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I wasn’t going to post on this film, but after Cliff shared the tragedy of taking his family to see Happy Feet, I thought I would review another Hollywood “family” feature, one that is truly a entertaining, family film.

First, forget Leonardo DiCaprio, Forest Whitaker, Will Smith, or any of the other names being mentioned for Best Actor in next year’s Oscar race. The award goes, hands down, to the pigs that played Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web. Especially the one who won “the award”. With one look of his big, black eyes, he made me smile and cry more than any human actor did this entire year.

If you are not familiar with the story of Charlotte’s Web, it is a classic children’s book by E.B. White about a girl who saves the runt of a pig litter, who she names Wilbur, to raise as her own. She is forced to give Wilbur away when her farmer parents become concerned about her attachment to him. He is slated to become Christmas dinner for her extended family, but through the wit of Charlotte A. Cavatica, the web-spinning spider extraordinaire, he is offered a chance to escape the smokehouse that is his destiny.

This was one of my favourite books/movies as a child, and for American children (if they are lucky), this story is the first introduction to the cycle of life and death - not the glossed-over circle-of-life Disneyfied version the last generation of children is familiar with, but an honest, true, and age appropriate introduction to the realities of life, death, and farming, told through the stories of the goose who sits on her eggs, only to have one not hatch and have the rest sold as gooslings, the horse who provides back-breaking labour to the Zuckerman family, and the cows who barely realize that they may too someday grace a family’s dinner table.

I had some reservations about watching the movie because how do you remake a classic animated film based on one of the greatest children’s books of all time? Especially using live actors? And, what is the point of doing so? Well, I don’t know what the point is, but this is a remake worth watching.

One would assume two hours of live action/animated cows, sheep, pigs, horses, crows, etc. would be annoying, but the animation team did a great job of making the animals engaging, entertaining, and just the right amount of cute. In fact, the only annoying animal was Charlotte the spider – anthropomorphizing her by giving her large, cute brown eyes was an easy way to make her more palatable to audience members who may not like spiders, but this was easily overlooked by looking at some of her other sets of normal eyes. The animation was great, and in some scenes, such as the flight of Charlotte’s children when they are born, almost magical. The scenes of Charlotte spinning her web were fascinating, and I am still wondering if they were done with animation or CGI. I kept trying to compare the film to the original, but was unable to do so because this film stands alone as a good film.

In fact, in some ways this film works better than the original. This is partly because of Dakota Fanning, who is probably the best child actor working in America today. The rest of the cast is stellar. Stellar because the filmmakers made a brave decision to tell the story without letting the animation or the acting overpower it. There are no over the top histrionics from the farm animals, and there could have been considering some of the animals were voiced by the likes of Cedric the Entertainer, John Cleese and Andre Benjamin. Steve Buscemi, voicing Templeton the rat, could have gone the in-your-face route like his predecessor Paul Lynde, but played the most flamboyant character in the film straight, making the role as poignant as it was in the book. I am no fan of Julia Roberts, but her voicing of Charlotte was subdued and calm, just as a mother’s voice should be. Also, by making the movie live instead of animated, the transformation of Fern (Dakota Fanning) from introverted girl to a child experiencing her first crush was a pleasure to see, and one of the most honest portrayals of a first crush shown in a movie I can remember for quite some time.

From a technical standpoint, I was also fascinated with how the director and editors handled the scene changes. Most of the scenes flowed into the next, and in one of my favourite scene changes I have seen in some time a camera shot of the actors outside of Wilbur’s pig pen bled into a street scene in the local town so flawlessly I giggled….

It is probably not fair to compare this remake with the original, but when you remake a classic film, you open yourself up for criticism. When you make a story based on one of the most popular children’s books of all time, you also invite criticism. This movie didn’t move me as much as the original - but that is not a fair assessment as I haven’t seen the original in 20 years or so. What the movie did do is stick very closely to the book, and in doing so create a new family film classic.

So, if during this holiday season you want to take the family to see great family entertainment without wasting $50 on Happy Feet, then Charlotte’s Web should be the movie on the top of the list!

Oh yeah, the kids I took to see it loved it as well…