Landmine in a Chocolate Factory: How 'Pure Imagination' Blew Up the Morality of Willy Wonka (1971)

And how the latest Wonka film redeemed the song. (Fatherhood Fridays #11)

As much as I enjoy the original movie adaptation of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, it hid one cultural landmine that blew up the morality of Roald Dahl’s beloved tale. It also edged us toward our current cultural corruption.

Where was the landmine? The revelation of the Chocolate Room and the song “Pure Imagination.”

If you don’t remember the film, the tour of Wonka’s chocolate factory begins with everyone signing a wall-sized contract. Then, after squeezing the entire group of children and adults through a narrowing hallway that culminates in a tiny door, they emerge into a lush garden where every plant is made of candy and the waterfall and river are molten chocolate. It’s a child’s wonderland.

Visually, the transition suggests a birth (or rebirth), and the garden recalls Eden. This is a newly created world from one man’s imagination. The song admits it’s intended to be paradise on earth. The children and their parents are the first humans apart from the creator to walk its paths.

But unlike Eden, there are no restrictions. No forbidden fruit. In serpentine fashion, the creator of this syrupy garden of delights serenades his guests to take and eat. He encourages them with “Anything you want to, do it. Want to change the world, there’s nothing to it.”

When introducing the room in the book, Wonka speaks about a desire for beauty even in a factory, holding forth a classic virtue to support his innovations. Only then does he invite his guests to taste a blade of grass and sample a buttercup. There is no gluttonous assault on the edible forest, as in the film. The restrained invitation creates an immediate contrast with the actions of Augustus Gloop, who barrels through common etiquette to stick his gob in the chocolate that he was not offered. It highlights his gluttony and emphasizes the moral points. Both gluttony and poor manners are ugly vices.

In the film, Wonka sets them all loose with a song and a teasing dance. Children and parents swarm the sweet landscape like frenzied bees without a formal invitation. If everyone is free to gorge themselves, what’s wrong with young master Gloop washing it down with some hot cocoa?

Like Eden, there is a false promise of something good in the song: “Living there you’ll be free if you truly wish to be.” Here, it’s an open invitation to do what you want, to claim total liberty. Eat as much as you like. Abandon all courtesy and decorum. Revel in gluttony without consequence.

But there’s a catch. There is an unspoken rule: Don’t touch the chocolate river!

Instead of revealing the vice of Augustus, this version makes Wonka a dishonest broker, a master of bait-and-switch morality. The book makes you question his sanity, even as the character retains clarity on virtue and the necessity of consequences for vice. The movie makes him morally vague, an untrustworthy trickster dealing with amoral brats in a constant game of serving them their just desserts. It suggests a morality of “do unto others before they do unto you.” This recast of Wonka as untrustworthy was partly Gene Wilder’s demand, which shows us Hollywood’s longstanding trouble with understanding and accurately interpreting works that emphasize virtue.

This short interview clip was eye-opening about his perspective on the character: https://youtube.com/shorts/KY8PqczrWZI?si=-99CxmAfQQkxXbk-

The vagueness of the phrase “Pure Imagination” highlights the issue. When speaking of immaterial things, you can interpret pure as “complete, entirely, utter” as in “pure folly.” You can also take it as “undefiled, without moral fault or guilt” as in the “pure heart” of fairy tales.

I believe Roald Dahl would have leaned toward the latter. Hollywood likely meant the former. As poetry, the song leads somewhat toward the former, but the overall context of the film muddies the waters, especially since Wonka is immediately concerned about the boy contaminating his chocolate—an idea closer to the concept of moral purity. But the danger of putting such vagueness in a children’s movie is that the viewer is unguided about which direction to lean.

Based on where our culture is 54 years later, the first definition won. Recent and upcoming generations were nurtured in and embraced a world made entirely of unbridled imagination. “Anything you want to, do it” is the mantra of the age. Even our presidential candidates encourage an “unburdened” imagination of the future. The promised benefit is still total liberty through a free imagination. It’s still a lie.

What the rest of the film shows in contrast, and what Dahl obviously meant to say, was that these children needed no invitation to follow their desires. They were already slaves to their whims. The chocolate factory was simply the final slide off the cliff from the slippery slope they were on. Their gluttony, greed, and obsessions may have avoided consequences within coddling homes, but eventually the right circumstance opened a door for deserved judgment. The opportunity of a lifetime turned into a curse because of the candidates’ bad character.

We are just starting to see the tragedies resulting from three generations falling for this lie of total liberty. The bottom of the cliff was (perhaps) the “pure imagination” of fluid identities. We’re going to be dealing with the carnage for decades.

In whole, I think both the book and the 1971 movie are worth enjoying with your kids. However, this is a case study in approaching children’s entertainment with discernment. Especially in a visual medium, it’s harder to evaluate all the messages within a narrative. I’ll admit, while the chocolate room scene always left me a little uncomfortable as a kid, it took me years to understand why. I thought maybe it was just the ominously hypnotic sounding bells. Now I’m convinced it’s the subversive message. If you’re going to enjoy and understand the story’s message, you have to sidestep potential landmines. Which means that first, you must see them.

Once you see them, you can point them out to your children and talk about them. Comparing the movie and book helps to clarify the messages. When you see a message that’s good and virtuous contrasted with one that’s tainted and corrupting, you’re training the imagination to love the good. You’re reaching more toward a “pure imagination” in the sense of a morally undefiled one.

Bounded by virtuous understanding and wisdom, imagination is a gift. Instead of using it to invent new ways to degrade ourselves and suffer under the resulting consequences and guilt, we can use it as a tool for furthering the mandate from Eden to tend God’s good creation. Instead of wondering why our ideas continue to have consequences that outweigh their benefits, a trained imagination uses wisdom to evaluate whether an idea is based in goodness. If the root is good, the fruit should be also, allowing us to avoid many negative outcomes. This is why the stories we allow to shape us can be so important—and why parental involvement in the earliest stories our kids consume is essential.

In a surprising turn from Hollywood, the newest iteration of the famous chocolatier, played by Timothée Chalamet in the film Wonka, lands closer to the original work of Roald Dahl. In this new story based on Dahl’s character, Willy is a young visionary naively bringing his creations to market in the face of a monopolistic cartel of chocolate moguls.

It’s still a morality tale, though more focused on the virtues of hard work and determination in the face of cunning and greed. It deals with gluttony and temptation in clear and novel ways. The song “Sweet Tooth” is a brilliant portrayal of the struggle with temptation, the result pays off with Dahl’s style of humorous consequence. At the same time, the film celebrates goes beyond warnings to celebrate virtues like family ties (although with a sad but predictable lack for fathers), it pushes back on self-protective cynicism, encourages sacrificial charity, and paints marriage favorably. It’s not a perfect film. It has its own questionable moments, but it doesn’t nuke the moral message in one song like the 1971 version.

Perhaps most surprising is that they reuse “Pure Imagination” with a partial rewrite and a visual context that removes much of the ambiguity and easily reads as an imagination that is clean and without moral faults—the latter definition above.

They use the song as the resolution for the two primary character arcs. Most importantly, it begins with the fulfilment of the dream of Noodle, the young girl who helps Willy overcome the villains (played by Calah Lane). She grew up believing she was an orphan after being taken from her mother in infancy and sold into servitude. As mother and daughter embrace for the first time, Willy’s line in the song changes. Instead of the Edenic chocolate garden being paradise, paradise is now the love of family. Still not entirely true, but it’s a taste of truth in our mortal lives.

From there, the lyrics revert to the original, but the visual context transforms the meaning. Willy has used his creativity as the tool to tackle problems with hope and ingenuity for the entire movie. He used imagination to ease the suffering and improve the lives of those around him and to strive toward an honest dream. As he sings in the finale about “the world of his creation” and “being free if you truly wish to be”, we get a glimpse of his vision as a colorful factory springs up around him from the bones of an old ruin. (Incidentally, this is the type of freedom the Declaration of Independence calls “the pursuit of Happiness.” In the founding idea, “anything you want to” fell within a moral framework that would promote happiness through virtue and responsibility. They knew the truth that unrestrained liberty can only lead to misery.)

This is no longer a feast of gluttony attached to the song, but an ode to vision, ingenuity, and hard work. It is imagination bounded by the virtue of serving others with something exceptional. The “want to change the world” line shifts from implying that we can easily bend the world to meet our demands (a lie), to suggesting that each change in the world starts with something as simple as an idea (a truth that does not deny the difficulty of bringing it to fruition).

Viewed in contrast, the divergent messages from two versions of the same song show the power of imagination to shape a life.

The world wants children to grow up with complete and unbridled imagination. This inevitably makes them slaves to their basest whims and subjects them to all the consequences of vice. Most of our entertainment companies still promote this message.

Good parents want their children to grow up with virtuous imagination that truly frees them to pursue a good life and enjoy the blessings of liberty. That starts with the stories they consume and training them how to avoid the landmines of hidden messages, even within otherwise decent stories.

I’m seeing glimpses that more parents and more storytellers are starting to value the latter, which is hopeful for our culture and our children.

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Updates:

Speaking of training imagination, my upcoming children’s book, Dog Knights and the Orb of Power, is largely about using imagination to live out noble character traits. The main character pretends he’s a knight so that he can be brave and honorable.

It’s perfect for kids who are just starting to read on their own (Ages 7-10), or who still enjoy being read to (Ages 5-??). I released a preview with some activity pages. If you’re interested, you can download it here.

If you’re curious about a series that promotes virtues for kids through fun, adventurous stories, then please sign up to be notified when the campaign is live. We’re aiming for the campaign launch in February.

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In addition to Imago Dad, Brandon Wilborn writes speculative fiction with spiritual themes. Find Brandon’s previously released books at BrandonWilborn.com