Netflix dump Roald Dahl from generic adaptation

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After Netflix bought the Roald Dahl Story Company in 2021, it seemed like the next logical step was for the streamer to milk every last drop of nostalgia from its new cash cow, leaving it a desiccated bovine husk without an ounce of remaining literary magic. So, when Wes Anderson won an Oscar for The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugarone of four excellent, intelligent, creatively stagey short adaptations he made for the service, it came as a bit of a shock. Charming, eccentric, artsy, zippy little bedtime stories aren’t exactly Netflix’s stock-in-trade. But those questioning their every assumption should now find solace. The Twits is exactly what one might imagine a Netflix Dahl adaptation to be: Diluted, simplistic animation, as cloying and feckless and smoothed over as anything from the last decade of Illumination films.

There might be some comfort found in that predictability, that lowest-common denominator filmmaking, if not for the source material. As mean-spirited and gleefully vindictive as anything Dahl ever wrote, The Twits inspired its readers by setting them against two terrible people, a couple physically warped by their inner cruelty and only held together by their mutual disaffection. Illustrator Quentin Blake helped pit these spiky grotesques against the expressive animals they tormented. It was a story of cartoonish evil and equally cartoonish revenge. In altering the plot, style, tone, humor…and pretty much everything else, The Twits panders and talks down to its young audience in a way Dahl never did.

Very loosely adapted by longtime Disney creative Phil Johnston (Ralph Breaks The Internet), whose non-animated scripts (A Merry Friggin’ Christmas, The Brothers Grimsby) betray a comedy hack, The Twits introduces the anonymous everytown of Triperot through a (literally) flea-bitten framing device. It’s there that Mrs. (Margo Martindale, twanging it up as a junkyard Paula Deen) and Mr. Twit (Johnny Vegas, his Lancashire accent spewing from a deranged Rick Rubin) prank one another and attempt to open a derelict, Action Park-style amusement park called Twitlandia. But the Twits’ gaudy, rusted enterprise is only a small piece of this new story. Most of it belongs to the annoyingly precocious orphan pals Beesha (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Bubsy (Ryan Lopez), ported over from the kind of bobbleheaded children’s TV that co-writer Meg Favreau hails from.

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The kids arbitrarily collide with the Twits, discovering that their heinous operation entails milking magical tears from a family of bright-blue, simian Muggle-Wumps. Timothy Simons and Natalie Portman play Marty and Mary Muggle-Wump as foils to the Twits, stuffed-animal parental figures that alternatively puke up sentient hairballs and offer sage advice. The simple result is that, once the plot stumbles through odd narrative detours—like an election storyline about lying politicians and easily manipulated voters, and pace-deflating scenes to remind everyone that Beesha and Bubsy are orphanswhich is sad—The Twits boils down to these kids saving the Muggle-Wumps and beating the Twits. Also there are songs, which one wouldn’t believe are by David Byrne if it wasn’t written right here.

Byrne’s pedigree—and the pedigree of the comic supporting cast, which ranges from Jason Mantzoukas as Mayor Wayne John John-John (not a typo, just stupid) to Alan Tudyk as a psychoactive toad—is the most confounding element of The Twits. For a film that has the bland, rounded design and fart-worshipping humor of a Minions movie, it certainly wastes a lot more talent than its competitors as it runs through the checklist of kids-movie must-haves. One longs for the loose watercolors of Blake or the respectful malice of Dahl as The Twits stuffs its 85 minutes or so (with 15 minutes of credits) with slo-mo slapstick, endless toilet humor, random dance sequences, and screaming little fuzzballs solely conjured up to become stuffed toys.

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Though, this almost does as much a disservice to the Twits themselves as their own film. Martindale and Vegas thankfully offer more energy and vocal identity than more name-brand stars might, and the characters they play are as disgusting as they should be. Really, there’s a scene where they puke worms into each other’s mouths until they Lady And The Tramp one together. And yet, they’re constantly undermined by the film around them. Their unmotivated misanthropy and loathing of one another suddenly takes a backseat so that they can sing a song about their love and a vaguely defined reasoning for their attitude. (“We’re the only ones out here who are free,” they harmonize.) Is that really the case, or is it that they’re a striving lower-class couple? Or is it they’re also both revealed to be orphans? This shifting characterization, their home’s janky mechanized décor (which cribs shamelessly from Wallace & Gromit)and their sudden transformation into political symbols—The Twits briefly becomes an out-of-place story about how economic downturns can lead a constituency to rally behind obviously evil people—makes the Twits strangers in their own movie.

That leaves the bulk of the film up to the semi-sarcastic Beesha and cutesy Bubsy, whose scenes operate on a far doofier, little-kid level than the rest of the film; when the children meet the Muggle-Wumps, Bubsy chuckles, “You Muggle-Wumps are funny,” with the intonation of Dora The Explorer explaining something to a toddler. Their generic adventure to save some magical little critters from a couple of bad guys is overwhelmed with repeated, bottom-drawer cheap humor and prescriptive morals. The handful of dry gags and book-faithful tricks become mere ornaments inappropriate to a Netflix film aiming to be anything but a Twits movie.

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Director: Phil Johnston
Writer: Phil Johnston, Meg Favreau
Starring: Margo Margole, John Vegas, Natalie Porse
Release Date: October 17, 2025 (Netflix)