‘The Twits’ Review: Netflix’s Animated Roald Dahl Adaptation Goes From Grossly Generic to Surprisingly Political

While some young Roald Dahl fans, like me, preferred the cozy creepiness of The Witches or the weird whimsy of James and the Giant Peach, other readers were decidedly Twits kids. They liked that novel’s gross-out stuff about glass eyes placed at the bottom of beer glasses, worms swapped in for spaghetti, and so on. The very conception of the book, from 1980, was premised on revulsion: It was written mostly because Dahl wanted to talk about how much he hated beards (one of his more innocuous prejudices, it turns out.) As a child, I saw the icky appeal of it all, but thought The Twits — about a cruel and slovenly married couple and a family of magical monkeys trying to escape their imprisonment — a little too sordid to be considered a classic on the level of, say, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The Twits has been adapted for the stage in the past,…