The same applies to Spielberg’s adaptation of Dahl’s novel. What’s immediately obvious is that the film is a significant technical accomplishment: the infinitesimally detailed motion-capture technology alone, which stretches Rylance’s human performance to gargantuan proportions, is river-straddling bounds beyond anything that’s come before it. (His hands look warm and weathered, and his eyes – there’s no other way to put it – just shine with life.)

But as the film plays, the technology itself just melts away. You’re watching a girl and a giant explore a landscape of astonishments – and while the note-perfect script, written by the late Melissa Matheson (who also scripted E.T.), treats Dahl’s words with radiant respect, it also subtly reworks them to make the story cinematic to its soul.

The part in which the BFG and Sophie meet the Queen herself (a superb Penelope Wilton) is mostly taken up with the consumption of the BFG’s giant-sized breakfast: bales of toast, a punchbowl of coffee, slippery heaps of fried eggs on silver trays. But Spielberg’s camera watches the meal with the tireless fascination of a three-year-old: like the rest of the film it’s a tactile, playful, imagination-sparking sequence, enriched by a persuasive and elegant use of 3D.