SPIDERY WRITING (Charlotte's Web (DVD))

Member Name: pinkpowderpuff

Product:	Charlotte's Web (DVD)
Date:	09/06/07 (153 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fantastic real life and animated animals, success of small things

Disadvantages: Over sweet story, too identifiable voice talents, realistic rat, flat characters

This film is based on the classic children’s book by E.B.White. I cannot say how closely this adaptation is to the original book, as, though it is stated as a classic, it seems to have completely passed me by during my life so far. I had absolutely no recollection of the story at all so I approached this film with completely fresh eyes and no preconceived ideas as to the story.

The introduction to the story shows how a pig is saved from early slaughter just after it was born. As the runt of the litter, the farmer was going to kill it until his daughter, Fern, wakes up in time to say she will look after it instead. The whole film from then on is structured around the story of the trying to save this pig, named Wilbur, from slaughter. The girl, Fern, made me think of my own daughter who is of a similar age. She has a great love of animals and would love to have such a pet to look after. This is more likely to end up as a dog rather than a pig but the basic premise is the same. As he grows and Fern starts to get into trouble concerning the ways she looks after him, he is moved to her uncle’s barn across the field. There, Wilbur makes new friends with the animals in the barn such as the sheep, geese, rat and most importantly the spider, called Charlotte. He is so nice with everyone and shows how easy it can be to make friends by being complementary to someone else. In this case, he keeps on saying “Great name!” when he meets someone new. He is such a kind, innocent animal that it is easy to see why he is so likeable. Unbeknownst to him, his friendly treatment of the supposedly horrible, ugly spider is the key to his very existence.

The story progresses to show small things can make big things happen. This shows, in parallel, that even children can do wonderful things and even small things can turn out wonderful later. If Fern hadn’t woken up in the night that Wilbur was born, he would have died there and then and all the subsequent events would not have happened. Equally the amazing efforts of Charlotte show how seemingly insignificant members of a group can still make a significant contribution. Small things can have big effects. It also shows the positive effects of friendship and its involvement in all matters including, and especially, life and death.

Several famous actors speak the voices of the animals. I found this very distracting, especially at first. Some were instantly recognisable as someone that was known to me but not identifiable and I was left wondering who they were rather than following the story. Julia Roberts’s voice was instantly recognisable as Charlotte so this was no distraction. However, as it is also so clearly she, then it rather detracted from the character of Charlotte because I kept visualising Julia. John Cleese plays the head sheep but I couldn’t place him for a bit, which was frustrating and hence, distracting. Then I kept picturing him instead of the sheep. Other famous voices that I couldn’t quite recognise were Oprah Winfrey as a goose and Kathy Bates as a cow. As they were well known to me, I was also trying to think who the others were who were playing the horse, the rat, the other goose and the other cow but I couldn’t, as I am not familiar with those actors.

The real life actors were led by Dakota Fanning, who played Fern. I thought she was amazing in the Science Fiction series, “Taken”, and she has appeared in so many other roles already for an actress so young. I found that she gave a lovely, natural and truthful performance that made her character highly believable and sympathetic.
I didn’t recognise anyone else but they gave good performances in my opinion. There was also a narrator, which made a clear connection to the book. I didn’t think this was done well at all. It gave it an even more saccharine feel than it already had. The triumph over disaster always seemed inevitable and the voice over made it seem just too sweet.

The performances of the animals were spectacular. The training of the animals must have been so good and the blending in with animatronics and animation was seamless. The rat was pure animation but my partner believed that a real rat had been used; it looked so realistic. It was truly brilliant particularly as it went into its lair. It looked incredibly lifelike, in many ways too lifelike. Cartoon mice and rats are fine to look at as they don’t really look like the real things but real looking-rats are another matter. I don’t want to look at a real rat particularly as it looks so disgusting, especially when it was moving. It was also odd how none of the humans featured in the film either seemed to not notice it or to not be bothered by it. However, as a character, I must say it was the most rounded and interesting one in the film. At least there was an element of light and shade, which was missing from just about everything else.

The other animals were like a sideshow. They didn’t add anything to the story and appeared just to be for comic effect. The sheep were quite funny as stereotypical followers of anything or anyone. The big horse was scared of little spiders to, I suppose, again emphasise small taking on big. However, he was my son’s favourite character but because he says he likes horses it implied he would have liked him regardless. The cows and geese made a good couple of double acts with some witty banter between themselves that was quite amusing in places but overall they were one-dimensional. Charlotte the spider was beautifully animated and portrayed in terms of her movements. Perhaps they won’t get such a bad rap from those who have seen the film. Having said that, my daughter says she is still not keen on spiders so that hope is a forlorn one perhaps.

EXTRAS

The DVD comes with numerous “special features”.
· Commentary. There are two of these where you can watch the film accompanied by the filmmaker describing various things such as what was going on or why or how they did so and so. Here are two versions of this from different people. Since I am not too interested, I do not have much comment. Even if you are, it is something you would listen to only once.
· Making Some Movie. This is a typical description of the making of the film with some behind-the-scenes footage showing how wonderful everything was and how everyone had so much fun making it. It was broken up into headings using “Some xxx”, which is plagiarising an iconic line from the movie.
· Some Voices. This puts faces to the voices of the animal characters. Since most were obvious or well known, there wasn’t much to be got out of this. The most interesting was the sight of the boy, Dominic Scott Kay, who played Wilbur.
· Flaka’s Pig Tales. This was directly aimed at kids with some interesting knowledge thrown in for those who could read the captions. There was, for instance, a follow on from Charlotte’s “Salutations!” in the movie to how to say “Hello” in different languages. It was incongruous to have a Spanish flag stuck in Mexico but they were trying to say Spanish-speaking countries in general and they had used Europe too much already I suppose. There were also some riddles and talk about the animals that kids might enjoy and learn from.
· How Did They Do That? This showed some of the animals being trained. This was mildly interesting though slightly irritating. This was because of the stress continually made on how kind they were to all the animals with positive treats offered to the animals when they did something as required. Heaven forbid them admitting to doing anything bad to an animal.
· What Made A Classic? This describes the origin of the book by describing the author E.B.White having a farm in Maine in the North East of U.S.A. and the idyllic, rural life there in the middle of the last century.
· Where Are They Now? This was an interesting question but it was not relating to the actors and their subsequent work. This was to do with the pigs featured in the film. They used 42 pigs to cover the different ages of Wilbur as he grew up in the film. You might wonder if they suffered the same fate as was expected of Wilbur. However, you can breathe a sigh of relief, as this was not the case. They were all found homes for life in Australia where the filming was done. It was funny to see the baby pigs from the film now grown into some truly huge, adult pigs.
· Two Music Videos. These are not what I find interesting so I didn’t really watch them to have any useful comment to make. OK, I will. Boring!
· A Day at the Fair. This was a collection of stills from the filming at the fair and it was of no use whatsoever unless perhaps you are a huge fan of Dakota Fanning.
· Farm Photo Album. This was similar to the above except centred on the farm animals. My DVD got stuck at this point and wouldn’t respond to the menu button and I had to stop completely and start again. From what I saw they were just pictures so not that interesting.
· Gag reel. I was expecting some hilarious outtakes, as there must have been so many happening in such a production. However, it looks like I was wrong because there wasn’t much on the evidence shown here.
· Deleted scenes. There is an option to watch about eight deleted scenes with or without a filmmaker commentary. I found it more interesting with to get the explanation of the reason for the deletion. It seems that a dog was left out because he couldn’t be trained well enough, which seemed a bit strange, as above they described how brilliant the trainers were!

It was a nice film to watch. However, I was disappointed in the general story after I had been hyped up to its classic tale. The repeating device used by Charlotte and the human reaction to it did not seem to me to be realistic in context and required a new idea. The only subplot was that concerning the dumb crows and that seemed merely a device to involve them with the rat later in the story. The potential of the story of Fern and the boy from school was hardly touched upon and their developing friendship was under explored. Most of the other characters were also rather lacking in roundedness and depth. The rat was by far the most interesting character but because of what it is, I didn’t want it to be. All in all, it is a pleasant family film with fantastic actions by the animals. The conclusion is rather good though and poignantly done, which does always help improve the overall feel of the movie.

Summary: A pig trying to survive in this live action / animated family movie