Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

2017
Written by Gene Grillo (and the original screenplay by Roald Dahl)
Based on the novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
Directed by Spike Brandt

Remember when a poor young boy found a magical golden ticket and embarked on a candy adventure? Also a cat and a mouse were wandering around? That sounds vaguely familiar thanks to the power of franchise mashups! Everyone’s favorite cat and mouse team that isn’t named Itchy and Scratchy are back again to get int hijinks that keep ensuing no matter how hard they try to un-ensue them. And Willy Wonka is there. No, this is not Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it’s Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory! Yes, we’re literally in the 1971 movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, complete with the songs and the look and the costumes and the deviations from the book that the movie choose to do (such as the Everlasting Gobstopper test!) This isn’t even the first time Tom and Jerry have done this, they were running around in a remake of 1939’s The Wizard of Oz a few years back (and that movie got it’s own sequel!!)

This is the future of film. It’s the Marvel Cinematic Universe brought to a whole new level (even as the MCU borrows from the Universal Monsters and Godzilla movies that did it first), except now entire franchises are sandwiched together in a powerhouse of corporate synergy. Expect far more of this in the future, especially once someone at Disney decides the different brands should be more than just cameos in Wreck-It Ralph movies and has Luke Skywalker fight Iron Man. Other notable (and less so) examples include The Lego Movie, various Cartoon Network versions of WB shows, and the legion of parody movies such as The Hungover Games, which get an additional boost of being able to skirt around the edges of different IPs, which weirdly makes them the most accurate version of this type of fanfic in production format (too bad they are almost universally terrible!) But enough of talk of things not this particular film…


Tom and Jerry are both poor and hungry, so hungry Tom even forgets he can eat Jerry as the two fight over cheese. Eventually Tom remembers he can chomp down on the mouse and gives chase, but by then they’ve bumbled into the Willy Wonka movie and run into the candy store right as The Candy Man song begins. Despite the thousands of dollars of candy the candy man tosses around for free (how does this store stay in business???), they barely eat anything and Tom is about to eat Jerry again before Charlie Bucket saves him and gives the pair some bread. Thus, the greatest friendship in cinematic history has been born.

Tom and Jerry are involved in a painful series of adventures as they try to raise money to buy a Wonka Bar for Charlie in appreciation, and then resort to stealing the bars (Charlie steadfastly refuses to eat any ill-gotten gains, so they have to return it.) Eventually, as we all know and love, four other children find golden tickets, and eventually our Charlie Bucket, who goes on the tour with Grandpa Joe.

What is interesting is what the deviations are. Slugworth takes a far bigger role, now more than a mysterious character with an offer the kids cannot refuse, he has a whole song sequence where he sings a version of “I Want It Now” done in a chalk on brick graffiti animation style, complete with his ridiculous Eastern European accent. The words and animations show capitalism gone amok, making this the wokest version of Willy Wonka ever. Grandpa Joe manages to lose the golden ticket, causing Tom and Jerry to have to return it to them, at which point they spot Slugworth wandering around the factory and thus spend most of the rest of the film battling Slugworth while getting led around by an Oompah-Loompah mouse (I am not making that up) played by Tom and Jerry side player Tuffy.

If you ever wanted to see an Oompah-Loompah mouse reenact the spooky boat ride scene and recite the creepy poetry while the garish colors and visuals play, you have had your prayers answered, buddy!

The rest of you will just have as many nightmares as you got from the regular version.

Slugworth is joined by guard dog Spike (who earlier was a delivery driver that Tom and Jerry stole candy bars from), and they chase after Tom and Jerry while they try to warn Willy Wonka about Slugworth. This means that everything negative and freaky that happens to the kids also happens to Spike or Slugworth. While in the original story all the bad things that happen to Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde, and Mike Tee-Vee are because they are naughty children (which the movie sort of spoils by the scene of Charlie and Grandpa Joe being bad drinking the fizzy lifting drink), the punishments inflicted on Slugworth and Spike don’t seem to be justified (Spoiler for the old movie, Slugworth was just an actor doing an honor test on the kids, so he’s a Wonka employee, and so is Spike, so this is basically innocent people being tortured!) Also Willy Wonka hates cats for some reason never really explained beyond “cats are dirty”, though this guy is employing mice to make his food, so, um, yeah. And who doesn’t want to see Droopy being led away in handcuffs?

This film is a trip, it is so familiar yet completely different from so many things that it both ruins childhoods and movies but also becomes its own movie that has its own goals and point. The cartoon framework makes the cartoon punishments of the kids fit in more easily, though that dispels the magical realism of the film. There is no way the cartoon could ever recreate the magic of Gene Wilder’s performance, and it seems aware of that, thus despite him being a major character he’s more of just there than anything else. Outside of all the strangeness, the film just really isn’t spectacular, it is a direct to video made for children movie that doesn’t expand much more than that, so keep your expectations tempered. It isn’t a disaster, instead, a curiosity. As much fun as it would be to overreact and act like this movie killed your childhood, it instead just made a half-hearted tribute to your childhood, no worse than the hundreds of others you run into all the time.

Rated 5/10

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