Tom and Jerry Should Not Meet Willy Wonka in a Feature Film. It Is an Abomination

By Rich Juzwiak | April 18, 2017 | 4:50pm

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It’s rare to encounter something as straightforward and yet dumbfounding as Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It’s a full-length feature that uses songs and (at times modified) dialogue from Mel Stuart’s iconic 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory rendered in limp animation with saccharine coloring, and featuring the also iconic cartoon cat-and-mouse adversaries Tom and Jerry. It follows the 2011 instant classic Tom and Jerry & the Wizard of Oz.

So many questions about this one: Are Tom and Jerry Charlie’s pets? How much more freelance laundry work did Charlie’s mom have to take on to provide for the hungry cat and mouse mouths? Why are the cat and mouse allowed in the chocolate factory? Isn’t that unsanitary? If the Oompa Loompas are mice as well, how could anyone be sure that what they’re eating is actually chocolate and not mice feces? Who thought of this and why? The level of cynicism that it must have taken to create this seems superhuman—it doesn’t so much invoke nostalgia as prey upon it. The concept is so wicked, it seems like something only a villainous capitalist in a Road Dahl novel could dream up to torture current children and to ruin the childhoods of the rest of us, thereby eliminating the very concept of childhood all together.