The Twits – Film Review

Phil Johnston’s The Twits is an animated musical comedy that should, in theory, have been a perfect playground for anarchic imagination. Roald Dahl’s 1980 novel was a lean, nasty little morality tale about cruelty and comeuppance — a darkly funny fable that children adored precisely because it never pandered. Yet in expanding the book into a feature-length film, Johnston and his creative team transform it into a frantic, message-heavy, and emotionally cluttered adventure. Despite an energetic voice cast and some charming flourishes, The Twits stumbles under the weight of too many ideas, tonal confusion, and an overindulgent script that smothers Dahl’s dark humor with forced sentimentality and hollow musical numbers.

The film is framed through the perspective of Pippa the firefly (voiced with delicate whimsy by Emilia Clarke), who narrates a story to her son from within Mr. Twit’s unkempt beard. It’s a whimsical conceit that immediately establishes a playful tone, but from there, The Twits quickly collapses into a jumble of subplots. Johnston, who previously co-wrote Zootopia and Wreck-It Ralph, is no stranger to mixing manic comedy with moral commentary, but here his attempt to weave social satire, emotional drama, and slapstick chaos together leads to an experience that’s more exhausting than exhilarating.

The titular Twits — Margo Martindale and Johnny Vegas bringing gleeful nastiness to every cackle and snort — are the film’s main attraction. They’re foul, mean-spirited, and absolutely committed to being terrible to everyone around them. Unfortunately, the script doesn’t trust that to be entertaining on its own. Rather than focusing on their toxic relationship or their grotesque sense of glee, Johnston expands the world into a sprawling narrative about orphaned kids, magical creatures, and political corruption. The result is an overextended story that loses the sharp edge of Dahl’s original satire and replaces it with a clumsy morality play about empathy, found family, and civic responsibility.

While the Twits themselves are rendered with exaggerated, grotesque flair — their exaggerated animation recalling a blend of The Willoughbys and Hotel Transylvania — the supporting characters feel less vividly imagined. Beesha (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), the young protagonist, is written as a determined and big-hearted orphan who anchors the emotional arc of the film. Ramakrishnan’s performance is earnest and energetic, but her dialogue is saddled with heavy exposition and moral platitudes. Beesha’s friendship with Bubsy (Ryan Lopez) offers moments of genuine sweetness, yet their journey feels tacked on to a larger narrative that keeps changing focus.

The Muggle-Wumps, colorful monkey-like creatures voiced by Natalie Portman, Jason Mantzoukas, and Alan Tudyk, inject bursts of humor into the story, but their subplot — involving imprisonment, liberation, and reconciliation — feels borrowed from another movie entirely. The decision to make them musical commentators, complete with self-referential jokes and oddly contemporary slang, undermines the timeless feel that a Dahl adaptation usually strives for.

Even Mr. Napkin (Timothy Simons), a potentially funny character meant to serve as the story’s adult straight man, is trapped in a revolving door of tonal shifts — at times meek and sympathetic, at others wildly cartoonish. This unevenness in characterization reflects the movie’s broader identity crisis: The Twits can’t decide whether it wants to be a wickedly clever parody or a warmhearted family adventure, and it ends up being neither convincingly.

There’s no denying that The Twits is visually ambitious. The film’s animation blends stop-motion-inspired textures with computer-generated energy, giving everything a tactile, grimy quality reminiscent of Fantastic Mr. Fox — but louder, busier, and less refined. Twitlandia, the couple’s grotesque amusement park, is a design triumph of candy-colored vulgarity, filled with absurd rides and grimy details that perfectly capture the twisted aesthetic of Dahl’s world.

However, the visual creativity is often sabotaged by the editing and pacing. Scenes move so quickly that the eye barely has time to appreciate the details. Musical numbers, which should be moments of spectacle, feel rushed and forgettable. The songs themselves, co-written by Johnston and a team of pop composers, are serviceable but generic, leaning on repetitive choruses and shallow lyrics about friendship, bravery, and believing in yourself — all ideas that feel jarringly out of place in a story about gleeful wickedness.

Where the film shines is in its occasional bursts of visual wit — moments when the animation pauses long enough to linger on a sight gag, a twisted contraption, or a cleverly composed tableau. But these moments are fleeting, and they’re buried under layers of noise, both literal and figurative.

If there’s a reason to watch The Twits, it’s the voice performances. Margo Martindale and Johnny Vegas are pitch-perfect as the vile couple. Martindale, in particular, infuses Mrs. Twit with delicious venom, making every line drip with malicious delight. Vegas plays Mr. Twit as a slobbering buffoon, and his chemistry with Martindale captures the couple’s gleeful cruelty, even when the script softens their edges.

Emilia Clarke brings warmth and gentle humor to Pippa, while Natalie Portman’s tender, maternal tone as Mary Muggle-Wump lends the movie a fleeting emotional sincerity. Maitreyi Ramakrishnan continues to prove her versatility, imbuing Beesha with determination and compassion, though she’s frequently let down by a script that overexplains her feelings. Alan Tudyk, as usual, brings impeccable comedic timing to even the silliest lines.

Still, despite the cast’s best efforts, the dialogue is too clunky to fully sell the humor. Many jokes feel focus-tested or overexplained, lacking the mischievous simplicity that made Dahl’s humor so iconic. Even moments of slapstick violence, once a hallmark of his stories, are dulled by the film’s need to remain safely within the bounds of moral respectability.

By the time The Twits reaches its final act, it has twisted itself into knots of redemption arcs, action set pieces, and moral declarations. The movie wants to say something about community, kindness, and change — that even the cruelest people can do good. But in doing so, it betrays the unapologetic nastiness that defined Dahl’s original vision. The Twits’ comeuppance is softened, their misdeeds contextualized, and their chaos sanitized into something resembling Disney’s redemption formula.

It’s not that kindness doesn’t belong in a story like this — it’s that The Twits tries to smuggle it into a world built on meanness and mockery without reconciling the two tones. The result is moral confusion: a movie that wants to revel in bad behavior while also scolding it. Children might find the spectacle amusing, but older viewers will sense the creative tug-of-war underneath every scene.

The Twits is not without charm. Its animation has bursts of originality, the performances are strong, and the energy rarely dips. Yet all that energy feels wasted on a film that doesn’t trust the power of simplicity. Instead of embracing Dahl’s concise wickedness, Johnston’s adaptation tries to be everything at once — a musical, a fable, a political satire, a redemption story — and ends up as a noisy, incoherent mess.

The Twits offers flashes of wit and visual invention, but it’s ultimately undone by an overcrowded script, uneven tone, and a misunderstanding of what made Dahl’s story memorable in the first place. It’s a curious experiment that mistakes chaos for cleverness and loses its bite in the process.