Catherine Keyser News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

That’s a question filmmakers and writers have tangled with ever since the 1964 debut of the tiny, largely unpaid laborers in Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s book “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” In Dahl’s original, the Oompa-Loompas were starving African pygmies, subsisting largely on a mash of green caterpillars and tree bark until “rescued” by Willy Wonka. He smuggled the entire tribe out of Africa in packing crates to live and work, and sing and goof and dance, in the chocolatier’s factory.

Wonka is the latest film to try to shake the tiny unpaid labourers from their colonialist roots in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. What do we...

“Wonka” is the latest film to try to shake the tiny unpaid laborers from their colonialist roots in Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

Louise Fitzhugh—author of Harriet the Spy—and James Merrill—the poet—were joined by friendship, craft, and graphomania: the compulsion to write. Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh’s iconic 1964 novel, appears to be a book with an aspiring writer as its protagonist, but the writer is the vehicle for the actual main character: her notebook. Harriet’s notebook acts like the broom in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Goethe’s fable (made famous by Mickey Mouse in Walt Disney’s Fantasia). The apprentice animates his broom to do his dirty work, but then he can’t turn off the spel...