Are Oompa-Loompas enslaved by Willy Wonka? New film addresses colonization

What do we do with the Oompa-Loompas?

Filmmakers and writers have grappled with that question since the 1964 debut of the small, largely unpaid workers in Roald Dahl's beloved children's book “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

In Dahl's original, the Oompa-Loompas were starving African pygmies who were “rescued” by Willy Wonka. He smuggled the tribe out of Africa in boxes to live, work, sing and dance in the chocolatier's factory.

“It didn't occur to me that my portrayal of the Oompa-Loompas was racist,” Dahl said in 1988. “But it did occur to the NAACP and others,” he added, referring to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. .

Since their debut, the Oompa-Loompas have gone through a series of transformations to shake their history from their colonialist roots. Some have been cosmetic (in later editions of the book, the illustrators made the tribesmen white). In the 2005 film “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” director Tim Burton moved the Oompa-Loompas out of Africa to a place that vaguely resembles South America.

But in “Wonka,” the new prequel from Warner Bros., the filmmakers tackle the colonialist aspects head-on.

Instead of smiling servants, there's a single Oompa-Loompa, and he's a sort of lonely, more grumpy nemesis and eventual mentor than an obedient lackey. As for the Oompa-Loompas' dubious working conditions (do they really just get paid in chocolate?) and questions about how and where Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) gets all those cocoa beans, unknowingly stealing them—a! the Oompa-Loompas!—and he makes the candy himself.

Finally, we hear the Oompa-Loompas side of this once-unbalanced story, a first in a franchise that includes books, musicals, and movies. Still, there were complaints about these Oompa-Loompas even before the film was released, with some actors criticizing the decision to cast Hugh Grant in a role traditionally played by actors with dwarfism.

In the 1971 film “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” starring Gene Wilder, the Oompa-Loompas house was changed to “Loompaland”; Instead of being smuggled in boxes, they were “transported.” The creators of the adaptation transformed the oompa-loompas from starving natives of “the deepest part of Africa” into orange-faced, green-haired men dressed in vaguely European clothing, while running as fast and far as possible from the narrative of the “ happy slave” from the book.

Dahl was pressured to recast the Oompa-Loompas in later editions of his books. Several illustrators reimagined the smiling black natives into light-skinned elves with spiky blonde locks or bearded hippies.

For Catherine Keyser, an English professor at the University of South Carolina, the novelist's attempts to “deblack” (in Dahl's words) his characters, certainly under pressure, made them, in some ways, even less human. “They were rewritten as white, so now it was based on elves and tricksters,” she said.

In the 2005 remake, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” a single actor, Deep Roy, played all of the Oompa-Loompas.

Paul King, director and co-writer of “Wonka,” said portraying Dahl's original Oompa-Loompas was never a consideration. “It was a good decision to change it,” he said. “I felt very comfortable with Dahl’s decision.”

“I think the Oompa-Loompas were a way to make globalization in colonial form seem welcoming, attractive and comforting. But maybe if you could have a Bildungsroman from the perspective of a single Oompa-Loompa, which gives an interiority and a name to one Oompa-Loompa, that might fix it,” Keyser added.

ROBERT ITO. THE NEW YORK TIMES