oompa-Loompas side of this otherwise uneven story. However, there were complaints about the Oompa-Loompas even before the opening of this latest film, with some actors criticizing the decision to cast Grant in a role traditionally played by dwarf actors.
Scholars have criticized Dahl’s books for children for decades, highlighting instances of racial and sexist stereotyping. This year, Puffin Books ignited a firestorm when it released new, revised versions of Dahl classics, including “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Matilda,” which removed, among other things, references to skin color, body size and slavery. For many years, biographers have attacked Dahl himself, describing him as anti-Semitic and astonishingly cruel to his first wife, the Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal.
Oompa Loompas in the 1971 version of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (imdb)
So, it’s no surprise that when the creators of the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, starring Gene Wilder, first adapted Dahl’s story, they moved as quickly and as far away as they could from the book’s “happy slave” narrative.
After the race riots in Britain in the 1950s and the American civil rights movement in the 1960s, “There is no way “To overestimate that it was not conducive to that moment.”
In Wilder’s version, the Oompa-Loompas were transformed from hungry indigenous people from “the deepest, darkest part of Africa” into orange-faced, green-haired men in exotic European costumes. Their African homeland has been changed to the fictional country of Lombaland; Instead of being smuggled out of the jungle in boxes, they were transported as respected human beings.
In 1971, the filmmakers hired stunt artists and colored them green, a decision that upset Dahl. said Matthew Dennison, author of the critically acclaimed biography Roald Dahl: Narrator of the Unexpected. (Dahl hated the film version, he said, in part because he couldn’t stand Gene Wilder, for reasons I don’t understand.)
Dahl also came under pressure to reformulate the Oompa-Loompas in later editions of his books. Various painters have reimagined painter Joseph Shindelman’s images of smiling black indigenous people as fair-skinned goblins with blond hair, or bearded hippies.
For Keizer, the novelist’s attempts to “de-Negritude” (Dahl’s words) his own characters, under known pressure, made them, in some ways, less human.
The Oompa Loompas character as they appeared in the movie “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” directed by Tim Burton in 2005 (imdb)
Over the years, the Oompa-Loompas have continued to transform. In Tim Burton’s 2005 remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, one actor, Deb Roy, was chosen to play all the Oompa-Loompas, using digital technology to create replicas of the workers who sing, dance and swim in bright, identical outfits ( Robots were also used in some scenes.) On stage in countless school productions, the performances have been by children wearing green wigs, with or without orange faces, and in the West End by half-human, half-puppet hybrids.
Clearly there was a lot of visual material for King to choose from. However, Dahl’s original characters, the African Pygmies, were never considered.
“It was a good choice to change that,” King said. “I was very relieved by Dahl’s decision.”
Hugh Grant as Oompa Loompas in a scene from the movie “Wonka” (Warner Bros.)
It’s a relatively small role for Hugh Grant, but one that plays into Keizer’s vision of a redemptive story for the Oompa-Loompas, one told from their point of view. “I think the Oompa-Loompas were a way to make globalization with a colonial framework seem comfortable, fun and attractive,” she said. “But maybe if you could have the bildungsroman from the perspective of one individual called the Oompa Loompa, giving the Oompa Loompa an internal character and a name, that would fix this dilemma.”
In the end, Grant as the Oompa-Loompa pays homage to the original 1971 novel, even as he is granted the kind of power and independence those original servants could only dream of.
* New York Times service
