Robert Zemeckis’s visually innovative film tells the darkly humorous and heartwarming tale of a young orphaned boy who, in late 1967, goes to live with his loving Grandma in the rural Alabama town of Demopolis. As the boy and his grandmother encounter some deceptively glamorous but thoroughly diabolical witches, she wisely whisks him away to a seaside resort. Regrettably, they arrive at precisely the same time that the world’s Grand High Witch has gathered her fellow cronies from around the globe-undercover-to carry out her nefarious plans. Zemeckis is joined by a world-class team of filmmakers, including Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro and Kenya Barris. The cast includes powerhouse performances from Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer, Stanley Tucci, Kristin Chenoweth and Chris Rock, with newcomer Jahzir Kadeen Bruno as the brave young hero.
This movie contains 16 potentially triggering events.
Mild and played for laughs. A rat bites a man's private parts (while he's fully dressed), but we don't see it directly, only his reaction and subsequent pain.
Somewhat, I think. The hotel manager has been told that the grandmother is carrying a mouse around, and when he approaches her about it, she scolds him, saying that that's an absurd accusation, turns it around on him by blaming him for allowing the hotel to be infested with mice (which it isn't), and threatens to expose him if he doesn't do something about the infestation. He's flustered and ends up apologising. However, she doesn't do it out of malice, but to be able to continue trying to save the children who have been turned into mice and fight the witches.
A boy is emotionally neglected and shamed by his cold and demanding parents, and has apparently always been so. In the end, the parents completely reject him because he's been turned into a mouse, and he has to go live with someone else
permanently. He doesn't seem too sad about this (which is kind of weird) but that doesn't mean he wasn't mistreated. --- Apart from that, the witches obviously abuse children by being cruel to them and turning them into mice (and, in one case long before the movie's present, into a chicken). The transformations are the first step towards the witches' end goal of killing every child in the world by "squishing" them once they're small enough to be stepped on.
I wouldn't say that the witches' desire to kill all children is anything like an addiction. As I see it, their "high" is the pleasure of triumph and of killing. Their desire is driven by evil and by the fact that they're disgusted by children because children smell exceedingly bad to them. They want to be rid of all children for good. If they were addicted, they wouldn't plan to kill every child in the world, because once they'd succeeded there would be no more "fixes" to be had.
The Grand High Witch who has by this point in the film been turned into a rat was attacked by her cat whom she was mean to earlier in the film. Squeaks and meows are heard, but nothing is seen beyond the cat jumping at the rat.
A character is turned into a chicken, and people eat her eggs. Although this is not technically cannibalism, that and the fact that she is a human turned into chicken, a commonly eaten animal, can still invoke an emotional response.
No, but the witches' feet all look like their toes were amputated long ago (completely healed). Every witch lacks all her toes, except for the grand witch, who has one middle toe on each foot.
No one breaks a bone, but there are 2 scenes where the Grand High Witch extends her arms to extreme lengths; there is a sickening crunch each time a new segment of bone appears to lengthen her arms.
I'm not sure, but I seem to remember that whenever someone is turned into a mouse or rat, they sort of seize up and shake all over, seeming to loose muscle control for a few moments, until the transformation actually happens.
The witches have no toes but the Grand High Witch has one middle toe that can be unsettling, so this could be triggering. There's no actual detachment of any appendages shown in the movie.
No, but kids are in great danger, since the witches want to kill them all and do succeed in turning three children into mice as a first step toward killing them by stepping on them. Also, in the very beginning of the movie, a boy is in great danger, since he's in a car accident so bad it kills both of his parents. He's saved by his seatbelt.
The parents are killed in a car crash. They pull "Hero Boy" from the overturned car, but the parents are not seen. "Hero Boy" does grab his dad's glasses though.
Grandma starts coughing whenever witches are near, and it made my daughter (who is very emetophobic) nervous. But Grandma never actually vomits or even comes close - she just coughs. Also, there is a scene in the dining room when the Grand Witch leans in Grandma’s face and starts to make mouth movements like she might be sick - but instead she starts clucking like a chicken.
There are 2 scenes where the Grand High Witch extends her arms to extreme lengths; there is a sickening crunch each time a new segment of bone appears to lengthen her arms.
A cliché histrionic, impossible-to-please chef yells "Give me a knife, so I can kill myself!" at his employees when he's displeased with them. He clearly doesn't actually mean it; it's just a melodramatic way of scolding.
The witches hide their hands, feet, and bald heads so as to appear unremarkable. The characters turned into animals want to be turned back into humans.
Yes and no? Lots of people have accused Roald Dahl, who wrote the book behind the movie, of using the evil, inhuman and malformed witches to represent Jews. Since Roald Dahl was in fact an unapologetic and outspoken anti-semite, it's very possible that the accusation is warranted. I wouldn't have noticed anything, though; I have the information from reading trivia about the movie on IMDb after watching it. ___ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/06/roald-dahl-family-apologises-for-his-antisemitism
Well... Hmm... A boy gets a mouse as a present and asks the giver, "What's his name?", to which the giver replies that it's a girl. (--- SPOILER, SPOILER, SPOILER --- Later on, it turns out that the mouse is actually a human girl who's been turned into a mouse, which means that she understood the exchange.)
In both human and mouse form, the overweight boy is consistently shown as exceedingly stupid, slow on the uptake, clumsy and completely unable to resist his constant urge to eat - all to the extent that it endangers his own life as well as the lives of others - I mean, the extent of his obsession with eating is absurd, probably the worst I've seen in a movie, which is saying a lot. ... So, there's no end to the number of scenes in which he gets stuck or almost falls down from places and needs help/rescuing, doesn't get what's glaringly obviously going on, has to be held back from running out of hiding to fetch some food he's fixated on etc. It's cliché, unfunny and frankly unacceptable. The movie business needs to move past that trope. I don't care if Roald Dahl wrote the character that way; it would've taken nothing away from the story to drop that part of the character.
Technically, two black adults (male and female) are the first ones to die. They die in a car crash in the very beginning of the movie; we see their son in the back of the crashed car, but not them. We only see them in a photo, later on in the movie.
Sort of. They never get turned back into humans, Bruno doesn't go to live back with his parents (they're not really good people anyway), but they turn more evil witches into rats. Just watch a bit through the credits.