Blogtober Day 17: Witches & Wonderful Illustrations

If you never had the chance to run into a Roald Dahl book when you were a child, I urge you to go look them up and find one or several to settle down for a good night of reading. Today for Blogtober I'll be talking about a movie that was released in 2009 based off of one of these books called The Witches.

The books are the perfect type to capture a kid's imagination. I loved to read the kind of books you'd find from Enid Blyton or in the Chronicles of Narnia, where fascinating things happen to ordinary children. As a child it gives you another world to peer into and sometimes escape to, and also gives you hope that the future can be interesting and full of fun things.

As a kid I loved Roald Dahl's story writing, and the books were made especially fantastic by the illustrations from artist Quentin Blake. I don't think I knew what it was that made me love the illustration as a child, but today I love them because they're natural, not dependent on being exact or realistic. They're simple and perfect the way they are. I love art that can be enough on its own, and I hope to reach that with my own art someday.

But today I'm talking about the movie, which is reminiscent of Home Alone, as it stars a little towhead boy who goes off on mostly solo adventures. It has its own spooky aesthetic which I'll let speak for itself.

The story is that there are witches in the world among the regular people, but they're evil and hate all children and want to kill them. They have no toes, and are bald, and have long claws so they dress like very prim church ladies with long gloves, wigs and hats. The main character, a little boy named Luke, is hearing about the witches from his grandmother, who knew of witches during her childhood in Norway and is missing a finger from a close encounter with the Grand High Witch herself. She tells Luke stories about witches and puts him to bed while his parents are out on the town, but his parents don't come back and Luke begins to live with his grandmother, who gives him two pet mice that he begins to build a circus for.

They go on holiday to the seaside to treat Grandma's diabetes, but who else should be staying at their hotel than all the witches in England, and some from even farther. They have a big meeting at the hotel, and take off their disguises to reveal their horrible selves underneath. The scene is pretty great and the makeup is well, monstrous. But in the right way.

The Grand High Witch

The Grand High Witch addresses them all (and unwittingly addresses Luke as well, who is hiding in the room behind a screen divider), and in what could be described as the world's most deranged infomercial, explains her master plan to eliminate all the children in the United Kingdom by opening sweet shops and selling candies tainted with her latest and greatest potion, Formula 86! The formula takes two hours for one dose to take effect, but once it does it will turn whoever ingests it into a mouse.

Just as the witches are about to leave, they sniff out Luke and hunt him down. Luckily for him, for a bunch of child-murdering witches they're terrible at actually catching children. He gets away temporarily, but not before they catch him again and give him 500 doses of Formula 86, turning him into a mouse immediately. The catch is that he's a talking mouse, so after getting away he's able to come up with a plan with his grandmother and steal the formula to turn the plan back on the witches. Successfully spiking their soup, Luke and his grandmother turn all the witches into mice and head home victorious.

Something I don't think happened in the book, at the end of the movie the one remaining witch, a good witch, visits them in the night and turns Luke into a too-naked-for-screen human boy again, and restores his pet mice and also his glasses. In the book I think he went on living as a mouse, with special things built for him like Stuart Little.