In the first full trailer for Disney’s The BFG — which is a promising film, given that it’s a Stephen Spielberg-directed adaptation of one of Roald Dahl’s most beloved books — I’d say that the biggest thing we learn about the film is: one character is little; another character is big. When you juxtapose them, the littler one looks littler, and the big one looks bigger. I hope your mind isn’t too blown.
And yet, somehow, it’s still pretty damn wondrous, and will still probably make you cry a bit. And the fact that the completely humongous character — the titular Big Friendly Giant — is 2016 Oscar Winner Mark Rylance is especially intriguing.
The film follows the story of a 10 year old orphan named Sophie (Ruby Barnhill), who gets scooped up by a giant/resident of Giant Country. Though initially she’s fearful about the whole being-kidnapped-by-a-giant thing, the BFG’s acronymic name doesn’t lie, and he shows her some of the wonders of his life (like a place where dreams are harvested to send to children) and Giant Country. But his compatriots, like Bloodbottler — played by Bill Hader, and Fleshlumpeater — played by Jemaine Clement — are far less friendly giants than he is, and eventually Sophie and the BFG have to enlist the help of the Queen to help them fight the man-eating giants that threaten the human world.
Stephen Spielberg took to Facebook earlier to introduce the trailer for the film, which will be released on July 1, 2016. “Walt Disney is probably the grandfather of the combinations of darkness and light as a storyteller,” he says. “And Roald Dahl…shares that legacy…I’m at a point in my career where I’ve been steeped in stories that used history to inform us…But thank goodness I got the chance to liberate myself from the kind of box that history puts you in,” he says, referencing the likes of Bridge of Spies, Lincoln and Amistad, and saying this has given him the chance to “free [his] imagination.
Watch the trailer:
Here’s Spielberg’s introduction on Facebook: