Wonka: A Few Comparisons to The Original | Teen Ink

Wonka: A Few Comparisons to The Original

February 26, 2024
By maddyrae1 BRONZE, Cannon Falls, Minnesota
maddyrae1 BRONZE, Cannon Falls, Minnesota
4 articles 0 photos 0 comments

“The greedy beat the needy” is repeated a few times throughout the “Wonka” movie. Timothee Chalamet plays Willy Wonka in the new “Wonka” movie, a backstory to “Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, 2005.” We get to see why Willy wanted to make candy, and how he meets the Oompa Loompas. This movie also made some people tear up. It taught lessons to be humble, was very kind-hearted, but wasn’t really like the backstory shown in 2005.


The aspiring chocolatier has nowhere to stay for the night and is approached by a man who says that Willy can stay at Mrs. Scrubbit’s Laundry Shop. Mrs. Scrubbit (Olivia Colman) says that he will only have to pay a single sovereign while making him sign a contract. As she’s convincing him to stay, Noodle (Calah Lane), an orphan, shows up behind Scrubbit and tells Willy to read the fine print. Though he doesn’t quite hear her, Scrubbit pushes Nooddle away, continuing to persuade him to sign. He does it considering he has no other choices, and suddenly the man and Scrubbit are pushing him down the laundry shute where he meets a few other people who have been working at the laundry shop for years because they signed the same contract without reading it closely.


Noodle meets him again later that night and they both tell their stories. Willy tells his dreams of chocolate-making and about his mom who passed away but would make him chocolate when he was younger. A few days later, a jar of Willy’s chocolate was stolen. He explains that he has been trying to catch the little orange man behind this. Anyone who has seen Charlie and The Chocolate Factory can figure that he’s talking about an Oompa Loompa. When Willy catches him one night, the Oompa Loompa, or “Lofty” (Hugh Grant), says he comes from Loompaland. Willy traveled to this island to gather cocoa beans for his chocolate and Lofty was supposed to be on guard duty but he was sleeping. Lofty now has to steal chocolate from Willy until his island has enough.


Willy finds a way to get out of doing laundry and how to sneak back into town so he can continue selling his candy. The townspeople love him as he sings his songs and boosts other’s confidence with his candy, but it’s soon over as the police find and stop him. A wealthy shop-owner who’s been plotting against Willy ends up being Noodle’s terrible uncle who left her at Scrubbit’s years ago. As this is all found out and explained, an accomplice of Willy is looking through all the records and seeing the other evil and unfair things the uncle and his sidemen have done. They’re put in jail as Willy’s chocolate is flowing out of a fountain. He sees his mom in the crowd as he’s brought back to his childhood when his mother told him she’d be there when he succeeded.


As I was sitting in the theater watching this scene with my mom, I looked over and saw her crying. She does cry to almost every movie but “Wonka” is very touching. This movie shows how everyone’s mom will be with them every step of the way, even if she’s not there physically. It was filmed beautifully, mainly in the United Kingdom. The CGI was amazing in ways where everything in the movie looked right out of a fantasy book. I left the theater with every song from the movie memorized in my head. It was a very joyful and kind-hearted interpretation of the original movies.

 

This movie was a great rendition; though it’s not at all like the original “backstory.” In Charlie And The Chocolate Factory with Johnny Depp, there’s a flashback shown to when Willy was younger: Willy eating candy on Halloween while hiding from his father, his father finds him and puts very cramped braces on Willy, forbidding him from ever eating chocolate again. The clear difference between “Wonka” and “Charlie And The Chocolate Factory” is that in “Wonka,” Willy’s dad isn’t mentioned at all but in “Charlie And The Chocolate Factory” his dad is a big factor as to why he became a chocolatier. His dad was a dentist and my take is that Willy wanted to be a chocolatier to either make others happy and enjoy what he couldn’t have or he did it to kind of rebel against his dad. This is very unlike “Wonka” because in “Wonka,” Willy made chocolate to make his mom proud.



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