Netflix’s Surprisingly Timely Roald Dahl ‘Toon’

While some young Roald Dahl fans, like me, preferred the spooky and cozy side of The witches or the strange fantasy of James and the Giant Peachthe other readers were definitely The idiots children. They liked the gross stuff in this novel about glass eyes placed at the bottom of beer glasses, worms replaced by spaghetti, etc. The whole conception of the book, dating from 1980, was based on disgust: it was written mainly because Dahl wanted to say how much he hated beards (one of his more harmless prejudices, it turns out.) When I was a kid, I saw the disgusting appeal of it all, but I thought The idiots – about a cruel, neglected married couple and a family of magical monkeys trying to escape their imprisonment – a little too sordid to be considered a classic on the level of, say, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The idiots has been adapted for the stage in the past, but a film version has been a long, somewhat torturous time coming. A live-action version was shelved only a few years ago, but now a planned TV series has been turned into an animated film, directed (with Todd Kunjan Demong and Katie Shanahan as co-directors) by Phil Johnston, best known for writing appealing and hugely successful children’s films like Wreck-It Ralph And Zootopia. Maybe The idiots offered Johnston the chance to connect with his inner trash child, allowing him to be crude and a little dangerous after the much sharper and polished product of the aforementioned efforts.

As the film begins, a joyous celebration of nastiness seems to be exactly the plan. The action was moved to the present day and a new set of characters were introduced. But the text’s grimy fascinations remain intact. The Twits, played with courage and slime by Margo Martindale and British comedian Johnny Vegas, are indeed a lousy couple, playing nasty pranks on each other, keeping adorable and highly intelligent monkeys in captivity and threatening the local children. They also plan to open an amusement park, complete with a foul bouncy castle made of soiled mattresses and all sorts of other obvious health code violations. It’s a bit cruder and less fanciful than Dahl’s novel, but it’s mostly in that vein, seeking to appeal to a whole new generation of young people who like the dirtier things.

There’s not much for the rest of us, though, other than a few spirited vocal performances (including one from Johnston himself) and occasional jokes that are just odd and sideways enough to record. The small handful of spare original songs, by David Byrne at that, don’t make much of an impression. The look of the film is woefully poor compared to Disney or DreamWorks’ glossy release. Some of that filth, that sleaze, is undoubtedly the problem, but too often The idiots feels like one of the many cheaply produced digital animated films that age pretty badly, pretty quickly. (Unfortunately, most computer-animated films don’t have a very long lifespan, at least not aesthetically.)

The additions to the narrative – particularly the introduction of two typical orphaned children, Beesha (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Bubsy (Ryan Lopez) – give The idiots a generic kids’ movie quality, as if Netflix didn’t think Dahl’s story was relevant enough for today’s audiences. This has unfortunately been the case with many recent Dahl adaptations. The prickly and strange nature of Dahl’s worlds is only appreciated to a certain extent. Then, contemporary customs and styles must intervene.

But like The idiots unfolds, at least one of his modern inventions resonates in a surprising way. Beesha and Bubsy end up going up against the bad guys, like kids always do in movies. One might expect that their fellow citizens – from a dark town called Triperot – would also find the Twits distasteful, even evil. But instead, they rally around the Twits, sold on a false message of revitalization of a city that was once a great place to live. The Twits, simply trying to promote their tainted business interests, launch a campaign to restore past greatness. The children watch in horror, then try to break their elders’ spell.

Which should sound pretty familiar to you here in the America of 2025. It is, to my mind, the first animated children’s film to make such a direct allusion to Trumpism, to the crazy wave of collective disruption that has gripped more and more people (young and old, alas) over the last ten years. That a children’s film would seek to allegorize this – to speak specifically to the feeling of seeing blatantly evil people elevated to positions of power while selling a false narrative about returning to a lost Eden – is rather remarkable. There are other, more familiar themes in the film, those of belonging, chosen family, and practicing empathy even toward those with whom we fiercely disagree. These elements are also valuable, but it is the sharp political analogy that makes The idiots quite distinct – it’s not a sentence I ever thought I’d write.

The fact that the film has such a strong and timely moral argument leads one to reconsider its creative merits. After all, Alan Tudyk East a strange hoot as a sad amphibian named Sweet Toed Toad. The magical monkeys, the Muggle-Wumps, are terribly cuddly and charming, and receive a lively voice from Natalie Portman and VeepThis is Timothy Simons. And hey, I also like the sentient furballs that are spat out by a Muggle-Wump when stressed; Sure, these blurry smiley faces come to life and probably exist primarily for merchandising purposes, but they prove endearing nonetheless.

It’s funny how a movie that initially seems intended to be a minor, forgettable pushover can suddenly stand out, to the point where most of its flaws are either brushed aside or embraced. Of course, those on the side of the Twits, in the film and in the real world, might say that such a shift in perspective is a clear example of lib-brained bias, of TDS (Twits Derangement Syndrome). To which I would respond: Go put your head on the ground, why don’t you.