Editor’s Note: This story contains spoilers for “The Twits,” now streaming on Netflix.
Roald Dahl made his career writing children’s books that dared to be mean (yes, sometimes in rather unfortunate ways). Across almost 20 novels, the British author spun fantastical tales with unsentimental wit, infusing his work with darkly morbid humor, blithe child endangerment, rotten and antagonistic adults, and a willingness to occasionally laugh at the misfortune of others. And no other work of Dahl’s gets more pitch-black than “The Twits,” a thin, acidic little text about deeply repugnant people.
There’s barely any story in the 1980 novel, which spends 87 pages following various misadventures of the titular couple from hell, two ugly and spiteful jerks who play cruel pranks on each other and everyone around them, saving their worst torment for a family of pet monkeys they hold captive. In the book’s final pages, the monkeys (“Muggle-Wumps”) flee to Africa, and the Twits suddenly catch the “Dreaded Shrinks,” compressing their bodies down until nothing remains. Their odd deaths, the final line informs us, were greeted with a “hooray” by everyone.
All of this makes “The Twits” a book that is, more or less, completely unadaptable in anything but the loosest sense for film. There have been attempts beforehand — John Cleese of all people was attached to write a screenplay in the early 2000s — but nothing materialized before now, with a “Twits” movie now on Netflix. It’s a film that, as director Phil Johnston describes it, treats the original book as something it’s “inspired by” rather than directly based upon.
“I had liked the book a lot and remembered it from when I was a kid as just pure anarchy, and I didn’t remember the story that much,” Johnston said in an interview with IndieWire. “When I decided to revisit it, I realized there isn’t a whole lot of story. That’s why I wanted to do it, because it was this clay that was there to be molded and used as a jumping-off point, rather than a direct adaptation.”
Johnston, best known for his work at Disney and directing “Ralph Breaks the Internet” for the studio, had a long road in production before “The Twits” saw the light of day. The project was originally conceived and produced as a TV show, with eight full episodes written and in storyboards. Then, in 2022, it got canned, with a movie taking its place. As Johnston described it, pretty much everything from the original series got killed in the transition beyond the broadest concepts; storylines from the show included Mr. Twit becoming President of the United States and a love story between a parasite in Mr. Twit’s beard and Mrs. Twit’s armpit.
In the final film, The Twits (voiced by an inspired duo of Margo Martindale and Johnny Vegas) are less the central characters than villains attempting to take over the dead-end small town of Triperot, while the Muggle-Wumps team up with original protagonists, a pair of spunky orphans, Beesha and Bubsy (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Ryan Lopez), to save the city. Complete with original songs (written by David Byrne), the final product has its idiosyncrasies — including an intentionally off-putting visual style Johnston describes as inspired by Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “Delicatessen” and “City of Lost Children” — but it follows a more conventional framework for an animated movie. Despite that, Johnston says he wanted the films to still feel in the same world as the Dahl books he read growing up.
“A big part of why I loved Dahl as a kid was because you felt kind of naughty reading the books because it was so unlike anything else. The world is mean. The villains are really mean. The satire has sharp teeth, and I think that tone is everything,” Johnston said. “I made three movies at Disney, and I wanted to do something that was completely other. That tone is so tricky. It’s a tonal tightrope throughout, creating absolutely repellent characters and not making them so disgusting that audiences are going to want to shy away.”
To expand upon the original book, Johnston had several ideas that would keep The Twits more clearly the main characters; a few scrapped scenes explored their origin story as kids (“part of me wishes they were in the movie now,” Johnston said), and one concept for the film was that it would be the pair’s love story, in which their love language is hatred. But he kept running into dead ends with these ideas, and eventually realized he needed less one-dimensional protagonists for the film, because of their inherently static nature.
“I kept running into walls with where they could go, and then I realized it’s because people like The Twits do not change. They cannot change, they will not change, and that’s the point of their existence in this film. So I needed someone else who would change,” Johnston said.
The film still retains Dahl’s signature lesson to children about the untrustworthiness of adults, although Johnston updates it for a modern day. About halfway through, “The Twits” takes a surprising turn into political commentary when the citizens of Triperot, desperate to latch on to something to save the dying town, rally behind the titular couple’s Twitlandia amusement park, giving them enough leverage to announce a mayoral bid in an attempt to gain complete power over the town. It’s a plot point that, without belaboring it, recalls recent elections in current U.S. history.
Johnston said the inspiration behind the plot point came from wanting to address the feeling that, since the original book was published, the world has gotten meaner and crueler. Specifically, he wanted to explore how children can navigate a landscape where evil and corruption get rewarded instead of punished by the adults around them.
“Adults, almost without exception, in Dahl’s work are mean, stupid, ineffectual, all three sometimes. I think that’s an empowering thing for kids to realize, that hey, ‘sometimes we do have the answers.’” Johnston said. “What I wanted to do with [the film] is take a look at how people can get lured in by disgusting playground taunts. The Twits are so gross and puerile and nasty in the book. And I was just thinking, ‘What if they rose to power in their town,’ and I used this as a way to deal with some of the things we’re looking at in the world right now.”
In contrast to the original book’s gleeful treatment of the main characters’ gruesome demise, the ultimate lesson of “The Twits” film is one about the importance of empathy. That results in an ending that does an almost entire 180-degree flip from its source material. The opening scene starts with The Twits glued to the floor upside down, facing imminent death from the Dreaded Shrinks, with the main plot told in flashback. Before the Twits shrink to nothing, however, Beesha — having initially left them for dead — feels remorse and frees them, before fleeing again to revitalize the town with the Muggle-Wumps. The Twits don’t have a change of heart and end up as outcasts once more, but the film frames Beesha’s mercy toward them in a positive light.
Johnston said that, once he settled on the plot for the film, he knew he couldn’t end it with the kids letting The Twits die. Although he wanted to keep some realistic bitterness in the film by keeping the Twits as nasty and as rotten as they were in the beginning, Johnston felt the ending struck a good balance between the book’s original tone and something decidedly more optimistic. He describes the final moral he wanted kids to take from it: While you don’t have to be naive, you also don’t have to stoop to the level of the worst people in the world.
“It’s kind of this idea of, if you’re a Twit, are you really winning? If you behave like a Twit, is that the right thing?” Johnston said. “There’s a line in [the film], ‘it’s so easy to hate someone else.’ But if that’s all we keep doing in the world, then I don’t know where we’re going to end up. [The ending] is a choice, and I guess that’s kind of how I want to live my life, because I found myself, as I was making this film, so many things in the world were making me so pissed off. And it just became, like, all right, well, if this is really wish fulfillment, let’s do something where we don’t end that way and hope our brighter angels will take over at some point.”
“The Twits” is now streaming on Netflix.