Willy Wonka
| Willy Wonka | |
|---|---|
| First appearance | Charlie and the Chocolate Factory |
| Created by | Roald Dahl |
| Portrayed by |
Gene Wilder (1971) Johnny Depp (2005) |
| Voiced by |
Maurice LaMarche (commercials) James Arnold Taylor (video game) |
Willy Wonka is a character in Roald Dahl's 1964 children's novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, its sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, and the film adaptations of these books that followed.
The book and the film adaptations both vividly depict an odd Wonka, a phoenix-like man arising from his creative and strange genius. He bewilders the other characters with his antics, but Charlie enjoys Wonka's behaviour. In the 2005 film adaptation, Willy Wonka's behaviour is viewed more as a sympathetic character flaw.
Wonka's reasons for giving away his factory in the books are revealed to be because he has no living relatives and is getting too old to keep running it. In the 1971 film adaptation, Wonka gives it to Charlie because he couldn't trust it with an adult who would likely change and ruin the wonder of his life's work so they could do it "their way", not his. Wonka tells Charlie he "can't go on forever", so he wanted to find an honest child to whom he could entrust his candy making secrets, and properly take care of his beloved factory working friends, the Oompa-Loompas, whom he rescued from a violently dangerous and terrible country called "Loompaland," where he thought they would surely go extinct. In the 2005 film adaption, Wonka tells Charlie that one day while getting his hair cut, he found grey hair and realized he, having no family, needed to find an heir. This is later revealed to be somewhat of a lie, as Charlie later discovers Willy has an estranged father with whom he has bad blood, which causes him great mental anguish and flashbacks that happen increasingly by the day. He decides to help the disturbed Willy finally confront, and ultimately, reunite with his estranged father, Dr. Wilbur Wonka, DDS, whose overbearing attempts at protecting his son's teeth, going so far as to throw in the fireplace any candies he brings home, drove Willy to run away. But, missing his train, he comes home to find the entire house is gone, seeming to have been perfectly removed from the complex it was a section of. Charlie tracks down the dentist's address, and upon this joyous, though at first awkward, reunion with his father, Willy immediately and happily allows Charlie's family to move in to the factory with the pair, going so far as to have their house placed in his famous chocolate room, having overcome his fear of parents. He used to not even be able to say the word "parents" without slightly panicking, stuttering and gagging upon even attempting to utter the first syllable, causing the parents on the tour that day to have to say it for him, or to abandon the word completely, mid-sentence.
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