When it was announced that the creative team behind the Paddington films were making a musical about Willy Wonka’s early life, some cynics speculated that we were just going to get Paddington again, but with more songs, less marmalade and a different shape of hat. To which the rest of us could only respond: ooh, yes, that sounds lovely, thanks.
Wonka – which is one of the best times you’ll have in the cinema this year – isn’t exactly that film. But it’s far closer to the recent big-screen adventures of Michael Bond’s beloved bear than it is to Dahl’s original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory novel – and, frankly, is all the better for it. This is no conventional prequel, full of bucketloads (or even Bucket-loads) of laborious foreshadowing: there’s no breezy cameo from a hot Grandpa Joe, a la Jude Law’s young Dumbledore, in tasteful midcentury knits.
Nor is it an effortful Dahl cover version. The plot has villainy to spare, but no sadistic streak – even Olivia Colman and Tom Davis’s venomous hoteliers are a good deal less toxic than, say, the Twits – while all confectionary-based mishaps aren’t matters of cosmic punishment but industrial sabotage.
Instead, director Paul King and his co-writer Simon Farnaby have concocted a wholly self-contained caper about a plucky young chocolatier taking on a cartel of older, meaner rivals – then dusted it with enough details drawn from both Dahl’s novel and the 1971 film to make the branding add up.
Devout Wonkarians are rewarded with nods and winks: a turn of phrase here, a visual echo there, or a tinkling of Pure Imagination in Toby Talbot’s magical score. (The suite of new songs, by Talbot and his old Divine Comedy collaborator Neil Hannon, are witty and wondrous: a set of instant, hear-once, hum-forever classics.) Otherwise, though, the film largely just gets on with its own Great Chocolate Caper thing.
