This blog probably isn’t really going away forever. I’ll probably revive it in some form or do some new posts in the future. But I won’t be doing regular posts. This really does feel like the end of an era for me, so I decided to do something special: A recommended reading list of my favorite source materials for the adaptations about which I’ve blogged (in, more or less, the order I’ve blogged about them.)

By the way, the books that didn’t make the list are not one’s I dislike. Really, every adaptation about which I’ve blogged is based on something I consider to be at least OK. Who am I to say that Emma or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are not great in their own ways? But this list is for what I consider the creme de la creme. It’s also worth noting that these books were written by different authors with different worldviews and I’m including them based on artistry (and, I’ll admit, nostalgia), so don’t assume they all reflect my own worldview.

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.

This is a book where I’m inclined to recommend you read an abridged version first and then tackle the whole doorstopper if you love the material. However, there’s no abridgment that specifically cuts and retains the same the parts that I would. So I guess what I really recommend is that you get an unabridged copy, but feel free to skim when you feel like it. I warn you though that the final chapter in the Waterloo section has a scene that’s critical to understanding the rest of the plot. For the record, there are some great quotes hidden in Victor’s Hugo infamous digressions in this book anyway.

I’m in love with the poetic style of Charles Wilbour’s English translation. If you insist on one that’s more accessible to modern readers though, Christine Donougher’s seems to be the best and, to its credit, it translates all the songs and poems, which Wilbour’s doesn’t, and handles some of the puns and the slang better.

Les Misérables by Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schonberg and Herbert Kretzmer

Since the 2012 movie is technically an adaptation of the both the book and the stage musical, why don’t you read the libretto while you’re at it? It’s available online.

Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers

Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie

Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie

J. M. Barrie wrote Peter Pan as both a stage play and a novel. (The latter was originally titled Peter and Wendy, but most editions today just call themselves Peter Pan.) The adaptations I’ve covered typically use elements of both and they’re both well worth reading, so I’m including both on this list.

If you check out the play’s script, try to get your hands on a copy of Peter Pan and Other Plays which features three others by J. M. Barrie. Two of them, The Admirable Crichton and What Every Woman Knows are just as great. The other, Mary Rose, is fine. Of course, getting The Complete Plays is ideal but difficult.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

There are plenty of great English translations of Grimm out there. I personally recommend the one by Jack Zipes, which feels very modern but, in his own words, also “retains an eighteenth-century flavor.”

The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault

Many of Perrault’s tales, such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood, have counterparts in the collection of Brothers Grimm. In some ways, his versions are more fun. In other ways, they’re less fun. Perrault includes more humorous touches in otherwise serious stories, such as Sleeping Beauty’s prince refraining from mentioning that “she was dressed a little like his grandmother.” But they’re also less fast-paced and zippy. Nevertheless, both had a huge impact on our idea of a fairy tale.

I recommend the recent English translation by Alex Lubertozzi, Tales of Times Past: The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault.

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

I’ll admit that the beginning of this novel is rather slow paced. You can easily skip the section from Chapter One about the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company. And the stories of The Five Sisters of York and The Baron of Grogzwig in Chapter Six aren’t really necessary either, though they’re well written. But if you can handle the longer and more digressive Les Misérables, this should be a snap. Once the main characters are established, it becomes, for me, the most fun of any of Dickens’s books.

The Mary Poppins books by P. L. Travers

The Personal History, Experiences and Observations of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz

Fantagraphics has released the entire long running comic strip in a series of books. Or you could read the whole thing online at the Peanuts Wiki.

A Christmas Carol in Prose by Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist or The Parish Boy’s Progress by Charles Dickens

The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

Nowadays, these books are numbered in, more or less, the order the stories take place with The Magician’s Nephew being listed as No. 1 and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as No. 2. The reasoning behind this was the author saying he thought it made more sense to read them in this order rather than the one in which they were published. However, the fan consensus, with which I heartily agree, is that it’s better to experience them in publication order or at least read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe before The Magician’s Nephew. The latter really works best as a prequel.

The Miss Bianca books by Margery Sharp

OK, these books aren’t quite as great as the others on this list, not as consistently great anyway. Around the fourth or fifth books, the plots start to get gradually dumber and less satisfying. But at their best, they’re so charming and they’re so little known, that I had to give them a shoutout here. (I would have done it when I made my list of obscurities, but I hadn’t blogged about the Disney adaptation then.)

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Babara Robinson

Robinson wrote two companion novellas to this one, The Best School Year Ever and The Best Halloween Ever. Neither is as interesting as The Best Christmas Pageant, but both are fun.

Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand

As far as English translations go, I recommend the one by Brian Hooker or nothing. It’s possible some others are closer to Edmond Rostand’s intent but if so, Hooker must have improved upon Rostand.

The God Beneath the Sea by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen

OK, so I haven’t blogged about adaptations of this book or the following two, but I mentioned them in my post about posts I didn’t do and they’re awesome.

The Golden Shadow by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen

Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C. S. Lewis

The Winnie-the-Pooh books by A. A. Milne

The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo

Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures by Kate DiCamillo

The Alice books by Lewis Carroll

Nowadays I don’t reread these as often as I did when I was a kid. But I feel like I have to include them because otherwise I’d be implying that Peter Pan and Winnie-the-Pooh are better than Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and I am not prepared to make that statement.

Well, there you go. That should be enough reading material to keep someone busy for a long time. I see that most of the books on this list for kids are fantasies of some sort and most of the books for adults are melodramas of some sort. My friends probably could have predicted that.

Posted on October 25, 2025 by stationmaster | 1 Comment

The Best Version of War Horse

Posted on October 11, 2025 by stationmaster

I’d like to dedicate this post to my late landlord who recommended the movie to my family.

My first “real” blog post[1]I also did an introductory post for this blog that has mysteriously disappeared. Sometimes the ways of WordPress are beyond me. was about a movie based on a play that was based on a book. Actually, the movie was something of an adaptation of both the play and the book, reinstating elements from the latter that had been cut from the former. This blog post will probably be my last “real” one[2]I’ll also be doing a farewell post of sorts., at least for a long time, so I’d like to close with something similar.

It occurs to me that if you’re a fan of the theatre, you’re probably not a big fan of The Adaptation Station.com. I’ve gone on record as loving the 2012 movie Les Misérables more than I love the stage play, though I’m a fan of both, since I believe it does a better job of telling the story. And while I consider the original stage play Into the Woods better written than the 2014 movie[3]Though both were written by James Lapine., I’d rather rewatch the movie that the 1999 filmed production-ProShot, I believe, is the technical term-of the play with the original Broadway cast since, with the exception of Meryl Streep vs. Bernadette Peters, I enjoy the movie actors’ performances more. In my defense, I did write a very positive post about the 2000 ProShot of the Peter Pan musical-well, the part of the post about the 2000 ProShot was very positive, not so much the parts about the 1960 and 2014 versions.[4]I’d also probably recommend the 1999 ProShot of Oklahoma! over the 1955 movie. Theatre fans should appreciate that.

It’s probably not a surprise then that I like the 2011 movie War Horse better than Nick Stafford’s award-winning stage play. What may be a surprise to people who know me well is that I even like it better than the original book by acclaimed children’s author Michael Morpurgo. Coming from a book lover like me, that’s a real compliment.

I should stress though that each telling of the story has its charms. I like that the character of Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan in the movie), alcoholic father to Albert (Jeremy Irvine) the English farm boy who is the titular horse’s original owner[5]Well, his first owner to be a real character in the story anyway. Technically, he must have been owned by someone else before being auctioned off at the beginning., has a character arc in the book. In the play, he remains unsympathetic throughout despite Albert’s mother Rose (Emily Watson)’s speech in his defense. In the movie, he’s sympathetic throughout despite all the decisions he makes that hurt his family. In the book, he starts out as a negative figure but is implied to have redeemed himself by the end.[6]Of course, since the entire book is told from the horse’s perspective, we barely see any of this character arc, but I like the idea. The book’s version of the story is probably the one which makes the impossible plot elements, like Joey a half-thoroughbred being able to plough a field, plausible.[7]The steed has many different owners and names over the course of the story but I’m calling him Joey because that’s the one he gets at the beginning even though it’s weird for me … Continue reading While all three versions are about the horrors of World War I, the stage play is probably the darkest and grittiest if that’s what you like. The play’s elaborate horse puppets are also able to act and create characters in a way that even the most well-trained film horses can’t and they’re just some of many great stage effects the play boasts.

So why do I like the movie best? Well, I love the soundtrack by John Williams. For all the iconic scores he’s composed, I actually find this one to be the most beautiful. But the stage play also makes good use of music and it’s not fair to hold it against a book that it doesn’t have any. The movie’s first act, which takes place in the countryside of Devon, boasts some beautiful scenery. But it’s also not fair to criticize a stage bound for its lack of realistic scenery and readers of the book can imagine the setting to be as beautiful as they wish.

Casting Jeremy Irvine as Albert in the movie, even though he wasn’t a big-name star at the time, was a very wise choice. A big-name star might have felt it was beneath him to direct serious speeches to a horse. But Irvine, likely because he was so thrilled to be working under Steven Spielberg at this early point in his career, never condescends to the material and completely sells his character and his bond with Joey. If Albert hadn’t been well cast, the movie-well, it might not have been entirely doomed from the start. The story focuses on whoever happens to own Joey, which includes several characters of various nationalities over the course of the war. But the movie would have had to work harder to gain my attention if Albert weren’t convincing and endearing right from the start. Still, there have also been many fine actors who have portrayed Albert onstage and reading the book, you can imagine Albert as well as you wish, so that’s not a great justification for favoring the film either.

I don’t know why he’s putting his face so close to the horse’s. I’m pretty sure that would freak it out in real life.

No, I think the reason I consider the movie adaptation of War Horse the best version is because of the script by Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) and Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral.) For example, there’s the way it writes the character of Emilie (Celine Buckens), the French girl who cares for Joey during the middle part of the story. In the book and the play, she’s mostly just cute. The movie ages her up a bit and makes her endearingly sassy too. “I was in love with a boy called Francois who had your lovely eyes,” she confides in Joey in one scene. “Unfortunately, he was in love with a girl called Marie who had your teeth. She fell for a boy called Claude who broke my heart and who I intend to marry one day.” You’ve got to love her!

While Emilie’s section of the movie does provide a nice break from the story’s general gloom and doom, more so than it does in the book or the play, it still has some well-done sad moments related to the Emilie’s physical frailty and the absence of her parents.[8]It is sort of annoying that the film never explains exactly what happened to her parents though it teases the question. Oh well. Nothing’s perfect.

Warning: If you’re not familiar with the story, the rest of this post is chock full of spoilers. The movie also has the best written version of the climax[9]Well, it’s the climax in the play and the film. You could argue it’s a bit before the climax in the book. in which Joey is tangled up in barbed wire in No Man’s Land and two soldiers from opposite sides, a Welshman and a German, work together to help him. Here’s how Morpurgo portrays their meeting.

“Now what do we do?” (the Welshman) said, walking toward us and looking at the German who stood head and shoulders above him. “There’s two of us here and one horse to split between us. ‘Course King Solomon had the answer, didn’t he? But it’s not very practical in this case, is it? And what’s worse, I can’t speak a word of German, and I can see you don’t understand what the hell I’m talking about, can you? Oh, hell, I should never have come out here, I knew I shouldn’t. Can’t think what came over me and all for a muddy old horse too.”

“But I can, I can speak a little bad English,” said the older man… “I speak only a little English-like a schoolboy-but it’s enough, I think for us.” And even as he spoke, I felt a rope slip slowly around my neck and tighten. “As for our other problem since I have been here the first, then the horse is mine. Fair, no? Like your cricket?”

“Cricket! Cricket!” said the young man. “Who ever heard of that barbarous game in Wales? That’s a game for the rotten English. Rugby that’s my game and that’s not a game. That’s a religion, that is-where I come from. I played before the war stopped me and in Waldes we say that a loose ball is our ball.”

“Sorry?” said the German, his eyebrows furrowed with concern. “I cannot understand what you mean by this.”

“Doesn’t matter. Not important, not anymore. We could have settled all this peaceful like-the, the war, I mean-and I’d be back in my valley, and you’d be back in yours. Still, it’s not your fault, I don’t suppose. Nor mine, neither come to that.”

As you can see, the two men speak in the same friendly/confessional tone that all of Joey’s owners in the book speak when they confide in him. (Part of the inspiration for War Horse came when Michael Morpurgo and his wife were part of a charity that allowed urban children to spend some time on farms, and he overheard a troubled boy with a stammer speaking fluently in private to a horse.) What works well in that context doesn’t work as well in this one. Anyway, after they agree to flip a coin for the horse and the Welshman wins, the scene concludes in much the same vein.

“In an hour, maybe, or two,” (the German) said, “we will be trying our best again each other to kill. God only knows why we do it, and I think He has maybe forgotten why. Goodbye, Welshman. We have shown them, haven’t we? We have shown them that any problem can be solved between two people if only they can trust each other. That is all it needs, no?”

The little Welshman shook his head in disbelief as he took the rope. “I think if they would let you and me have an hour or two out here together, we could sort out this whole wretched mess. There would be no more weeping widows and crying children in my valley and no more in yours. If worse came to worst, we could decide it all on the flip of a coin, couldn’t we?”

“If we did,” said the German with a chuckle, “If we did it that way, then it would be our turn to win. And maybe your Lloyd George would not like that.” And he put he put on hands on the Welshamn’s shoulders for a moment. “Take care, my friend, and good luck. Auf Wiedersehen.”

The play, in my opinion, improves upon this by having the German unable to speak English and the two of them communicate by pantomime. This is entertaining and moving in performance, but the movie’s version really takes the cake if you ask me.[10]Maybe I just haven’t seen the right productions of the play. Colin (Toby Kebbell), a Geordie, by the way, rather than a Welshman, arrives long before Peter (Hinnerk Schonemann) the German but realizes too late he hasn’t brought any tools to free Joey from the barbed wire. Suddenly Peter appears before him, offering wire cutters. Unlike in the book, where the two become friends almost immediately, there’s a bit of initial tension in the air. But it quickly dissipates as they work together to free the horse without hurting it more.

Colin: You speak good English.
Peter: I speak English well.

Instead of unburdening their souls to each other all at once this is how they talk.

Colin: So how’s things in yonder trench?
Peter: Delightful. We read, we knit sweaters, and we train our rats to perform circus tricks.
Colin: Well, if you ever need any more rats, we can send some of ours over. ‘Cause we’ve more than we need, strictly speaking. Besides they scare off all the pretty girls.
Peter: Our girls aren’t afraid of rats.
Colin: Big strapping German girls, eh? The kind what give robust massages?
Peter: Every Thursday and they bring rum cake on your birthday.

This banter, in which more is unsaid than said, feels a lot more believable than the touchy-feely dialogue Morpurgo gives these characters. I wouldn’t say their conversation in the book couldn’t have happened in real life. But in addition to being funnier, the movie’s feels more like real life to me, making it more touching.

The tension between the two has mostly dropped but it resurfaces briefly and ultimately harmlessly when the time comes to decide with whom Joey goes.

Peter: Since my side supplied the cutters, the horse is mine. This is fair, no?
Colin: In a pig’s eye! He’s English, plain to see.
Peter: Oh, you mean because he’s so filthy?
Colin: Because he’s so smart! And you’re none too clean yourself.

Only after they decide to whom Joey belongs with a coin flip, do they acknowledge that their job is to try to kill each other and that each could be killed at any moment.

Colin: Gone quiet now, hasn’t it?
Peter: Yes, but wait half an hour and we’ll be shooting again.
Colin: I’m a terrible shot, Pete. Don’t believe I’ll ever hit the target.

Compared to this, their dialogue in the book feels heavy handed and, honestly, clunky. The movie trusts the viewers to see the antiwar message for themselves without having the characters ask aloud why they can’t just be friends or why disagreements between nations can’t be resolved as peacefully as this one.[11]In the book’s defense, it was narrated by a horse who wouldn’t be thinking about such things. Maybe under that circumstance, Morpurgo felt having the characters spell it out was the only … Continue reading

While the resolution of the story is pretty much the same in each version[12]Although there is a subplot from the book that was sadly cut from the play but happily reinstated by the film, I enjoy the way the movie handles it the most. Famously, after the first World War, many men were left cynical and disillusioned and what makes the character of Albert so appealing is his childlike innocence. We don’t want him to end the story cynical and disillusioned, but it wouldn’t be credible for him to emerge from the War unchanged. The movie resolves this beautifully in the last speech we hear him give to Joey, when it looks like the horse will be going home with someone else. “Don’t be worried, boy, when I go,” he says. “I won’t worry over you none. Hey, I found you, didn’t I? And you found me. And we’ll both know we made it through.” On the one hand, Albert is being mature as he hasn’t gotten his way but is being calm about it anyway. On the other hand, he’s talking to a horse like it understands him, showing he’s still the same old Albert. It’s a highly satisfying ending. And hopefully that’s a satisfying ending to my blog too.

References

References
↑1 I also did an introductory post for this blog that has mysteriously disappeared. Sometimes the ways of WordPress are beyond me.
↑2 I’ll also be doing a farewell post of sorts.
↑3 Though both were written by James Lapine.
↑4 I’d also probably recommend the 1999 ProShot of Oklahoma! over the 1955 movie. Theatre fans should appreciate that.
↑5 Well, his first owner to be a real character in the story anyway. Technically, he must have been owned by someone else before being auctioned off at the beginning.
↑6 Of course, since the entire book is told from the horse’s perspective, we barely see any of this character arc, but I like the idea.
↑7 The steed has many different owners and names over the course of the story but I’m calling him Joey because that’s the one he gets at the beginning even though it’s weird for me since I have a cousin who goes by Joey.
↑8 It is sort of annoying that the film never explains exactly what happened to her parents though it teases the question. Oh well. Nothing’s perfect.
↑9 Well, it’s the climax in the play and the film. You could argue it’s a bit before the climax in the book.
↑10 Maybe I just haven’t seen the right productions of the play.
↑11 In the book’s defense, it was narrated by a horse who wouldn’t be thinking about such things. Maybe under that circumstance, Morpurgo felt having the characters spell it out was the only way he could convey the message.
↑12 Although there is a subplot from the book that was sadly cut from the play but happily reinstated by the film
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Oliver Twist Without Coincidences?

Posted on September 26, 2025 by stationmaster

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens is a book I love but I typically don’t love adaptations of it. The shorter ones, such as the musical Oliver! or the 2005 movie, cut the mysterious Monks, one of my favorite villains in the story.[1]For the record, that’s not a universal taste. Some critics dislike the melodramatic Monks and prefer the book’s more naturalistic villains like Bill Sikes. What can I say? To each their … Continue reading And even the adaptations that retain the character, such as the 1948 and 1982 films, don’t really do him justice.[2]I should say the 1948 Oliver Twist is a great movie and a great adaptation in many ways. (It was directed by David Lean, who also did the 1946 Great Expectations.) But the parts with Monks are easily … Continue reading A rare adaptation that really develops Monks though is the 1999 miniseries written by Alan Bleasdale and directed by Renny Rye. Like many another Oliver Twist, this one begins with the highly dramatic scene of his heavily pregnant mother (Sophia Myles) making a terrible journey on foot through the rain, giving birth to him in a workhouse and dying.[3]Dickens fans may be interested to know that Myles also played Kate Nickleby in a miniseries adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. I felt she lacked the necessary warmth for the character there but … Continue reading Unlike other Oliver Twists though, this one immediately goes back in time to show us the relationship between her and Oliver’s father (Tim Dutton) and why Monks (Marc Warren) is obsessed with ruining the poor orphan. The fact that it’s unlike other versions doesn’t mean it’s original to this one. While the flashback, which takes up most of the first episode, makes some changes to the book’s backstory for the series’ own dramatic purposes, it’s pretty much the same as what Dickens revealed in the final section of Oliver Twist. In fact, I’m impressed by how many details from the book it includes.

As a result of showing this backstory rather than just telling us about it, Monks’s evil mother (frequent Bleasdale collaborator Lindsay Duncan), an intriguing offstage character in the book, cuts a much more prominent figure in the miniseries. She becomes a great hissable villain.

A downside of showing the backstory right off the bat is that Monks can’t be mysterious when we know all about him. To keep him from becoming boring, the miniseries makes him a much more sympathetic villain. I don’t entirely dislike that idea as I’d contend there was always a hint of tragedy in Monks and his relationships with his parents, but I feel like the series goes a bit too far. Monks’s mother, when trying to manipulate him, tells her son that she knows he really enjoys killing things and is in denial about it. But we never get any indication that she’s telling the truth. Whenever Monks has the opportunity to kill anyone, he comes across as horrified by the prospect.[4]He didn’t want to kill Oliver in the book either but that wasn’t necessarily supposed to make him sympathetic. It might have been better if we really did feel like he has this sadistic side that he’s desperately suppressing. As it is, it’s hard to tell why his father considered him such a disgrace. Was it just because of his Frankenstein-ian appearance?[5]I know Frankenstein is the name of the scientist, not the monster but Frankenstein’s-monster-ian doesn’t sound right and, anyway, as Frankenstein’s “child” the monster … Continue reading That would make the father’s motivations less sympathetic than Dickens intended them to be though to be sure, the father was never supposed to be a perfect character.

An interesting side effect of restructuring the story is that it immediately establishes Oliver Twist as a melodrama. In the novel, we begin with the institutional evil of the workhouse and then move on to the criminal evil of Fagin’s gang before being introduced to the melodramatic evil of Monks. You could argue that this is an improvement on the source material and that it’s better to establish a melodramatic tone right off the bat so that readers or viewers aren’t too thrown when it develops later. You could also argue that the book had an interesting structure and that this messes it up. I guess I don’t have a strong opinion either way.

The characters who I feel are the least well adapted are John Dawkins AKA the Artful Dodger (Alex Crowley) and Charley Bates (Roland Manookian) which is odd since the miniseries actually avoids my pet peeve about the Dodger in adaptations and even addresses a problem I have with Charley Bates in the book. It annoys me that adaptations usually make the Artful Dodger a sympathetic figure. Do none of them remember what a jerk he was in the book?[6]I can kind of understand why they feel the need to do this with Fagin, given the antisemitic stereotypes he embodies. (In some cases, this is because they’re combining him with Charley Bates who somewhat randomly redeems himself at the end of the story.) The 1999 miniseries, if anything, goes in the opposite direction, making the character even more of a villain. But it’s hard for me to appreciate this when the actors for both the Dodger and Charley look far too old for their roles. In the book, they’re foils for Oliver and, naturally, they’re around his age. Here a generous interpretation is that they’re meant to be teenagers but look like they’re in their thirties. As I mentioned, in the book, Charley Bates redeemed himself in the end. According to what I’ve read, Dickens didn’t originally intend this but a friend of his really loved the character and begged Dickens to give him a happy ending.[7]It’s possible that the reason adaptations tend to portray the Artful Dodger and his fellow juvenile pickpockets more sympathetically than Dickens did is that they see them as appealing, … Continue reading Reading the book, it’s pretty obvious that the author’s plans for the character changed while he was writing. The miniseries has Charley show signs of conscience much earlier and more dramatically than the book does. Technically, this is an improvement…but I can’t quite say I like it. I’m attached to the Charley Bates from the book and the character in the miniseries just doesn’t feel like him. To a lesser extent, the same can be said of the Artful Dodger though there I can say it’s mostly because of the age thing.

Other than that, my least favorite bit of casting is David Ross as Mr. Bumble. He just isn’t pompous and intimidating enough to be the character. It’s true that Mr. Bumble is supposed to end up being overawed by his eventual wife (Julie Walters) but it shouldn’t be obvious from the start.

I’ve got to give the miniseries points for including Mr. Losberne (David Bark-Jones), one of my favorite good guys from the book who often gets cut by adaptations. However, I then have to take those points away again for the miniseries combining him with Rose (Keira Knightley)’s obligatory love interest, Harry Maylie, one of my least favorite good guys from the book who often gets cut by adaptations. Actually, he ends up not being much like either character. Since, like many another Oliver Twist, this one cuts the character of Mrs. Maylie, most of Losberne’s best lines from the book wouldn’t have worked here. Oh well.

Sorry about the opening credits in this shot.

In general, though, the casting and characterizations for this miniseries are excellent. Andy Serkis (who played Rigaud in the 2008 Little Dorrit), Emily Woof and Robert Lindsay are great as the iconic trio of Bill Sikes, Nancy and Fagin. I especially like the deadpan, for lack of a better description, way Lindsay delivers his character’s groveling, wheedling lines. You get the impression this is a Fagin who is always calculating-until his last scene when he goes mad.

Michael Kitchen is also great as Mr. Brownlow. Because of the way the story has been restructured, he comes across as almost as much a protagonist as Oliver or Nancy. Kitchen and Bleasdale make him quite compelling, and they do this not by adding to the character but by expanding on things at which Dickens only hinted. I’m not sure if it was such a good idea though to give him a history of taking in homeless boys who then took advantage of and stole from him long before he met Oliver. I understand the miniseries is trying to establish that, in the book’s words, Mr. Brownlow “(has) been deceived before in the objects whom (he has) endeavored to benefit” but having his charity repeatedly take that specific form is weird.

As Oliver Twist himself, young Sam Smith perfectly embodies Dickens’s saintly protagonist. I appreciate that unlike many other adaptations, such as the musical, the 1997 movie and the 2007 miniseries, this one keeps Oliver’s distaste for theft, however unrealistic it might be for someone from his background and in his desperate circumstances.

And I love that this miniseries includes the comical manservants, Giles (Sam Kelly) and Brittles (Morgan Jones.) They typically don’t make the cut.

Also included is the pedlar (Alan Pentony) who innocently offers to demonstrate his stain removal product on Sikes’s bloodstained hat. It’s details like that which make the villain’s guilty flight at the climax so memorable.

If there’s a major thing about this adaptation that niggles me, besides the things I’ve already mentioned, it’s the way it tries to “fix” the plot of Oliver Twist by removing the incredible coincidences in it. Not only does the reason Dodger brings Oliver to Fagin become that Monks has already hired him to ruin the boy, but the Dodger and Charley specifically try to frame him for stealing from Mr. Brownlow. I know that many readers find Dickens’s use of coincidences to be a weakness but honestly, I feel like making everything intentional on the parts of Monks and Fagin makes the whole thing seem more ridiculous than if it had been the result of a few convenient coincidences. It’s not like Fagin needed the extra motivation to induct a vulnerable child into his gang of pickpockets. It’s what he does anyway. And the really weird thing is the miniseries actually adds a coincidence to the story by having Charley Bates know Mr. Brownlow from before he ever met Oliver Twist. (Remember what I mentioned about this version of Brownlow having taken a number of homeless boys into his house in the past?) So are coincidences a flaw or not? Make up your mind![8]Why don’t Dickens’s coincidences bother me in the book? I once heard animator Glen Keane say in an interview that his idea of a great story is something really impossible. I’d agree … Continue reading

While I can’t really recommend this Oliver Twist as an introduction to the source material, frankly, that’s true of most adaptations of this particular book.[9]My favorite is actually a radio dramatization from 2012. I enjoy the 1999 miniseries as an homage to the original novel. The changes it makes to the story and characters aren’t necessarily bigger than the changes that adaptations usually make, and they happen to irritate me less. This Oliver Twist does manage to nail the book’s horrifying yet humorous tone. I’ll close by mentioning something I particularly admire. A quirk of the novel is that the problem of Oliver’s safety is pretty much wrapped up two thirds of the way through it. After that, the story becomes more about Nancy and about revealing the mystery of Oliver’s birth. Many adaptations, on the other hand, keep the protagonist in Bill Sikes’s clutches until the very end to avoid the audience losing interest. The 1999 miniseries manage to involve Oliver more in the climax without altering the plot quite so much. Please, adapters, I want some more of that.

References

References
↑1 For the record, that’s not a universal taste. Some critics dislike the melodramatic Monks and prefer the book’s more naturalistic villains like Bill Sikes. What can I say? To each their own.
↑2 I should say the 1948 Oliver Twist is a great movie and a great adaptation in many ways. (It was directed by David Lean, who also did the 1946 Great Expectations.) But the parts with Monks are easily the weakest.
↑3 Dickens fans may be interested to know that Myles also played Kate Nickleby in a miniseries adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. I felt she lacked the necessary warmth for the character there but she’s great in this role which doesn’t necessarily require much warmth.
↑4 He didn’t want to kill Oliver in the book either but that wasn’t necessarily supposed to make him sympathetic.
↑5 I know Frankenstein is the name of the scientist, not the monster but Frankenstein’s-monster-ian doesn’t sound right and, anyway, as Frankenstein’s “child” the monster could bear his last name.
↑6 I can kind of understand why they feel the need to do this with Fagin, given the antisemitic stereotypes he embodies.
↑7 It’s possible that the reason adaptations tend to portray the Artful Dodger and his fellow juvenile pickpockets more sympathetically than Dickens did is that they see them as appealing, romanticized street urchins like Gavroche in Les Misérables. If Dickens intended this though, he also intended to thoroughly deconstruct it by the end of the book.
↑8 Why don’t Dickens’s coincidences bother me in the book? I once heard animator Glen Keane say in an interview that his idea of a great story is something really impossible. I’d agree with that.
↑9 My favorite is actually a radio dramatization from 2012.
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A Moral in Wonderland

Posted on September 20, 2025 by stationmaster

“You’re thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can’t tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit.”
“Perhaps it hasn’t one,” Alice ventured to remark.
“Tut, tut, child!” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.” Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Looking back on my blog, I see that I’ve written about nearly all the things I’ve included in the header image I made for it years ago. Les Misérables. Great Expectations. Peanuts (specifically from the 1970s.) The Chronicles of Narnia. Nicholas Nickleby. The only ones I haven’t done are Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. No time like the present to fix that. But for once, I’m not going to write about the adaptation that I included in the photo. That’s not a slight against the 1951 animated Disney movie. I love it. But, growing up, I loved the 1999 made-for-TV movie from Hallmark entertainment even more, mainly because it was longer and included more from the books.[1]A YouTube video essay about the Disney film argues that it has a special appeal for children on the Spectrum. I think that may explain my childhood affinity for Alice. It’s also probably more … Continue reading

Upon rewatching however, I must admit that the 1951 Alice in Wonderland has the virtue of brevity whereas the second half of the 1999 movie can drag somewhat, at least if you’ve already watched it once and know where it’s going. Perhaps the filmmakers should have just settled for adapting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and cut the three episodes taken from Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. But they’re so great, I can’t bear to imagine that possibility.[2]The movie might have been even longer. According to an interview with the director, they filmed the White Knight’s song from Through the Looking Glass, A-Sitting on the Gate, but it had to be … Continue reading

Actually, this Alice takes many cues from the Disney movie. It mostly adapts Alice’s Adventures while including a few scenes from Through the Looking Glass and it emphasizes bright colors, big name stars, surreal visual humor and musical numbers. There are even a few moments that might be homages to the Disney movie, such as the Caterpillar (Ben Kingsley) turning into a butterfly or Tweedledum (Robbie Coltrane) and Tweedledee (George Wendt) blocking Alice (a pre-Napoleon Dynamite Tina Majorino)’s way as she tries to get away from them. Fans of the books who dislike that adaptation, probably won’t like this one either. But, as I mentioned, I love both. If fan criticism of them is coming from the perspective that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a Serious, Intellectual Work of Literature, I’d like to remind people that it began as a story the author randomly made up to entertain three kids on a summer outing. A colorful and commercial adaptation makes sense to me.

Anyway, this movie has a great script, courtesy of playwright Peter Barnes who also wrote Hallmark Entertainment’s excellent 1999 Christmas Carol movie starring Patrick Stewart and their masterful 2000 Arabian Nights miniseries. Even when this Alice in Wonderland‘s dialogue isn’t taken from Lewis Carroll it’s clever and quotable. (When explaining to Alice how his lectures divide people, the Mouse (Ken Dodd) tells her, “Last time, the whole audience hissed. Hissed! All except one man. He was applauding the hissing.”) The film is also full of actors who feel like they’re having fun with their roles and are fun to watch in them.[3]Martin Short is admittedly a bit annoying as the Mad Hatter but, hey, the character is meant to be annoying. Mind you, the characters aren’t all exactly as Lewis Carroll depicted them. For example, the Caterpillar, or Major Caterpillar as he’s called here, is much more verbose and argumentative than in the book but Ben Kingsley’s performance is so much fun that I don’t really care.

The Mock Turtle (Gene Wilder) is also much less perpetually morose in this version. His foil, the Gryphon (voiced by Donald Sinden) has likewise been changed from a cheery cockney to a more dignified upper-class character. I’m willing to allow that since they get two of the movie’s best songs, The Lobster Quadrille and Beautiful Soup, neither of which would be as much fun if the Mock Turtle were moaning and sobbing as he sang them.

Speaking of music, one of the best things about the movie is its soundtrack by Richard Hartley.[4]He also composed the music for the 2012 Great Expectations. You wouldn’t necessarily expect an Alice in Wonderland adaptation to have beautiful music as opposed to fun music. But “beautiful” is exactly the word to describe this film’s score.[5]Which isn’t to say the songs aren’t fun too. It actually makes the White Knight (Christoper Lloyd)’s farewell to Alice a genuinely moving moment in its goofy way.

For a made-for-TV movie from the 90s, this Alice in Wonderland‘s visuals are pretty great. While most adaptations show what Alice shrinking would look like from the outside, this one actually gives you an idea of what it would feel like to, using the book’s metaphor, “shut up like a telescope.”

I love the way Wonderland is constantly shifting. When Alice resurfaces after falling into the Pool of Tears, she finds herself swimming in a canal somewhere. Next minute, she’s in a giant library[6]Actually, the library is probably normal sized. She’s just tiny at the moment. where she opens a giant pop-up book revealing a giant pop-up of a house. As Alice walks toward the house, it becomes a real house and she’s in a wood. While none of those transitions come from the Alice books, they are very true to their overall spirit.

Some of the movie’s creatures, like the White Rabbit (voiced by Richard Coombs and physically performed by Kiran Shah, the White Witch’s dwarf in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005.)), look like real animals who just happen to wear clothes. Others, like Bill the Lizard (Paddy Joyce) have costumes and makeup that hint at their animal nature in the theatrical tradition. The Cheshire Cat is an animatronic, courtesy of Jim Henson’s creature shop, with Whoopi Goldberg’s face superimposed on it. Ordinarily, I would prefer a consistent approach to portraying the animals, but the movie’s inconsistency fits with the randomness of Wonderland. I must say though I don’t understand why it was necessary to make the March Hare (Francis Wright) look so ugly.

The main thing this adaptation adds to the story is a message and a character arc for Alice in which she learns to be more courageous. I’d argue that the lack of a moral was something that made the Alice books stand out from other Victorian children’s stories. To give them a point is to miss the point, so to speak. What’s more, I never got the impression from the books that Alice was someone who suffered from timidity. She usually tried to be polite but when confronted with something that really offended her sensibilities, such as crockery being thrown at babies or sentences before verdicts or books without pictures, she never hesitated to speak out against them. However, the 1999 movie isn’t the only adaptation to portray Alice this way. Both the 1985 miniseries and the 2010 movie, the latter of which functions as a fanfic-y sequel to the Alice books, also give her an arc where she learns to face her fears. And if you compare how this plays out in each version, it reflects very well on the 1999 Alice.

Interestingly, a party plays a part in each movie too. In 1999, Alice’s parents (Jeremy Brudenell and Janine Eser) are pressuring her into singing for their guests at a garden party but she’s stricken by stage fright. (The justification for this from the books is that Alice spends much of her time trying and failing to correctly recite poetry and the other characters spend much of their time reciting poetry to her whether or not she wishes to hear it.) She runs to the woods where she encounters the White Rabbit and follows it down the rabbit hole, etc. In 1985, on the other hand, Alice (Natalie Gregory)’s problem is that she wants to attend her parents’ tea party but isn’t allowed on the grounds that she’s too young. In 2010, a garden party is being held by a wealthy family that’s friends of a nineteen-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska)’s. Their nebbish son (Leo Bill) is going to propose to Alice for the sake of her recently widowed mother (Lindsay Duncan), and everyone is pressuring her to accept him. Remember what I wrote about how the Alice in the books never struck me as afraid to stand up for what she believed? Well, the 2010 movie must agree with me on some level since its Alice is written as being a defiant rebel against society right from the start. To the movie’s credit, sometimes she’s an entertaining rebel. (When her would-be mother-in-law (Geraldine James) rhetorically asks if she knows what she (the mother) has always dreaded, Alice replies, “The decline of the aristocracy?”) But this makes it hard to worry there’s any danger of her caving into social pressure when it comes to this prospective marriage. Are we supposed to buy that she’ll refuse to wear stockings just because society says so but will let others make a major life decision like marriage for her?

When the 1985 Alice reads the famous poem Jabberwocky, the monster itself appears and menaces her, only to just as quickly disappear. An Owl (Jack Warden), one of the few characters in the miniseries not to come from the books, tells her that the Jabberwocky was created by her fears[7]If you said that Jabberwocky is the name of the poem and that the monster in it is called a Jabberwock, you remember the poem better than either Paul Zindel, who wrote the 1982 miniseries or Linda … Continue reading and that it’ll keep appearing until she conquers them. Sure enough, the beast keeps popping up throughout her adventures in the Looking Glass World.[8]In the 1999 Alice, the Monstrous Crow from the Tweedledum and Tweedledee episode behaves similarly though it’s less intrusive. At the climax, she yells at it to go away, saying she doesn’t believe in it anymore. It dissolves into smoke and only then does Alice return to the real world. Her mother (Sheila Allen, wife of producer Irwin Allen) inexplicably invites her to have tea with the grownups.[9]Charles Dodgson AKA Lewis Carroll saw childhood, particularly girlhood, as the ideal state, so I’m not sure if he would have approved of all the coming-of-age themes in these adaptations. In the 2010 movie, the Jabberwocky is the tyrannical Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter)’s main enforcer[10]The Red Queen here is given the Queen of Hearts’s personality, mainly so the White Queen (Anne Hathaway, giving, for my money, the movie’s most entertaining performance) can be her … Continue reading and Alice is the prophesied heroine destined to slay it. Only after she overcomes her misgivings and does so is she able to return home. There she stands up to all the people who intimidated her before.[11]Again, this would be more of a cheer-raising moment if she’d actually come across as intimidated by them before. Instead of marrying into the rich family, she gets a job as an apprentice to their trading company, enabling her to support her mother, and goes on a voyage to China. I feel like this would have been a more triumphant ending if Alice had been established earlier as someone who was eager to explore new worlds. You’d think that’d be easy with her being Alice![12]By the way, in the 1999 movie, the actors who play the Wonderland characters double as guests at the garden party in the real world. It’s possible that the screenwriter intended that to be the … Continue reading

How does Alice gaining confidence play out in the 1999 movie? Well, for most of the runtime, the moral seems rather tacked on with the various characters she encounters in Wonderland simply telling Alice not to be afraid and that the show must go on, etc., things she could have been (and indeed was) told back home.[13]Though the White Knight advising her to always get back on her horse fits perfectly with his character. But it pays off in the climax when Alice is called upon to testify at the trial of the Knave of Hearts (Jason Flemyng) and stands up to the irrational tyranny of the King and Queen of the same (Simon Russell Beale and Miranda Richardson.) (“I can’t let you condemn an innocent man,” she says. “Why not?” asks the King. “It happens all the time.”)[14]The 1985 miniseries also has Alice plead on the Knave’s behalf but she sounds tearful and vulnerable rather than calm and no-nonsense. I don’t necessarily mind that since Alice is often … Continue reading To me, that’s what makes Alice a cool character in the source material. She doesn’t slay monsters but, like the child in the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, she’s not afraid to call out adults on their nonsense. Her retort when the Queen calls for her head is so great that I wish it were in the book. Alice literally brings the King and Queen’s whole house of cards tumbling down.

The 1999 Alice in Wonderland also has a more satisfying way to have Alice fulfill her familial obligations in the end while still being herself than the 2010 one has. It’s something that actually relates to what she’s experienced in Wonderland rather than something tacked on the end of the story to provide a happy ending. When Alice…But I’ve already spoiled too much. Suffice it to say, I love this movie.

References

References
↑1 A YouTube video essay about the Disney film argues that it has a special appeal for children on the Spectrum. I think that may explain my childhood affinity for Alice. It’s also probably more interesting than this blog post.
↑2 The movie might have been even longer. According to an interview with the director, they filmed the White Knight’s song from Through the Looking Glass, A-Sitting on the Gate, but it had to be cut for time. I’d love to hear that which tells something about the film’s quality when I just said it feels overlong.
↑3 Martin Short is admittedly a bit annoying as the Mad Hatter but, hey, the character is meant to be annoying.
↑4 He also composed the music for the 2012 Great Expectations.
↑5 Which isn’t to say the songs aren’t fun too.
↑6 Actually, the library is probably normal sized. She’s just tiny at the moment.
↑7 If you said that Jabberwocky is the name of the poem and that the monster in it is called a Jabberwock, you remember the poem better than either Paul Zindel, who wrote the 1982 miniseries or Linda Woolverton who wrote the 2010 film.
↑8 In the 1999 Alice, the Monstrous Crow from the Tweedledum and Tweedledee episode behaves similarly though it’s less intrusive.
↑9 Charles Dodgson AKA Lewis Carroll saw childhood, particularly girlhood, as the ideal state, so I’m not sure if he would have approved of all the coming-of-age themes in these adaptations.
↑10 The Red Queen here is given the Queen of Hearts’s personality, mainly so the White Queen (Anne Hathaway, giving, for my money, the movie’s most entertaining performance) can be her benevolent counterpart. But her character design still has a heart motif despite her never being called the Queen of Hearts and her soldiers look more like playing cards than chessmen. This is not confusing at all.
↑11 Again, this would be more of a cheer-raising moment if she’d actually come across as intimidated by them before.
↑12 By the way, in the 1999 movie, the actors who play the Wonderland characters double as guests at the garden party in the real world. It’s possible that the screenwriter intended that to be the case in the 2010 movie too since some of the characters parallel each other, most notably the Red Queen and the potential mother-in-law. But if that was the intention, director Tim Burton evidently didn’t get the memo and none of the actors double.
↑13 Though the White Knight advising her to always get back on her horse fits perfectly with his character.
↑14 The 1985 miniseries also has Alice plead on the Knave’s behalf but she sounds tearful and vulnerable rather than calm and no-nonsense. I don’t necessarily mind that since Alice is often tearful and vulnerable in the books, but it doesn’t really show her becoming more mature and, to be fair, the miniseries doesn’t pretend it does.
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Animation Station: Should I Have Blogged About The Reluctant Dragon?

Posted on September 13, 2025 by stationmaster

This is one of those ideas that I described as Blog Posts That Were Not to Be, one I’ve now decided should be, so a faithful reader of The Adaptation Station.com already knows the gist of it. I even practically reused a footnote. If you’re not interested in a more detailed version, I understand if you don’t want to read this. If you are interested in a more detailed version, great! After this, I’m going to do one more of those ideas as a full post and that’ll be it. My apologies to those who wanted more.

A long time ago I did a series of posts about animated Disney movies that consist of a series of shorts strung together. I dubbed them Disney anim-anthology movies. After I’d concluded the series, it occurred to me that I had left out a movie that fit that description quite well: The Reluctant Dragon (1941.) I justified the omission to myself on the grounds that (a) nobody besides myself seemed to be really loving the anim-anthology series and it was better that it ended when it did and (b) The Reluctant Dragon is more of a live action movie that contains animation. But it occurred to me not so long ago that if live action footage disqualifies a movie from being animated, my series on Disney’s anim-anthologies shouldn’t have included the Fantasia films, Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros or Fun and Fancy Free.[1]This goes beyond anim-anthologies and to animated Disney movies in general. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh begins with a live action sequence, and I’ve heard that even the storybook … Continue reading Still, I maintain that The Reluctant Dragon shouldn’t really count as an animated feature and I’m going to write about it the same way I wrote about Disney’s anim-anthologies to prove that it isn’t one of them.

Does that make sense?

No? Oh well. Here we go anyway.

Despite the title only a small portion of The Reluctant Dragon is based on the short story by Kenneth Grahame of Wind in the Willows fame. Most of it is a behind the scenes look at Walt Disney’s animation studio. I’m not sure if I’d call it a documentary posing as a movie or a movie posing as a documentary. (A docu-movie?) It actually reminds me of the fluffy behind the scenes promotional material you might see for a new Disney movie on the Disney Channel except a bit more adult oriented.[2]The film gives no indication of the bitter animators’ strike that was happening at Disney around this time. I know what you’re thinking. Hollywood giving a sanitized portrayal of something? … Continue reading

The Reluctant Dragon begins with humorist Robert Benchley’s shrewish wife (Nina Bryant)[3]She’s his shrewish wife in the movie, I mean, not in real life. reading a copy of Grahame’s book which her nephew has left behind at her house. She insists that her husband pitch the story to Walt Disney as an animated feature. Despite his protests[4]This movie could have more accurately been titled The Reluctant Benchley, but I guess that would have been confusing., she dumps him at the studio to give the pitch while she goes shopping. Benchley is given a pass and a young guide named Humphrey (Buddy Pepper) who is supposed to take him to Walt Disney, but Benchley slips away from him to check out the art studio. Amusingly, he’s clearly hoping to get a look at a nude female model but all he finds is an elephant.

The Disney artists explain that they’re studying the real thing in order to properly caricature it, presumably for Dumbo. None of them are at all annoyed by this random guy[5]None of them mention if they recognize him as a celebrity. interrupting their work. This is a recurring thing throughout the movie. The people at Disney are delighted to explain the process of whatever they’re doing to Benchley-though they do have some laughs at his expense. When Benchley starts going on about the supposed stupidity of elephants, one of the artists draws a caricature of him as one. This is another recurring theme in the movie. Throughout it, Disney artists keep making caricatures of Robert Benchley and giving them to him. By the end, he’s loaded down with the things.

Benchley wanders into a recording studio and witnesses the vocal work for a cartoon short being performed. The way the movie sets this up is quite funny. Opera is being played by an orchestra. Benchley sees a distinguished looking woman walk into the studio and is told by the man sitting next to him that she’s Florence Gill. “I heard her sing Margarita at the Metropolitan,” says Benchley, trying to sound knowledgeable. Then instead of singing, Gill starts making chicken noises in time to the music. She’s the voice of obscure Disney character Clara Cluck. The seemingly ordinary man next to Benchley gets up and performs with her by quacking and squawking. He’s Clarence Nash, the voice of Donald Duck. After the recording, Nash gives Benchley tips on how to do the duck voice.

Humphrey the studio guide finds Benchley and takes him back into custody. As he leads him across the studio lot, he reads boring trivia out of a notebook while Benchley ignores him and practices his Donald impression. This time, he gets carried away by the sound effects department and observes how they make the sounds for a scene of Casey Junior, the train engine from Dumbo. The scene we see isn’t from that movie though and seems to have been made specifically for The Reluctant Dragon. That’s kind of cool.

Avoiding Humphrey, Benchley ducks into the camera room. Up until now, the movie has been in black and white but here it switches to technicolor ala The Wizard of Oz. I love how Benchley curiously examines his undershirt to see its color.

He sees a demonstration of how the multiplane camera gives depth to animated backgrounds, using one that I believe is from Bambi.

Then he sees a demonstration of animation photography and learns about how drawings are made to look like they’re moving, using a scene of Donald Duck who seems to come to life and interact with Benchley.

Humphrey’s voice is heard over the PA system, telling Benchley to come to Walt Disney’s office. Benchley still wants to escape from Humphrey though and… I’m not sure why. He’s annoying but not that annoying. Yet not only Benchley but everyone at the studio seems to hold Humphrey in contempt, given how they’re all happy to help Benchley hide from him. A woman named Doris (Frances Gifford) takes him to the Ink and Paint Department to do so. We get a montage of how the paint is made set to the tune of Heigh Ho from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Benchley also sees the models of the characters that the maquette department makes for the animators to study.

You can see characters from Lady and the Tramp and Peter Pan here, movies that were in production when The Reluctant Dragon was made but would be delayed for years due to World War II.

Next, Benchley’s wanderings take him to a room where a bunch of story artists, who are working on pitch for Baby Weems, a cartoon short about a baby boy, are studying a real one.[6]The baby model is Jim Luske, son of Hamilton Luske, who directed many classic works of Disney animation. They explain to Benchley how storyboards work and give him the pitch. At first, this is just shown as the camera panning across the images as the story artist (Alan Ladd) narrates. Then the images are shot more like a movie and become gradually more animated though the segment never becomes entirely so. This corresponds to how one’s imagination slowly but surely takes over during a pitch meeting with storyboards. Well, I assume that’s what happens anyway. No one ever pitches storyboards to me. Anyway, it’s an interesting visual style and even if Baby Weems, which is about a genius infant who becomes a celebrity, much to his parents’ dismay, had been normally animated, it still would have been the most memorable part of the movie.

Having learned all the work that goes into pitching a story, Benchley is even more loath to go through with his wife’s idea. But the path away from Humphrey leads him into a room where animators are working. For once in The Reluctant Dragon, they’re real animators (Ward Kimball, Norm Ferguson and Fred Moore) who worked at the Disney company. Benchley sees some drawings they’ve done of Donald Duck versions of famous paintings.

These are just a few of them.

Then they show him a preview of the Goofy cartoon on which they’re working, How to Ride a Horse. The jokes in it about Goofy being klutzy don’t do much for me but I really enjoy the ones about the horse being mad and deliberately sabotaging him.

After How to Ride a Horse, Humphrey catches Benchley imitating Pluto[7]Don’t ask. and takes him to meet Walt Disney (played by himself) in a screening room. Before Benchley can share his idea, the short being screened starts and it’s…The Reluctant Dragon. The titular beast (voiced by Barnett Parker) is a cheerfully effete fellow who’d rather picnic and write poetry than pillage the countryside.

Fortunately for him, Sir Giles (Claud Allister), the knight summoned to slay him, is just as genial and pacific. The knight and the dragon come up with a way to satisfy public expectations of them without anyone getting hurt.

The Reluctant Dragon is a fairly fun cartoon. A lot of your enjoyment may depend on your tolerance for Parker’s vocal performance. Me, I’d probably find it unbearably annoying if the short were any longer but it’s amusing in small doses. I’ve got to say though the character designs and backgrounds all look very bland. In fact, that’s true of this movie’s animated segments in general. The most visually impressive one is Baby Weems and that’s mostly just storyboards! I was planning to write that if I were to rank The Reluctant Dragon among Disney’s anim-anthologies, I’d put it below Fun and Fancy Free and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad but above Make Mine Music and Melody Time. That was mainly because Baby Weems is funnier than the funniest short in Melody Time[8]I’d consider that to be Pecos Bill by the way. and The Reluctant Dragon as a whole is more consistently engaging than Make Mine Music with none of that anim-anthology’s weird pacing issues. Yet I hesitate in that judgement now because when Make Mine Music and Melody Time are at their most beautiful, they’re far more visually appealing than anything in The Reluctant Dragon.[9]Also, Peter and the Wolf, my favorite part of Make Mine Music, might be better than Baby Weems.

But I don’t really think The Reluctant Dragon should be ranked among Disney’s anim-anthology movies despite it being in the same spirit or a similar one anyway. It’s really a live action movie with animation, not an animated movie with live action and I’m not just saying that because the live action footage takes up more of the runtime than the animated footage.[10]I’m pretty sure it does anyway. I haven’t actually done the math. In the other animated Disney movies that contain live action footage I’ve mentioned, there’s a feeling that the live action stuff exists to prop up the animation. In The Reluctant Dragon, the animated shorts exist to demonstrate what they’re talking about in the live action parts. Don’t take that to mean I dislike the movie. Mind you, I’m not sure to whom I could recommend it. Most of the information on how animation is done is readily available on the internet nowadays. The 40s-style humor of the live action parts probably doesn’t appeal much to modern audiences and none of the individual cartoons, not even Baby Weems, is a comedic masterpiece. But I enjoy humor from many different decades including the 1940s and I found every one of the individual cartoons to be OK at the least and often funnier than that. Even the Casey Junior scene entertained me. If The Reluctant Dragon sounds interesting to you, I hope you enjoy it too.

References

References
↑1 This goes beyond anim-anthologies and to animated Disney movies in general. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh begins with a live action sequence, and I’ve heard that even the storybook that opens and closes Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is live action though the Technicolor makes it hard to tell.
↑2 The film gives no indication of the bitter animators’ strike that was happening at Disney around this time. I know what you’re thinking. Hollywood giving a sanitized portrayal of something? And Disney of all studios? I am shocked, I tell you! Utterly shocked!
↑3 She’s his shrewish wife in the movie, I mean, not in real life.
↑4 This movie could have more accurately been titled The Reluctant Benchley, but I guess that would have been confusing.
↑5 None of them mention if they recognize him as a celebrity.
↑6 The baby model is Jim Luske, son of Hamilton Luske, who directed many classic works of Disney animation.
↑7 Don’t ask.
↑8 I’d consider that to be Pecos Bill by the way.
↑9 Also, Peter and the Wolf, my favorite part of Make Mine Music, might be better than Baby Weems.
↑10 I’m pretty sure it does anyway. I haven’t actually done the math.
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A Tale of Two Kate DiCamillo Adaptations

Posted on August 22, 2025 by stationmaster

“Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark.”-Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux

I really don’t envy any Hollywood screenwriter faced with the task of adapting one of Kate DiCamillo’s books. That’s not to say her books are bad. More often than not, they’re wonderful. But they’re not wonderful in a way in that lends itself to a mainstream commercial children’s movie. Those tend to be, shall we say, stereotypically masculine with an emphasis on action and broad, raucous humor. DiCamillo’s work tends to be quiet, philosophical and touchy feely with an emphasis on character relationships and emotional healing. They tend to be feminine but not feminine in a Hollywood kind of way. They can be really funny at times but not funny after the fashion of a typical kids’ movie. Her books are marketable in that they win awards, but award-winning children’s books are more the kind that parents and teachers recommend to kids than the kind that kids naturally gravitate towards themselves. I hasten to add that there are plenty of kids who enjoy Kate DiCamillo’s books. It’s just that they tend to be kids who already love books and reading in general. Unlike Harry Potter or Captain Underpants, they don’t really appeal to kids who gravitate towards movies. If that sounds like I’m criticizing Kate DiCamillo, I’m not. After all, why shouldn’t books be aimed at bookworms? Sometimes it even rubs me the wrong way when children’s books seem like they’re trying to ingratiate themselves with kids who dislike children’s books. In the words of Jane Austen, “I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding.”

Apparently, being the kind of thing that parents and teachers promote to their children and students is still enough to get several of DiCamillo’s books made into movies. I’m not going to look at all of those though, just two that particularly interest me[1]Well, of the ones that have been made so far anyway. An adaptation of my favorite DiCamillo work, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane is currently in development according to IMDB. I’m … Continue reading, the computer animated The Tale of Despereaux and the (mainly) live action Flora & Ulysses.

The Tale of Despereaux (2008)

Unlike most mice, Despereaux Tilling (voiced by Matthew Broderick) is born with his eyes open. He’s also smaller than the other mice in the castle of Dor except for his enormous ears. But what really sets him apart is his soul. Instead of eating the books in the castle library, he falls in love with a story about knights, chivalry and honor. Despereaux adopts the code of conduct he gets from the book and soon finds his very own princess to honor, the human Princess Pea (Emma Watson.) For the un-mouse-like crime of speaking to a human, the other mice banish him to the labyrinthine dungeon with the castle rats. There he discovers a terrible plot against his beloved Pea.

This setup is the same as in Kate DiCamillo’s book, the full title of which is The Tale of Despereaux Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup and a Spool of Thread, but Despereaux’s character is pretty different. In the book, he started out as timid and fearful, painfully aware of his underdog status. In the movie, he’s blissfully oblivious to it and cheerfully fearless[2]He also isn’t the only one of his litter born alive, making it odd that his name is the French word for despair, especially since neither of his parents (William H. Macy and Frances Conroy) is … Continue reading, which is part of why the mouse community, to whom cowardice is a virtue necessary for survival, finds him such a problem. “There’s so many wonderful things in life to be afraid of if you just find out how scary they are,” says his school principal (Richard Jenkins.) And you know what? I actually think I enjoy the movie’s Despereaux better than the book’s even though he doesn’t have much of a character arc.[3]There are a couple of well-done moments where he finally experiences fear but they’re over pretty quickly. Timid underdogs are fairly common as the heroes of children’s stories. Fearless fools like the movie’s Despereaux stand out more. As much as I love the book, its first section, the one that focuses on Despereaux himself, is probably the most generic part of it.

Despereaux isn’t the only character to be radically reinvented in this adaptation. In fact, pretty much everyone is changed in some way or another. Roscuro the rat (Dustin Hoffman), who, being a rat, belongs in the shadows yet is drawn to the light[4]In the book, his full name is Chiaroscuro., is no longer a native of the dungeon and starts out as a much more sympathetic character than he does in the book. (He definitely became sympathetic over the course of the book, but he didn’t necessarily begin that way.)

In the book, the king (an uncredited Kevin Kline)’s redeeming point was how devoted he was to his daughter. In the movie, he neglects her in his all-consuming grief over the death of his wife (Patricia Cullen) and his character arc is about learning to pay more attention to her. Gregory the jailer (Robbie Coltrain) is combined with another character. The cook is made into a man (also voiced by Kevin Kline) and given a magical soup making genie (Stanley Tucci) for a sidekick. (I have no idea what the filmmakers were smoking when they made that addition to the story.)

The character who feels the most like she leaped off the page is the unfortunate serving girl, Miggery Sow (Tracey Ullman), and even she’s arguably a bit changed from the book, her backstory being somewhat softened.

Strangely, I don’t mind this since I think the book’s versions of the characters and the movie’s versions are both great in their different ways.[5]Well, OK, the soup-making genie isn’t great but he’s not that annoying either. There are some great things in the book that aren’t in the movie but there are also some great things in the movie that aren’t in the book. For example, I like the relationship that it develops between Despereaux and Roscuro who barely interact in the source material, and I like how it explores Princess Pea’s dark side at which the book only hints. The story’s climax is reimagined to be much more action packed but, in all fairness, the book’s climax, while thematically appropriate, was arguably anticlimactic. The movie’s climax manages to also be thematically appropriate without being anticlimactic.

The movie recreates or attempts to recreate the feel of the book with voiceover narration from Sigourney Weaver. As one critic in an overall positive review notes, “Weaver’s sensible cadences aren’t necessarily the best match for DiCamillo’s earnest, confiding literary voice” yet this weirdly endears the narration to me. Intentionally or not, it feels like a mother or an aunt reading a book aloud to a child out of love, not necessarily an actress who was chosen for the sound of her voice. Speaking of books, as a lover of literature, this is one of my favorite quotes from the movie’s narrator.

Did a book ever speak to you? Almost like it was written for you? Despereaux loved it all, every bit of it…He even loved things he wouldn’t suspect.

The things about my favorite books that I wouldn’t suspect often end up being the things I love most about them.

The movie’s beautiful backgrounds also have a storybook quality. These days computer animated movies either have a completely realistic look or an ultra-cartoony one. I wish more looked like The Tale of Despereaux.

I love the character designs for the animal characters too though I don’t care for the look of the humans. (Just look at Princess Pea’s prominent nose!)

Some of the character animation is also regrettably stiff. Still, I love the movie’s earnestness and sincerity and how it shows children in a way that’s accessible to them, sympathetic characters doing bad things with bad consequences.

Conscience compels me to concede that “accessible” may not be the most accurate word to describe this film. Many kids find it too slow paced, and it’s not universally loved by adults either. I’ll even admit I don’t rewatch this movie as often as I thought I would when I first saw it. But whenever I do rewatch it, I love it, and I’d encourage others to give it a chance. Like the book, it’s a great tribute to such wonderful, powerful, ridiculous things as love, light, hope, forgiveness and soup.

Flora & Ulysses (2021)

At ten years old, Flora Buckman (Matilda Lawler) already self identifies as a cynic. Her comic book artist father (Ben Schwartz) and her romance novelist mother (Alyson Hannigan) were the kind of idealists who’d actually name their daughter Flora Belle. Now her mother is struggling in her career, her father is unsuccessful in his and they’re estranged from each other. Flora is not going to have any of that disappointment in her life. “Cynics don’t hope. They see what’s real,” she says. “Hope can get in the way of action.” But it’s made clear that Flora isn’t really a cynic at heart by how quickly she latches onto the idea that a squirrel in her yard has been given superpowers by being sucked up by a runaway vacuum cleaner.[6]Indeed, she almost gets this idea too quickly. In the original book, right after he’s been revived, the squirrel picks up the vacuum with one paw. I don’t understand why the movie cuts … Continue reading She names him Ulysses after the vacuum (the Ulysses 2000X) and takes him home despite her mother’s protests, hoping to learn why the universe has bestowed superpowers on this squirrel. It turns out to have been so he could inspire Flora and her family and help them see the universe’s possibilities again.

There’s a lot to love about Flora & Ulysses. The casting is great. Young Lawler really holds the movie together as Flora. The screenplay by Brad Copeland is pretty great too…sometimes. Much of it is quite witty and charming and true to the spirit, if not the letter, of Kate DiCamillo. There’s also a lot of it that’s pretty dumb, mainly when it indulges in visual humor as opposed to verbal humor. I’m not saying I never enjoy slapstick comedy. I think it can be hilarious. But sadly, this film’s slapstick seldom got more than a mildly contemptuous snort from me.

In fact, the only set piece I remember making me laugh harder than that was the car chase where Flora’s dad has to drive the getaway vehicle after his hand has been shot by a tranquilizer dart.

If you’ve read the original book but haven’t seen the movie, that last sentence probably had you going, “What?!” In DiCamillo, the threat of Ulysses being captured by animal control is only brought up once and then neutralized. This adaptation’s biggest addition to the story is a bumbling animal control agent (Danny Pudi) who’s out to get Ulysses and test his brain tissue for rabies.[7]Coincidentally, the movie adaptation of DiCamillo’s Because of Winn Dixie also added a comical antagonist who was involved with law enforcement. This character just isn’t very funny and it’s annoying that the climax becomes all about stopping him.

Strangely, the movie bothers to give him a sympathetic reason for not liking squirrels and then just treats him like a comedic punching bag.

What’s arguably even more annoying for fans of the book is that some of its endearing characters get shortchanged. Flora’s neighbor, Tootie Tickham (Nancy Robertson), the owner of the fateful vacuum cleaner, was a major presence in the book but only gets two scenes here. The sage Dr. Meescham (Anna Deavere Smith) gets more screentime but most of her memorable lines from the book are cut. I particularly miss her telling Flora that cynics are people who are afraid to believe. On the plus side, William Spiver (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), Tootie’s great nephew who suffers from hysterical blindness, is as kooky as he is in the source material. Perhaps he isn’t quite as funny or well developed but the adaptation does more justice to him than to most of the other supporting characters.

Speaking of Tootie and her family, the movie doesn’t include the giant book of poetry which the vacuum also devoured in the book. This makes the fact that one of Ulysses superpowers is the ability to write poetry in English rather random.

This review has been more negative than not or at least I’ve been more specific about the things I dislike than the things I like, so I should mention that it’s not like the only good things about the movie come from the book. An added workplace subplot about Flora’s father’s obnoxious manager (Jesse Reid) is pretty fun.

I actually think the movie improves upon the book-or had the potential to do so anyway-by showing Flora’s mother in a sympathetic light earlier. In the source material, she just comes across as nasty until the very end when she redeems herself.[8]Well, there is a scene of William Spiver helping her with one of her books that hints at a more likeable side to her, but Flora doesn’t see it that way and I’m not sure how many young … Continue reading If anything, the movie goes too far in the opposite direction and doesn’t really show her being nasty at all. I really feel like her angry outburst from Chapter 45 of the book shouldn’t have been cut as the poem Ulysses ultimately writes for Flora isn’t as meaningful without that context.[9]If you really want it spoiled, the poem is what Flora’s mom should have said to her instead.

I see that even when I tried to focus on the positive, I slipped back into negative there. That’s unfortunate since I really do like this movie. Well, I like the parts that have a quirky indie vibe. They’re the parts that feel like they’re from Kate DiCamillo even when they’re not. The parts that feel like just another dumb kids’ comedy, not so much. Still, humor is relative. The things in Flora & Ulysses (2021) that I find unfunny other people-and not just kids-may find funny. Few comedies that center around a young girl dealing with the aftermath of her parents’ separation also center around a superpowered squirrel so you can’t say this movie is unoriginal. And I do think the movie’s ultimate message for cynics is a good summary of the book’s.

Do not hope, only observe because when you do, you’ll see how much wonder the world actually has, and you won’t be a cynic anymore.

Concluding Thoughts

Both The Tale of Despereaux and Flora & Ulysses take a great deal of artistic license with DiCamillo’s plots and characters. Arguably, Despereaux is the one that takes the greater license. But to me, it feels different from other, more commercial children’s movies in the same way that the book feels different from other, more commercial children’s books. Actually, at its best, so does Flora & Ulysses. But it’s not at its best as consistently as is The Tale of Despereaux and I can’t defend it as strongly or recommend it as highly. Still, that’s different from not being able to recommend it at all.

References

References
↑1 Well, of the ones that have been made so far anyway. An adaptation of my favorite DiCamillo work, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane is currently in development according to IMDB. I’m really not sure how they’re going to do that one as a movie.
↑2 He also isn’t the only one of his litter born alive, making it odd that his name is the French word for despair, especially since neither of his parents (William H. Macy and Frances Conroy) is French in this version.
↑3 There are a couple of well-done moments where he finally experiences fear but they’re over pretty quickly.
↑4 In the book, his full name is Chiaroscuro.
↑5 Well, OK, the soup-making genie isn’t great but he’s not that annoying either.
↑6 Indeed, she almost gets this idea too quickly. In the original book, right after he’s been revived, the squirrel picks up the vacuum with one paw. I don’t understand why the movie cuts that.
↑7 Coincidentally, the movie adaptation of DiCamillo’s Because of Winn Dixie also added a comical antagonist who was involved with law enforcement.
↑8 Well, there is a scene of William Spiver helping her with one of her books that hints at a more likeable side to her, but Flora doesn’t see it that way and I’m not sure how many young readers do.
↑9 If you really want it spoiled, the poem is what Flora’s mom should have said to her instead.
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How Good of an Adaptation is The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh?

Posted on August 16, 2025 by stationmaster

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) is actually a compilation of three previously released animated featurettes (e.g. twenty-five-minute length cartoons that would originally appear before full length movies in theaters) with some (entertaining) bridging material and an epilogue added.[1]If it sounds like I’m criticizing this thing for being a cash grab, I’m not. There’s something to be said for fans being able to watch all three featurettes together. When the first of these featurettes was released, it got terrible reviews from English critics who considered it a dreadful adaptation of its source material, A. A. Milne’s beloved children’s stories. They accused it of being too loud and cartoony, lacking the source material’s gentleness, and too Americanized, lacking its dry, quintessentially English humor. Time has been kind to The Many Adventures though. Most of the modern reviews I’ve read describe it as a good, even great, adaptation of the Pooh stories, especially considering the Walt Disney studio is famous for making inaccurate adaptations. That seems to be the consensus now.[2]It should be noted though that those reviews weren’t generally from English critics. If there’s a grudge held against Disney’s Pooh these days, it’s not so much that it’s regarded as a bad adaptation itself. It’s that it led to multitudinous spinoff movies, shows, picture books, comics, etc. that are now more familiar to American audiences than the original books.

Is this more tolerant view of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh justified or was the original English disdain for it correct? Here’s my attempt at an in-depth analysis to answer that question.

The Characters

Disney adaptations are known for softening the darker aspects of their source materials. You’d think that wouldn’t be a thing with The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, given the great innocence of the Winnie-the-Pooh books. But if you pay attention, some of the characters did kind of having dark shades that Disney airbrushed. The most famous example of this is Eeyore (voiced by story artist Ralph Wright) who is as pessimistic in the movie as he was in the books but not nearly as arrogant or bitterly, not to mention elaborately, sarcastic. Piglet (John Fiedler) is defined by his timidity in both the books and the movie but in the former, he also had a great deal of pride and defensiveness of which you don’t get as much in the film. He also could be rather competitive in the books and even had a jealous streak towards his best friend, Winnie-the-Pooh.[3]The very introduction to the first Pooh book brings this up. Disney’s Piglet is loveable in a less complicated way though he does get a great snarky line in the third featurette. (“Pooh, I don’t think Rabbit’s splendid idea worked.”) The character who comes across the most differently from the book is Rabbit (Junius Matthews) who is much more frazzled and panicky in the movie than the dignified, authoritarian literary version.[4]This is the only instance I can recall of the character in Disney’s later spinoffs and tie-ins being closer to the books. He’s also much more frequently the butt of the comedy. I don’t mind this as much as you’d think since while the character is different in the movie, he still feels like the kind of comedic character A. A. Milne could have written. Plus, Junius Matthews’s vocal performance is just so entertaining.

Since the Disney movie doesn’t adapt every single Pooh story, some characters inevitably get more focus than others. The ones who end up emerging as the leads are Winnie the Pooh himself (Disney veteran Sterling Holloway), Piglet, Rabbit and Tigger (Paul Winchell.) In spite of not being the focus though, Owl (Hal Smith) still emerges as a vivid and funny personality if not as rounded as he was in Milne. The same can’t be said for Kanga (Barbara Luddy, another regular Disney voice actor) and Roo (Clint Howard in the first two featurettes, Dori Whitaker in the third) who really don’t come across as that funny here. To be fair, they were probably the least funny and least developed characters in the books too, but I’d say they were still funnier there than were here. If there’s one supporting character I really wish had more development though, it’s Eeyore. That’s not because Disney made him unfunny. Sure, his acerbic personality may not have been unchanged but he’s still hilarious. For being a story artist rather than a voice actor, Ralph Wright turned in a great performance. It’s just too bad that there’s not more of him in the movie compared to the books.[5]In 1983, he’d star in a new featurette, Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore but despite adapting some top-notch material from the Pooh books, the visuals, voice acting and comedic timing in … Continue reading

It should also be mentioned that there’s a character who is original to the movie, but I’ll get to him later.

The Framing Device

In the first Pooh book, the one titled simply Winnie-the-Pooh[6]By the way, Milne hyphenated Pooh’s full name and Disney didn’t. I’m going to spell it based on which version of the character I mean., it’s established that all the stories are being told to Christopher Robin by the narrator (presumably his parent) before bathtime and that the characters are all based on his stuffed animals. This doesn’t really feature in the second book, The House at Pooh Corner, except for the introduction.[7]Or, rather, the contradiction. You have to read it to understand. The Many Adventures uses a somewhat different framing device. It begins in a live action bedroom featuring the stuffed animal versions of the Pooh characters.[8]Even Rabbit and Owl who aren’t supposed to be toys, but I digress. An invisible narrator (Sebastian Cabot) informs us that this room belongs to a boy called Christopher Robin. On a window seat is a book which opens up. The illustrations come to life and we’re off.

Now I’ve read that director Wolfgang Reitherman was not a fan of the Pooh books[9]Though it should be noted that some of the leading animators on The Many Adventures were, mainly Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and Milt Kahl. and even initially resented being assigned them to adapt. But I really don’t feel a lack of affection, watching this. A lot of the toys we see in Christopher Robin’s room are the kind of toys that were depicted in Ernest H. Shepard’s illustrations for Milne’s two books of verse for children, When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six, such as toy soldiers, a rocking horse and a train set. Yeah, they’re 60s-era American versions of those things rather than Edwardian English ones but still. Even the window seat on which the book stands is arguably reminiscent of the window seat in Christopher Robin’s nursery in Now We Are Six.

The map at the beginning of the book within the movie is clearly modeled on Shepard’s map from the real book and that’s not the only nod to the original you’ll notice if you’re quick eyed. While we don’t get Pooh’s arms being stuck, we do get a nod to his name’s origin from the book as we see him blowing an insect from his nose. (“Pooh!”) Even if the director wasn’t a fan of the Pooh books himself, it seems like he wanted to please viewers who were fans.

I consider it a happy accident that The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh was animated with xerox technology since it means the pencil lines on the animated characters are frequently visible, evoking the original illustrations by E. H. Shepard.

Now on to the individual segments.

Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966)

This featurette is based on the first two chapters of Winnie-the-Pooh, the one In Which We Are Introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Bees, and the Stories Begin and the one In Which Pooh Goes Visiting and Gets Into a Tight Place. Why adapt two stories instead of just one? Beyond needing to fill out the runtime, I suspect the motivation lay in fact that roughly half the Pooh stories end without the main characters having accomplished anything. That’s part of their easygoing nature. Whether our heroes’ goal is to get some honey or to catch a Woozle or to get the bounces out of Tigger, they’ll usually have forgotten about it by the time the chapter is over. Sometimes even when they do accomplish a goal, such as discovering the North Pole, it’s more accurate to say they feel like they’ve accomplished it. You could argue this important to the spirit of Pooh, but Disney probably felt it would be unsatisfying. Fortunately, the first two chapters of the first book blend into one story pretty seamlessly. The first one is about Pooh trying and failing to get a meal. The second one is about him getting one but with unintended negative consequences.

If the main appeal of the Pooh books is their verbal humor, I don’t see how The Honey Tree doesn’t capture that. It includes most, if not all, of the funniest jokes from the corresponding sections of the text. Criticism of its humor being too American as opposed to British comes more from it adding slapstick. For example, in the book, the balloon-borne Pooh simply decides that the bees he’s trying to rob are “the wrong sort of bees” and has Christopher Robin get him down from the sky by shooting the balloon with his gun which he always takes with him.[10]Who says the Pooh books don’t resonate with Americans? This adaptation replaces that with a chase scene that begins in the air and continues on the ground after all the air has gone from the balloon. Along similar lines, Rabbit goes beyond using Pooh’s legs as a clothesline when the bear is stuck in his door and turns his “south end” into a decorative center piece. In the film’s defense, the ending of the balloon incident in the book is a bit anticlimactic and the stuff with Rabbit is quite fun.

Part of me wishes the jingly songs by Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman used Milne’s poetry from the Pooh books but it’s not as big a part as might be supposed. As they are, the songs are great and broadly within the spirit of the Pooh books’ poetry. I’m especially a fan of the song Pooh sings as he does his Stoutness Exercises in which he explains that their purpose is to make him hungry, so he’ll eat and get stouter. (Pooh was talking about body positivity before anyone else!) The voice acting is also great in general, especially Sterling Holloway’s delightful turn as the loveable bear.

In addition to the chapters from the book I already mentioned, the featurette also features an allusion to Chapter 4 of Winnie-the-Pooh, In Which Eeyore Loses a Tail and Pooh Finds One. (Christopher Robin[11]This character was originally voiced by the director’s son, Bruce Reitherman, whose American accent was a big source of contention in England. He was redubbed for The Many Adventures but … Continue reading is seen nailing the donkey’s tail back on and Eeyore swishes it around to make sure it won’t come off again.) The only characters to appear in the first two chapters of Winnie-the-Pooh were Christopher Robin, Pooh and Rabbit but The Honey Tree also features, besides Eeyore, Owl, Kanga and Roo. No Piglet or Tigger though. The latter is understandable since he wasn’t introduced until the second Pooh book, but the former is more eyebrow raising. Apparently, many of the featurette’s English detractors felt that he’d been replaced by the new and distinctly American character of Gopher (Howard Morris)[12]Ernest T. Bass on The Andy Griffith Show. I can’t blame any Milne fan for feeling offended by the idea that Milne’s cast of characters needed an American animal with an American accent and American persona.[13]And, honestly, even if they wanted an animal to appeal to Americans, I feel like the turkey is more iconically American than the gopher. But while he’s not as funny any of the characters from the book, Gopher does have his moments. I love the meta joke about his business not being in the (phone)book and the scene of him almost ruining the extreme weight loss program for Pooh (“Don’t! Feed! The! Bear!”) is my favorite bit specific to this adaptation. When he’s asked to dig Pooh out of Rabbit’s doorway, he takes a good long look at him and says, “The first thing to be done is get rid of that bear! He’s coverin’ up the whole project!” That sounds like an A. A. Milne joke to me.

Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968)

Is it weird that this is my favorite of the three featurettes artistically but my least favorite as an adaptation?

Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day mainly adapts the climactic chapters of Winnie-the-Pooh (the ones In Which Piglet Is Entirely Surrounded by Water and In Which Christopher Robin Gives Pooh a Party and We Say Goodbye) and The House at Pooh Corner (the ones In Which Piglet Does a Very Grand Thing and In Which Eeyore Finds the Wolery and Owl Moves Into It.) In between them, it adapts part of Chapter 2 of The House at Pooh Corner (the one In Which Tigger Comes to the Forest and Has Breakfast.) There’s also a nightmare sequence, one of the few scenes in The Many Adventures that tries to be scary, about Heffalumps and Woozles, imaginary beasts from Chapter 3 and Chapter 5 of Winnie-the-Pooh, (the ones In Which Pooh and Piglet Go Hunting and Nearly Catch a Woozle and In Which Piglet Meets a Heffalump.)[14]We also briefly see Eeyore building a house for himself out of sticks, a reference to the first chapter of The House at Pooh Corner (In Which A House Is Built at Pooh Corner for Eeyore.) The house in … Continue reading

As you can tell by the titles of the chapters, Piglet and Tigger make their Disney debuts here. Tigger is really only the focus of one scene that exists to introduce him for the next featurette, but Piglet is one of the main characters in Blustery Day‘s story which is one of the reasons I’m inclined to favor it. Since I was a Very Small Animal myself as a kid, I related to him. Sure, I wrote above that Piglet is more complex in the book but he’s still great here. John Fiedler’s vocal performance is delightful.

However, I have a problem with how Pooh saving him from the flood is adapted. In the literary Winnie-the-Pooh, Pooh comes up with a clever idea to rescue his friend. This was a great moment for him. In the movie, all he does is happen to be in the same area as him when he’s in danger and wrongly gets credited with saving him by Christopher Robin. Why the filmmakers thought this would make for a better ending is beyond me. To be fair though, since this was only the second Pooh cartoon, it wouldn’t really have had the same effect as it did after an entire book of him being a Bear of Very Little Brain. Neither does Blustery Day include Piglet’s act of bravery that saved Pooh and Owl when they were trapped in Owl’s house in The House at Pooh Corner.[15]Come to think of it, that was also the result of a surprisingly crafty idea on Pooh’s part. Of course, since this was the animated Piglet’s very first appearance onscreen, having him behave uncharacteristically heroic right off the bat would have made even less sense than Pooh behaving uncharacteristically clever so early. The adaptation does include Piglet’s later moment of self-sacrifice, which also ends up being a great moment for Pooh. This was one of the most emotional moments in the books[16]Not that that’s saying much since being emotional is beside the point of most of the Pooh stories. Still, it’s saying something. and the movie does a very nice job with it.

Why is this Pooh featurette my favorite when it makes what I consider such misguided changes to the source material? Well, the songs are even better than the ones in Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree. In particular, I think A Rather Blustery Day and The Rain, Rain, Rain Came Down, Down, Down are underrated gems. And I don’t feel like Blustery Day comes across as lacking in affection for the books. There’s something fun about just how many Pooh stories it crams into its runtime. It also helps that since the main chapters from the books it adapts are the ones where the characters in the most physical danger, relatively speaking, they lend themselves to elaborate Disney-style slapstick comedy better than the chapters adapted by Honey Tree did. Perhaps because of that, the scenes of slapstick are much funnier. I especially love the one with Owl, Pooh and Piglet in Owl’s dangerously swaying tree. All three characters are hilariously in character with Piglet being concerned about the physical danger, Owl being concerned in the family anecdote he’s relating to his guests and Pooh being concerned with getting some honey to eat. Just because it’s slapstick doesn’t mean it can’t be about character.[17]By the way, one of Owl’s speeches has a fun allusion to Edward Lear’s classic nonsense poem, The Owl and the Pussycat.

Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too (1974)

This featurette is mainly based on Chapters 7 and 4 of The House at Pooh Corner, (the ones In Which Tigger is Unbounced and It Is Shown That Tiggers Don’t Climb Trees.) It also inserts Chapter 3 of Winnie-the-Pooh, In Which Pooh and Piglet Go Hunting and Nearly Catch a Woozle.[18]Attentive viewers will note that a snatch of dialogue between Piglet and Pooh in that scene was already used in Blustery Day though with the speakers reversed. Why did I just list Chapter 7 of House at Pooh Corner before Chapter 4? Because the movie puts them in that order. I actually think this change in the chronology works well, making it so that we don’t see Tigger really humbled until after we’ve seen the other characters fail to “unbounce” him.

A side effect of having Chapter 7 take place before Chapter 4 though is that Rabbit can’t be reconciled to Tigger at the same point he does in the book. Well, the movie could have done that, but it would have meant his character arc would have been over halfway through the featurette. Instead, it creates some new drama[19]Well, it’s dramatic compared to the movie’s generally comedic tone. for the characters so that Tigger remains a nuisance to Rabbit and Rabbit remains hostile to Tigger until the end. Happily, I think the added drama works well.

Unlike the other two featurettes, this one only features the characters necessary to the story. Owl, Gopher and Eeyore are all absent even though the last one was present for one of the scenes in the book that Tigger Too adapts. There are also no new songs, only reprises of The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers from Blustery Day. I mean that as an observation, by the way, not a criticism. As much as I enjoy how Blustery Day is crammed with things from the books, there’s something to be said for not forcing characters into a story when you can’t think of anything for them to do. And I’d rather have no new songs than songs that paled in comparisons to those from earlier segments.

The Epilogue

[20]The above image on the left is an allusion to Chapter 5 of The House at Pooh Corner, (the one In Which Rabbit Has a Busy Day and We Learn What Christopher Robin Does in the Mornings.) The one on the … Continue readingThe added ending to The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is a truncated version of the final chapter of The House at Pooh Corner, In Which Christopher Robin and Pooh Come to an Enchanted Place and We Leave Them There. It’s mainly Christopher Robin and Pooh’s final conversation about the joys of doing Nothing, of which Christopher Robin will no longer be able to partake-or not as often anyway. It’s one of the more downbeat endings to a Disney movie.[21]I’ve written before that there was a time when Disney movies didn’t always have happy endings, but that time wasn’t very long and even then, it wasn’t as if Disney movies … Continue reading Being truncated, the scene isn’t as moving as it is in the source material, mainly because the relationship between these two characters hasn’t really been a focus since Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, but it’s still touching.

Conclusion

Actually, “not as great as the source material but still pretty great” is a good summary of my opinion on this adaptation in general. It could be better. Besides the issues I’ve mentioned above, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh could have been improved if the creators had planned the featurettes out as a movie in advance. Then the exciting events in Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day could have functioned as the climax of the whole film just as they did for Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner (respectively.) That would have given them more time to develop Pooh’s relationships with Piglet and Christopher so the few dramatic moments would have packed even more punch.[22]Maybe this is because I haven’t read enough books but the literary Pooh and Piglet’s friendship is actually one of my favorites in literature. There also could have been some foreshadowing of Christopher Robin’s farewell to childhood, as there was in The House at Pooh Corner, so the ending would have come less from nowhere. And I’m miffed that in all these years, Disney has never adapted the third chapter of The House at Pooh Corner (the one In Which A Search Is Organdized and Piglet Nearly Meets the Heffalump Again) e.g. the funniest Pooh story ever!

But it’s not like I’m actually thinking about any of those potential improvements while I’m watching the movie-certainly not stuff about structure! I’m just relaxing and soaking in the charm. Both the original books and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh are appealing to and appropriate for very small children yet have a wit that engages adults too.[23]Also, more adults may find the cuddly stuffed animals appealing than they’d admit. Actually, they’re arguably aimed the most at adults who work or have worked with little kids-well, assuming they look on those kids with some degree of fondness. Such adults have probably met a few Poohs, Piglets, Rabbits and Tiggers in their time-or been one of them themselves. (We were probably all Eeyore at some point in our adolescence.) You could even argue that each of the episodes that make up The Many Adventures represents a different aspect of childhood. Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree is about childish appetites. Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day is about childhood fears. And Tigger Too is about overexuberant kids who drive adults crazy. Hmm, maybe the movie does have a good structure after all.

Any lingering resentment towards The Many Adventures in the UK seems to be less to do with the adaptation itself and more to do with how the Pooh characters have come to be defined in American minds by the Disney versions. I think it’s unfortunate that Disney held onto the copyright so firmly and that we haven’t gotten to see other takes on the material.[24]Well, there were those weird Russian Pooh adaptations. I’d have loved to see what the people who made The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends and The Wind in the Willows (1995) could have done with the Pooh books. They’d likely have captured aspects of them that Disney didn’t and doubtless been more authentically British. But it’s also possible Disney’s hold on the rights to the characters has saved us from less faithful adaptations being made. If The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh has to be The Winnie the Pooh for many people…eh, things could be worse.

I think the text in this image really says it all.

Bibliography

Finch, Christopher. (2000) Winnie the Pooh: A Celebration of the Silly Old Bear. Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Milne, A. A. (1994) The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie-the-Pooh. Dutton Children’s Books.

Kothenschulte, Daniel. (2016) The Walt Disney Film Archives: The Animated Movies 1921-1968. Taschen Books.

References

References
↑1 If it sounds like I’m criticizing this thing for being a cash grab, I’m not. There’s something to be said for fans being able to watch all three featurettes together.
↑2 It should be noted though that those reviews weren’t generally from English critics.
↑3 The very introduction to the first Pooh book brings this up.
↑4 This is the only instance I can recall of the character in Disney’s later spinoffs and tie-ins being closer to the books.
↑5 In 1983, he’d star in a new featurette, Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore but despite adapting some top-notch material from the Pooh books, the visuals, voice acting and comedic timing in that featurette would pale by comparison to the original three.
↑6 By the way, Milne hyphenated Pooh’s full name and Disney didn’t. I’m going to spell it based on which version of the character I mean.
↑7 Or, rather, the contradiction. You have to read it to understand.
↑8 Even Rabbit and Owl who aren’t supposed to be toys, but I digress.
↑9 Though it should be noted that some of the leading animators on The Many Adventures were, mainly Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and Milt Kahl.
↑10 Who says the Pooh books don’t resonate with Americans?
↑11 This character was originally voiced by the director’s son, Bruce Reitherman, whose American accent was a big source of contention in England. He was redubbed for The Many Adventures but I’m not sure by whom. I would assume it was by Timothy Turner who voiced Christopher Robin in the third featurette but according to behind-the-scenes material, John Walmsley, who voiced him in the second one, did his dialogue in the epilogue.
↑12 Ernest T. Bass on The Andy Griffith Show.
↑13 And, honestly, even if they wanted an animal to appeal to Americans, I feel like the turkey is more iconically American than the gopher.
↑14 We also briefly see Eeyore building a house for himself out of sticks, a reference to the first chapter of The House at Pooh Corner (In Which A House Is Built at Pooh Corner for Eeyore.) The house in the movie is less fortunate than the one in the book, not that Eeyore would expect anything better.
↑15 Come to think of it, that was also the result of a surprisingly crafty idea on Pooh’s part.
↑16 Not that that’s saying much since being emotional is beside the point of most of the Pooh stories. Still, it’s saying something.
↑17 By the way, one of Owl’s speeches has a fun allusion to Edward Lear’s classic nonsense poem, The Owl and the Pussycat.
↑18 Attentive viewers will note that a snatch of dialogue between Piglet and Pooh in that scene was already used in Blustery Day though with the speakers reversed.
↑19 Well, it’s dramatic compared to the movie’s generally comedic tone.
↑20 The above image on the left is an allusion to Chapter 5 of The House at Pooh Corner, (the one In Which Rabbit Has a Busy Day and We Learn What Christopher Robin Does in the Mornings.) The one on the right is an homage to an illustration from Now We Are Six, one accompanying the poem Us Two.
↑21 I’ve written before that there was a time when Disney movies didn’t always have happy endings, but that time wasn’t very long and even then, it wasn’t as if Disney movies always ended tragically.
↑22 Maybe this is because I haven’t read enough books but the literary Pooh and Piglet’s friendship is actually one of my favorites in literature.
↑23 Also, more adults may find the cuddly stuffed animals appealing than they’d admit.
↑24 Well, there were those weird Russian Pooh adaptations.
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How Bad of an Adaptation is The Black Cauldron?

Posted on August 8, 2025 by stationmaster

The Chronicles of Prydain are a series of children’s fantasy adventure novels from the 1960s by Lloyd Alexander. They are beloved largely because of their characterizations. The Black Cauldron (1985) is an animated movie adaptation of the first two books in the series.[1]The title of the first of which is The Book of Three by the way. It is…not beloved.

Well, that’s not entirely true. The film does have something of a cult following but it’s also generally considered a terrible adaptation, unworthy of the source material. Since I just said the characters were the main thing that made the books great, you’d assume that the movie is really untrue to them.

But that is less true than you’d think.

The titular cauldron is a magical artifact capable on creating an unstoppable army of deathless warriors. One of the only beings who knows the cauldron’s location is Hen Wen, an oracular pig. Wait. An oracular pig? Yeah, that’s a thing from Welsh mythology which served as the inspiration for the Prydain books. As I was saying, the villainous Horned King (voiced by John Hurt) seeks Hen Wen so he can use her to find the cauldron and use that to conquer the entire land of Prydain or possibly the world. Hen Wen’s caretaker, the old enchanter Dalben (Freddie Jones), divines this threat and sends his assistant, an ambitious young boy called Taran (Grant Bardsley), to take the pig to a safe hiding place. Stuff happens, Taran gains a motley crew of companions, and his quest evolves from hiding Hen Wen into trying to destroy the black cauldron itself before the Horned King finds it.

Most of the characters’ personalities and character arcs are the same as in the books. Taran still starts out complaining about his humdrum life and dreaming of glory in battle. He still messes up and feels guilty. He still learns the cost of true heroism and becomes maturer and more selfless. Gurgi (John Byner), the short hairy creature Taran picks up on his travels, still starts out a groveling, cowardly mercenary with a huge appetite and still ends up becoming a genuinely good and helpful friend. Fflewddur Fflam (Nigel Hawthorne), the boastful wandering bard[2]Sorry about all these unpronounceable names. Welsh, you know? still has his magic harp with the strings that break whenever he lies or exaggerates. Princess Eilonwy (Susie Sheridan) is still blunt, chatty and unflappable in the face of danger.[3]Well, she’s a bit less unflappable than in the books but I’m willing to believe that’s because the action scenes wouldn’t work as well if she didn’t display any fear. She still has a magical golden bauble that glows in the dark. She still offends Taran’s pride with her blunt words, and he still offends hers by not being immediately grateful for her help and speaking disparagingly of girls. They still make up and Eilonwy still ends up encouraging Taran when he’s feeling useless, and their friendship still becomes something more. The notes are all here. But there’s no music.

That’s largely because of the writing[4]This movie had so many writers, I’m not going to bother mentioning all their names. which includes little of Lloyd Alexander’s dialogue. To be fair, his distinctly literary humor, such as Eilonwy’s speech patterns (“It’s like putting your fingers in your ears and jumping down a well.” “That’s like asking someone to a feast, then making them wash the dishes!”), might not have translated well onscreen. Gurgi at least keeps his verbal tick of speaking of himself in third person, and he says “smackings and whackings” and “munchings and crunchings” a couple of times. But not only does the movie not have time to develop his character properly but the voice John Byner gives him is highly annoying. True, he’s supposed to start out that way, but he’s supposed to wind up being endearing and, for me anyway, the film never accomplishes that part.

Fflewddur’s characteristic exclamation from the books (“Great Belin!”) makes it into the movie.[5]Belin is a god from Welsh mythology. But he’s not a quarter as funny or endearing as he is in the text. Well, OK, maybe he’s a quarter as funny and endearing. Hawthorne’s vocal performance is one of the better ones in the movie and there’s one really funny moment where he covers his harp’s magical strings with his hand right before they explode from his bluster.

Here it is.

As Taran and Eilonwy however, Bardsley and Sheridan give two of the worst vocal performances I have ever heard in a Disney movie. Some of their line readings are flat and some of them are overdramatic. Were these really the best actors who auditioned for the roles? But to be fair, neither of them is given much help by the bland, boring writing. I know that the serious characters in animated Disney movies, such as the various fairy tales princes, are generally regarded as boring. But most of those movies don’t focus much on the serious characters. (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs focuses more on the dwarfs, Cinderella more on the mice, Sleeping Beauty more on the fairies, etc.) The Black Cauldron, on the other hand, really wants to be about Taran’s character arc and his relationships with the other characters and those things were very compelling in the original books. But the versions in this movie are horribly dull.

Speaking of animated Disney movies, I believe this was the first one not to be some sort of musical. I’ve gone on record as saying that I don’t believe kids demand musical numbers from all their entertainment as some seem to think but it recently occurred to me that The Black Cauldron might actually have benefited from being a musical. Assuming the songs were good, which is admittedly a bit of a gamble, Taran singing about wanting to be a hero at the beginning would likely be much more engaging than him just talking about it to no one in particular. He mostly just comes across as whiny.[6]Imagine if in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Belle just walked around her yard, complaining about how boring her town was, instead of singing about it. True, Taran is supposed to start out as whiny and grow into a better person, but a song with eloquent lyrics and a memorable tune would do more to make us sympathize with him even in his whininess.

Other characters are similarly true to the broad outlines of their literary counterparts without capturing their charm. Dalben is as critical of Taran’s immaturity as he is in the books but not nearly as insightful or witty. The three witches of Morva more or less keep the dynamic they had in the books with Orwen (Adele Malis-Morey) being more girlish, Orgoch (Billie Hayes) being more evil[7]The witches claim to be more amoral than immoral in the books but Orgoch certainly comes close. and Ordu (Eda Reiss Marin) being the most levelheaded and the trio’s spokeswoman. But they’re simply not very funny.

I have no idea why the character designs for Dalben and Fflewddur are so similar by the way.

Ironically, the best character in the movie is the one who’s technically the most changed from the book. The Horned King is a combination of various antagonists from The Chronicles of Prydain, but he makes for a great villain. John Hurt’s vocal performance is easily the best in the film and even when he’s not speaking, the Horned King is a chilling presence. The Black Cauldron becomes infinitely more gripping whenever he’s onscreen.

The adaptation’s other problems are generally more what you’d expect: the results of squashing the first two books in a series into one story. There are a lot of gestures towards a larger mythology that never get explained. How exactly is Eilonwy a princess? What’s with her golden bauble? How did Taran end up living with Dalben? Those and other questions are answered by the books, but the movie raises questions of its own that it doesn’t answer. For example, Taran refers to a war in his first scene, but we never learn any more about that. There’s no explanation for the black cauldron’s behavior in the story’s climax beyond the movie wanting an action-packed finale and needing a way to dispose of the villain.[8]I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to reveal that the villain of a children’s movie dies. Because Gurgi doesn’t have his magical wallet of never-ending food, he doesn’t have anything besides an apple core in the scene where all the heroes offer to sacrifice their most prized possession for the cauldron, weakening the dramatic moment.[9]Eilonwy still has her bauble, but she doesn’t offer it in the movie. What’s up with that?

All of Taran’s mentors besides Dalben are cut. To be fair, none of them were the most fun characters and I can see why you’d want to cut them if you absolutely had to turn the first two Prydain books into an eighty-minute movie but the result is that Taran is given no role models in humble heroism, weakening his arc.[10]It’s also kind of weird that he’s called an assistant pig keeper when he seems to be the only pig keeper. The worst omission is that of Prince Ellidyr, one of the most memorable characters from the literary Black Cauldron. Without him, neither Taran’s heroic sacrifice nor the resolution are anywhere near as interesting. On the plus side, if the first two Prydain stories absolutely had to be melded into one and none of the others adapted, giving the sword Dyrnwyn the role of Adaon’s broach makes sense.

A character whom the adaptation really does dirty is Doli (also John Byner) of the Fair Folk.[11]The Fair Folk in general are some of the least faithfully adapted characters in the movie, being much cutesier and friendlier to humans than in the books. Lloyd Alexander’s version was definitely a prickly curmudgeon, but he never abandoned the heroes as he does in the movie. He was separated from them in the book The Black Cauldron, but he returned in the end to rescue them. The film gives that role to Gurgi. It doesn’t seem to want Doli to be unsympathetic though as its final moments show him inexplicably watching the heroes with approval. Would it have killed the filmmakers to have him actually do something to redeem himself?

I’m probably making the movie sound unwatchably bad which it really isn’t. There just aren’t many reasons to watch it. Some of the action scenes are enjoyably suspenseful. The music by Elmer Bernstein has its good moments though much of it is too cacophonous for my taste.[12]There’s also a weird moment when after an effectively ominous prologue (narrated by John Huston) explaining the cauldron’s evil, we cut to the movie’s title and the score suddenly … Continue reading The backgrounds are fine though I’m mystified that some critics praise the film’s visuals even if they criticize its story.

These are some of the few I’d describe as downright beautiful.

For a while, The Black Cauldron was described as Disney’s worst animated movie[13]As in their worst movie to be animated, not the movie with the worst animation., from its main animation studio anyway. I haven’t watched every one of their animated movies and neither do I intend to do so, so I can’t speak with authority, but I still feel like that’s fair. There are other Disney cartoons with more annoying aspects, but this one is the most lifeless and dull of any of them.[14]I did end up seeing the recent Wish which many on the internet were denouncing as a trainwreck-largely for good reasons in my opinion. But while The Black Cauldron‘s basic premise is much … Continue reading It’s a shambling zombie of a Disney movie.

One of the only things about it with a little flair is the character animation and even that’s largely misguided flair. The characters are prone to flailing around and making constant sweeping gestures which are easier for animators but distracting to watch. This movie also has some of the unfunniest slapstick to appear in an animated Disney film.

Fans of the Prydain books have long lamented that this is the only noteworthy adaptation of them out there and rightfully so. Hopefully, someone will give it another shot someday.

References

References
↑1 The title of the first of which is The Book of Three by the way.
↑2 Sorry about all these unpronounceable names. Welsh, you know?
↑3 Well, she’s a bit less unflappable than in the books but I’m willing to believe that’s because the action scenes wouldn’t work as well if she didn’t display any fear.
↑4 This movie had so many writers, I’m not going to bother mentioning all their names.
↑5 Belin is a god from Welsh mythology.
↑6 Imagine if in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Belle just walked around her yard, complaining about how boring her town was, instead of singing about it.
↑7 The witches claim to be more amoral than immoral in the books but Orgoch certainly comes close.
↑8 I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to reveal that the villain of a children’s movie dies.
↑9 Eilonwy still has her bauble, but she doesn’t offer it in the movie. What’s up with that?
↑10 It’s also kind of weird that he’s called an assistant pig keeper when he seems to be the only pig keeper.
↑11 The Fair Folk in general are some of the least faithfully adapted characters in the movie, being much cutesier and friendlier to humans than in the books.
↑12 There’s also a weird moment when after an effectively ominous prologue (narrated by John Huston) explaining the cauldron’s evil, we cut to the movie’s title and the score suddenly turns from being ominous to strangely celebratory.
↑13 As in their worst movie to be animated, not the movie with the worst animation.
↑14 I did end up seeing the recent Wish which many on the internet were denouncing as a trainwreck-largely for good reasons in my opinion. But while The Black Cauldron‘s basic premise is much better than Wish‘s confusing and unrelatable one, Wish at least has a consistently strong voice cast and a little pizzazz.
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Adaptation Station Blog Posts That Were Not to Be

Posted on July 25, 2025 by stationmaster

Waste not, want not, I suppose. Scott Cramer, a YouTuber whom I like[1]Partially because we’re both North Dakotans., once did a video about ideas he had for YouTube videos which he ultimately never made for various reasons. This allowed him to make use of some of the best lines he would have used in those videos and give fans an interesting look at the behind-the-scenes process. I thought it’d be fun to do a blog post like that, so here are some concepts for blog posts that I’ve reluctantly rejected-well, rejected so far anyway. There’s no reason I couldn’t still take one and make a blog post out of it. If my readers are particularly intrigued by any, they should tell me and maybe-just maybe-I’ll expand on them.

Without further ado, here in no particular order are The Adaptation Station.com’s posts that weren’t.

The Best Guilty Pleasures About Which I’ve Blogged

You may have noticed I like to make lists looking back on movies, miniseries, etc. that I’ve done over the years. I thought it would be fun to do a lookback list of a very specific kind of movie: the guilty pleasure. Different people have different definitions of that but mine is a piece of entertainment which I’d have to say is more bad than good if I were to neutrally add up all its strengths and weaknesses but which I also happen to really enjoy even if I have a difficult time justifying the extent of that enjoyment. This is distinct from a piece of entertainment that’s a mixed bag in that there’s an element of embarrassment in my pleasure and it’s distinct from the so-bad-it’s-good pleasure in that there are things about guilty pleasures that I honestly believe are high quality. It’s just that the low-quality aspects should be bad enough in theory to keep me from revisiting those pleasures as often as I do. The concept may sound confusing, but I think a lot of people have “favorites” like this. I can think of three adaptations about which I’ve blogged that fit the criteria. In alphabetical order, those adaptations are Disney’s A Christmas Carol (2009), Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella (1997) and Peter Pan (2003.)

Ranking them for a Best Guilty Pleasures list gets difficult though. By a better guilty pleasure do I mean something that gives me more pleasure or more guilt? And what about other, less clear, guilty pleasures The Adaptation Station.com has covered? A big part of me feels I shouldn’t like Prince Caspian (2008) as much as I do considering the major changes it makes to the original story and characters. But there are very few scenes or lines in it that I find silly as I do scenes and lines in the aforementioned GPs. My guilt is more academic and theoretical with that one. Much the same could be said of Into the Woods (2014) though I’m less of a fan of the original stage play than I am of the Narnia books, so both my guilt and my pleasure are less intense. And what about things that are sort of the opposite of guilty pleasures, movies like Return to Oz that I feel I should enjoy much more than I actually do? Should they be included on the list or should they get their own post? What ultimately dissuaded me from a blog post about The Adaptation Station’s top guilty pleasures though was that I believe my original posts about the three adaptations that I’m confident would make the list already do a good job explaining why they’re guilty pleasures for me. To write more would just be repetitive.[2]Indeed, this blog has returned to the 2003 Peter Pan far more often than it has to either the more consistently faithful 1924 one or the more consistently entertaining 2000 one. I guess that’s … Continue reading

Alice in Wonderland (1999)

You know, I’ve blogged about all the adaptations in my blog’s header image except for Alice in Wonderland (1951.) I’ve loved that movie ever since I saw it as a kid, but I don’t have any ideas for blog posts about it. If I were to do a post about an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, it would be about Hallmark Entertainment’s star-studded 1999 TV movie directed by Nick Willing, which I also saw and loved as a kid. In fact, I preferred it to the 1951 movie since it included more from the books.[3]Though a downside of that is that the 1999 movie threatens to drag. In general, I really like Hallmark Entertainment’s adaptations of classic fantasies from the 90s and early 2000s (cf. Gulliver’s Travels. The Odyssey. A Christmas Carol. Arabian Nights. Snow White: The Fairest of Them All.) and I wish more adaptations nowadays would strive to be like them. To my mind, Alice in Wonderland might be their masterpiece. It’s full of fun performances and has a superbly witty script by playwright Peter Barnes. (“Last time, the whole audience hissed. Hissed! All except one man who was applauding the hissing.”) You wouldn’t necessarily think of this as being an asset to an Alice in Wonderland adaptation, but it also has an absolutely beautiful musical score courtesy of Richard Hartley.[4]He also did the soundtrack for the 2012 Great Expectations by the way. The White Knight (Christopher Lloyd)’s farewell to Alice (Tina Majorino) is oddly moving, largely because of that music.

Actually, the reason I’m not doing a blog post about the movie (unless someone insists) is that I love it so much. Except for a few small criticisms, I fear it would be one of those posts where I’m like, “this is great. That’s great. Those are great too.” Sometimes I’ll do a rave review on this blog or alternatively a post just ripping an adaptation I hate to shred but while those can be fun to write, the blog posts I think are most interesting to read tend to be about mixed bags or guilty pleasures. The most interesting part of my hypothetical post about the 1999 Alice in Wonderland would be the part comparing it to the 1985 miniseries and the 2010 movie, the latter of which acts as a fanfiction-y sequel of sorts to the Alice books. All three give Alice a character arc in which her adventures teach her to be more courageous.[5]The parallels between the 1999 and 2010 movies are particularly striking. At the beginning of both, Alice is being pressured into doing something at a garden party against her will for the sake of … Continue reading I’d argue that the fact that the original stories didn’t have any such message was something that made them stand out from other Victorian children’s books. To give them a point is to miss the point, so to speak. What’s more, I never got the impression from the books that Alice was someone who suffered from timidity. She usually tried to be polite but when confronted with something that really offended her sensibilities, such as crockery being thrown at babies or sentences before verdicts or books without pictures, she never hesitated to speak out against them. However, I love how the added character arc ultimately plays out in the 1999 movie. It strikes me as much truer to what makes the original Alice a cool character than the climaxes of the 1985 and 2010 adaptations.

Adaptations of J. M. Barrie’s Works Besides Peter Pan

Despite writing about so many adaptations of famous stories on this blog, I really do like to draw attention to great pieces of art with which people generally aren’t familiar. The only famous thing playwright J. M. Barrie created is Peter Pan-or, at least, that’s the only thing he created that’s famous nowadays and I’d argue his other works deserve better. I’ve thought about doing a blog post about movie adaptations of his other plays. The problem is I haven’t really found that many movie adaptations of those other plays. There’s The Little Minister (1934), an impossible romance between a straightlaced minister (John Beal) and a wild gypsy girl (Katharine Hepburn)-or so she seems to be-set against the backdrop of the labor disputes in 1840s Scotland. The thing about The Little Minister though is that Barrie wrote both a novel version and a play version and I’d want to be familiar with both before I wrote a blog post about it. Unlike Peter Pan however, I haven’t been able to get into the novel version of The Little Minister. I probably could get through it with an effort but there are so many other books I’d like to read now instead. Any Little Minister post will be a long time coming. There are also adaptations of Barrie’s romantic comedies, Quality Street (1937), also starring Hepburn, and What Every Woman Knows (1934) starring Helen Hayes. All I have to say about those movies is that they’re good but not as great as the original plays deserve.

The non-Peter Pan Barrie adaptation out of which I’d probably be able to spin the longest blog post is The Admirable Crichton (1957), the story of Lord Loam (Cecil Parker), an English peer of the realm with egalitarian ideals, and Crichton (Kenneth More), his butler who firmly believes in social hierarchies. While Lord Loam enjoys shocking people with his radical beliefs, he really loves being in charge too much to honestly like the concept of equality. And while Crichton believes that hierarchies are inevitable, he doesn’t believe that the specific hierarchy they have in England is the only possible one. Everyone’s ideological commitments are challenged when Lord Loam, his three daughters (Sally Ann Howes, Mercy Haystead and Miranda Connell), two of their boyfriends (Jack Watling and Gerald Harper), Crichton and another servant (Diane Cilento) are shipwrecked on an uncharted island and have to create their own civilization. The movie’s casting is great, but the writing isn’t particularly. Very little of Barrie’s dialogue is used and the script is not the better for it. While most of the story is the same as in the play, what changes there are make the comedy less funny and the story less effective. The only alteration I really like is giving Cilento’s character a happier ending than the play does-and I even have reservations about that since it also means giving Crichton a happier ending. Still, I don’t hate the movie or anything. It’s just that if I blogged about it, it’d be one of those posts that are really excuses for me to write about the original, not the adaptation.

Three Hans Christian Andersen Movies

Did you know there have been at least three movies that tell stories about Hans Christian Andersen-or a fictionalized version of him anyway-interspersed with retellings of some of his stories? To paraphrase Dr. Doofenshmirtz, that’s not a lot but it’s weird that it’s happened more than once. In the 1952 musical starring Danny Kaye, Andersen is an eccentric cobbler who is kicked out of Odense because the stories he tells distract the children from their schoolwork.[6]While the real Andersen was a cobbler-or, more accurately, the son of a cobbler-from Odense, he didn’t get along well with children and was very offended by the design for a statue of himself … Continue reading He goes to Copenhagen where he gets a job making ballet slippers for a ballerina (Zizi Jeanmarie) and eventually gets a publishing deal for his stories. Those stories are told in songs by Frank Loesser. In The Daydreamer (1966), one of a handful of theatrically released movies made by Rankin/Bass productions, a young Hans Christian Andersen (Paul O’ Keefe)-or Chris as he’s called-goes on a search for the Garden of Paradise e.g. Eden. The Sandman (voiced by Cyril Ritchard)[7]Or Ole Lukoie as he’s called in Danish. Maria Tatar’s English translation of Andersen dubs him Ole Shuteye. sends him dreams, depicted in stop motion animation, that show him he’s no less susceptible to temptation than Adam and Eve were and that give him the inspiration for the stories he will write. Hallmark Entertainment’s Hans Christian Andersen: My Life as a Fairy Tale (2003) is the only one of these movies[8]OK, technically, it’s a three-hour miniseries but on DVD, it plays like a three-hour movie. to be a straight biopic of Andersen though, after the fashion of films that are “based on a true story,” it definitely shouldn’t be used as a legitimate source. His stories are depicted in fantasy sequences with Andersen (Kieran Bew) and the people in his life cast as the characters.[9]I’m cynical about the way author biopics always depict their subjects’ famous work as directly inspired by their life experiences. Don’t they think authors ever use their … Continue reading

I thought it’d be interesting to compare and contrast these three movies but on reflection, apart from their basic premise, I feel like they don’t have enough in common for that. Sure, they feature a number of the same fairy tales but the only one to get an equal amount of attention in all three is The Little Mermaid. If there’s anything else they all have in common, it’s that while they don’t include Andersen’s least likeable traits[10]This is even true of the semi-accurate My Life as a Fairy Tale., none of them portray him as perfect either. The characters whose place he takes in The Daydreamer and Hans Christian Andersen: My Life as a Fairy Tale tend to be, well, not negative ones per se but ones who unintentionally hurt others like the prince in The Little Mermaid or Kai in The Snow Queen. The 1952 Hans Christian Andersen and My Life as a Fairy Tale each have a scene where another character accuses him of confusing stories with real life. I’m not sure what the overall thesis of a blog post about the films would be besides that Hans Christian Andersen: My Life is a Fairy Tale is the best of them by a long shot. I don’t say that because it takes more from the author’s real life than the other two by the way. I don’t really care much about historical accuracy. It’s just that My Life as a Fairy Tale is a wonderful movie and Hans Christian Andersen and The Daydreamer are simply average.

My Favorite Novels Based on Greek/Roman Mythology

I can think of at least three books adapted from Classical myths that I love. The first, Greek Heroes by Geraldine McCaughrean, is actually a compilation of four children’s novellas, each about a famous mythic adventurer. Those adventurers are Perseus, Hercules[11]Yeah, he’s called by his Roman name while everyone else is called by their Greek name. Deal with it., Theseus and Odysseus.[12]Part of me wishes McCaughrean had also done one about Jason-which in itself is a tribute to the series’ quality since only a few incidents in his story really capture my imagination. For more mature readers, I’d recommend a pair of novels by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen, The God Beneath the Sea and The Golden Shadow.[13]Garfield and Blishen saw themselves as writing for young readers but I’d automatically consider them for young adults at least since while they don’t get graphic whenever sexual assault … Continue reading The first is more about the gods and covers such famous myths as those of Pandora, Persephone and Sisyphus. The second is more about mortals and demigods. It mainly follows the life of Heracles, but it also tells the stories of his brother-in-law, Meleager, and Atalanta since you can’t get into Meleager’s story without getting into Atalanta’s. Last but not least, I’d heartily recommend Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C. S. Lewis, which reimagines the Roman myth of Cupid and Psyche[14]Well, truth be told, it’s more of a fairy tale than a myth but who cares? from the perspective of Psyche’s antagonistic sister, here named Orual. Longtime readers may remember I’m skeptical about reimaginings of famous villains that make them misunderstood, but the idea was more original when Lewis used it and Till We Have Faces is so great it transcends the trope.

Part of the reason I’m holding off on this idea is that I’m not sure if Greek Heroes really deserves to be ranked beside the other three books. While its prose is certainly lush and engaging, it can’t compete with the utter beauty of The God Beneath the Sea, The Golden Shadow or Till We Have Faces.[15]In general, I consider Leon Garfield one of the best prose writers ever. Yet it’s endeared itself to me more than some other novels based on mythology that are more adult or more interestingly written. If nothing else, it deserves credit for how many little details from ancient sources it includes, such as blood dripping from Medusa’s head planting snakes in the desert or Theseus being mistaken for a girl when he first arrives in Athens. Clearly, Geraldine McCaughrean did her research. Another thing that holds me back from making this idea into a real blog post is that I’m not sure if adapting one form of literature (ancient myths) into another form of literature (modern novels) is as interesting as adapting literature into movies, plays, etc. I have blogged about remade movies though so there’s that precedent. However, since so much of my love for these books is due to their succulent prose I fear the blog post would end up being mainly a series of quotations. Is that what anyone wants to read? On a more hopeful note, there is actually a major parallel between The Golden Shadow and Till We Have Faces. (Major spoilers!) Both the character of the old storyteller in the former and Orual in the latter are desperate to find evidence of the divine but their skeptical minds, in The Golden Shadow‘s words, “would helplessly destroy it even as (they) found it.” Later, the storyteller comes to see his life as random and meaningless and Orual comes to see the gods as her sadistic tormenters but from the larger perspective the readers are granted, they can see that their lives are actually part of a divine plan. And while the divine plan in The Golden Shadow may not be as consistently benevolent as the one in Till We Have Faces, neither is it completely lacking in benevolence. Like most of Leon Garfield’s work, his adaptations of mythology get very dark but are ultimately uplifting.

The Reluctant Dragon (1941)

Remember my Animation Station series on what I christened Disney’s Anim-Anthology Movies? Probably not but I really enjoyed writing them. It occurred to me afterwards that The Reluctant Dragon (1941), a Disney movie of a similar vintage, is also a collection of animated shorts. It depicts humorist Robert Benchley going to the Disney studio to pitch The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame of Wind in the Willows fame as a cartoon. As he wanders around the studio, he meets various (actors portraying) staff members, learns about the process of animation and sees three cartoons.[16]During this time, the Disney company was going through a bitter animators’ strike, so the portrait painted by the movie is much rosier than real life. I know what you’re thinking. … Continue reading The best of those, by the way, is actually not the titular cartoon but Baby Weems which is about an infant genius who becomes a celebrity to his loving parents’ dismay. None of the three shorts are bad though. I believe I was entirely justified in not including The Reluctant Dragon in my series on Anim-Anthologies since it’s really more a live action movie with a lot of animation than an animated movie with a lot of live action. Also, the series was pretty long as it was for something that didn’t get a lot of positive reader response. Still, The Reluctant Dragon, while no forgotten masterpiece, is a fun little historical curiosity and I’d enjoy recapping it.

So what do you guys think? Are there are any of these ideas you’d like to see me expand into full length blog posts? What about any you think sound terrible and are glad I didn’t make into full length blog posts? I’d love to hear from you.

References

References
↑1 Partially because we’re both North Dakotans.
↑2 Indeed, this blog has returned to the 2003 Peter Pan far more often than it has to either the more consistently faithful 1924 one or the more consistently entertaining 2000 one. I guess that’s just the way it is with guilty pleasures.
↑3 Though a downside of that is that the 1999 movie threatens to drag.
↑4 He also did the soundtrack for the 2012 Great Expectations by the way.
↑5 The parallels between the 1999 and 2010 movies are particularly striking. At the beginning of both, Alice is being pressured into doing something at a garden party against her will for the sake of her family and at the end of both, she finds a way to be her own person without letting them down.
↑6 While the real Andersen was a cobbler-or, more accurately, the son of a cobbler-from Odense, he didn’t get along well with children and was very offended by the design for a statue of himself that portrayed him as reading to children on his knees.
↑7 Or Ole Lukoie as he’s called in Danish. Maria Tatar’s English translation of Andersen dubs him Ole Shuteye.
↑8 OK, technically, it’s a three-hour miniseries but on DVD, it plays like a three-hour movie.
↑9 I’m cynical about the way author biopics always depict their subjects’ famous work as directly inspired by their life experiences. Don’t they think authors ever use their imaginations? But I really like how this plays out in My Life as a Fairy Tale.
↑10 This is even true of the semi-accurate My Life as a Fairy Tale.
↑11 Yeah, he’s called by his Roman name while everyone else is called by their Greek name. Deal with it.
↑12 Part of me wishes McCaughrean had also done one about Jason-which in itself is a tribute to the series’ quality since only a few incidents in his story really capture my imagination.
↑13 Garfield and Blishen saw themselves as writing for young readers but I’d automatically consider them for young adults at least since while they don’t get graphic whenever sexual assault is a plot point, as it often is in Greek mythology, they don’t try to whitewash it either.
↑14 Well, truth be told, it’s more of a fairy tale than a myth but who cares?
↑15 In general, I consider Leon Garfield one of the best prose writers ever.
↑16 During this time, the Disney company was going through a bitter animators’ strike, so the portrait painted by the movie is much rosier than real life. I know what you’re thinking. Hollywood giving a sanitized portrayal of something? And Disney of all studios? I am shocked, I tell you! Utterly shocked!
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Speaking of Snow White Movies…

Posted on July 19, 2025 by stationmaster

I first saw Hallmark Entertainment’s Snow White: The Fairest of Them All (2001) before I was ten years old. It would be a long time before I got to watch it again, so it loomed large in my childhood imagination. Personally, I thought it was better than the 1937 animated Disney movie since it felt more like the kind of fairy tale I got from the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen. Being a kid, I appreciated that it was more adult than a Disney fairy tale but wasn’t so dark or adult, like, say, Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997), that I couldn’t watch it. Indeed, some young children are less likely to be scared by the subtle eeriness of Fairest of Them All than they are by the more melodramatic scariness of the Disney movie. However, now that I’m finally able to rewatch the movie whenever I please as an adult, I must admit that Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the more consistently great movie. That’s not to say Snow White: The Fairest of Them All is never great though and I’m still more of a fan of how it adapts the original fairy tale.

The story begins with a peasant woman (Vera Farmiga), living out in the woods with only her husband (Tom Irwin, one of the movie’s less well cast actors) for company, wishing for a child with lips as red as blood and skin as white as snow. The woman’s wish is granted but unfortunately, she dies the same night. Her husband has to take his newborn baby to the next village to save her life, but they’re waylaid by a snowstorm. The man’s tears free a spirit (Clancy Brown) from a frozen lake.

As a reward, it grants him three wishes. The first wish is for milk for Baby Snow White. Then the spirit grants his joking request for a kingdom to rule. It can’t bring his wife back from the dead, but it does bring him another beautiful woman (Miranda Richardson)[1]Who played a similar character on an episode of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. to be his queen.

What the spirit doesn’t tell the newmade king is that this woman is actually his sister who used to be an ugly witch until he gave her a magical mirror.[2]It seems to be relatively common for modern Snow White reimaginings have the evil queen start off as plain or even ugly and use magic to make herself more beautiful. cf. Mirrored by Alex Flinn and … Continue reading She uses shards of the mirror to enchant the king’s eyes and heart.[3]A hint of The Snow Queen. As a result, Snow White (Kristin Kreuk) grows up such a neglected, lonely child that she talks to the lawn gnomes, never guessing they’re really…. well, I’ve explained enough to give you an idea of how the script by frequent Tim Burton collaborators, Caroline Thompson (who also directs) and Julie Hickson embellishes the story.

Most Snow White adaptations even if they claim to be based on the tale as told by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm are really based more on the Disney movie. I appreciate that that’s less true of this one than most. Two of the seven dwarfs’ personalities might be homages to Grumpy and Dopey but it’s subtle enough that it might be a coincidence. And if it’s not a coincidence, who cares? The movie includes the disturbing detail of the evil queen eating what she believes to be Snow White’s heart[4]Well, actually, it was her lungs and liver in Grimm. I don’t know if the Disney movie was the first to have the queen request her heart or if some other translation or adaptation did that first. and makes it more disturbing by having her almost trick Snow White’s father into eating it too.[5]Something borrowed from another Grimm tale, The Juniper Tree, as well as several classical myths. It doesn’t include the incident of the poisoned comb, but it does include Snow White being almost choked to death and the dwarfs saving her. This is the only Snow White movie to my knowledge that keeps the detail of the queen only poisoning half the famous apple and eating the safe half herself to win Snow White’s confidence.[6]Though the 2012 movie, Mirror Mirror, does have a little allusion to this in its last scene.

Some of the changes to the source material this adaptation has in common with the Disney one are more due to practicality than a lack of imagination, mainly having Snow White meet the prince (Tyron Leitso) long before the climax. He sort of awakens her with a kiss at the end, as has become the norm for retellings despite it not being that way in Grimm, though it’s not clear if that’s what breaks the spell upon her. (I don’t want to spoil more I’ve already spoiled.)

The seven dwarfs are portrayed here as nature/weather spirits. (Instead of putting Snow White’s comatose body in a glass coffin, they freeze it in a block of ice.) Each of them wears one of the colors of the rainbow and when they stand side by side in the correct order, they can travel across the sky in the shape of one. This looks rather cheesy, but I like how it plays into the plot. And I enjoy how their names and personalities are modeled after the nursery rhyme:

Monday’s child (Michael Gilden) is fair of face
Tuesday’s child (Mark J. Trombino) is full of grace
Wednesday’s child (Vincent Schiavelli) is full of woe[7]He’s the one who might be a stand in for Grumpy.
Thursday’s child (Penny Blake) has far to go[8]Dopey.
Friday’s child (Martin Klebba)[9]Who would go on to play a dwarf in two unrelated Snow White movies. is loving and giving
Saturday’s child (Warwick Davis) works hard for a living
But the child that is born on the Sabbath day (Michael J. Anderson)
Is fair and wise and good and gay.

As far as comic relief goes, these dwarfs may not be as hilarious as the Disney ones, but that kind of broad, cartoony humor wouldn’t have fit with this movie’s tone. The dwarfs do have some fun moments and a few good serious ones too, mainly the scene of them mourning over the seemingly dead Snow White.

I described their rainbow as looking cheesy. While this movie naturally has the effects of a made-for-TV movie from the early 2000s, that being what it is, I think the visuals generally hold up well. I’ve mentioned on this blog before that I feel like the CGI in popcorn movies these days actually looks less convincing than it did years ago.[10]From what I hear this is because the CGI people are so overworked. So Snow White: The Fairest of Them All actually strikes me as no harder on the eyes than Snow White (2025.) The film’s locations and its production design (courtesy of David Brisbin) are lovely.

I wish the costumes by Nancy Bryant looked more lived-in, but their designs are great. Michael Convertino’s soundtrack is beautiful too.[11]He also scored Faerie Tale Theatre‘s excellent Aladdin episode. Even in intense or dramatic scenes, it tends to sound quite pleasant and peaceful. Some may find that a distraction and it’s not what I would have done if I’d been the movie’s director. But to me, it fits in with the film’s odd, dreamlike atmosphere.

Interestingly, this version of Snow White implies that the verdicts of the magic mirror may not be as objective as the queen thinks. At a party one night, the queen is disconcerted to find that however she tries to attract the attention of the handsome visiting prince, he’s more interested in her stepdaughter.[12]This is arguably reminiscent of the beginning of The Blue Bird, a lesser-known French fairy tale. She retires to her apartment and nervously asks the mirror who is the fairest woman of all. It replies that it’s Snow White although the answer was the queen herself merely one night ago when she was confident. So, either Snow White grew significantly more beautiful in just one day or the mirror is reflecting the queen’s own thoughts. “She was no threat until you imagined her to be one,” someone tells her later in the movie. It’s an interesting interpretation though the fact that the mirror is able to tell the queen Snow White is alive when she believes her to be dead muddies it. The beautiful queen’s disguise as an ugly old hag in the Disney movie is unforgettable and I don’t have a problem with it. After all, it makes sense that a character with such a high opinion of her own looks would think an ugly person the best disguise. But I’m fond of Fairest of Them All‘s more subtly unnerving version where she disguises herself as the mother Snow White can’t remember.

Some have criticized Kristin Kreuk for being bland in the title role, but I really like her. To me, she brings a regal dignity to the character which is much closer to how I imagine Snow White than the chirpy Disney heroine.[13]That could apply to either the 1937 movie or the 2025 one. The makeup team, doubtless helped by the actress’s natural good looks, do a great job making her beautiful in an otherworldly way. Her pleasant speaking voice is a big asset too. I really do feel like my natural instinct would be to bow if ever I met this Snow White in person.

It does seem though that the movie wants to give her a character arc which it doesn’t really succeed in conveying. According to the director, this story is supposed to be about two women who are about to enter a new stage in life and are afraid of getting older. It’s clear how this applies to the character of the queen but not so much Snow White. She seems a bit frightened by the prospect of a romantic relationship with the prince and gets an early line about not wanting to grow up but it’s not clear what she means by that or why. What is clear is that the temptation of the poisoned apple, offered here by an enemy disguised as a loving mother, becomes the temptation to stay a little girl forever. After she awakens, she’s perfectly happy to ride off with the prince. I guess she’s learned that it’s dangerous to try to stay a child forever and is now ready for an adult relationship or…something like that? It’s all quite surreal but, to be fair, Grimms’ fairy tales typically are that way. Of the A-list fairy tale protagonists, Snow White is probably the one who fits our modern expectations of a protagonist the least since she’s the one who’s most thoroughly a victim.[14]As Walt Disney once pointed out, Cinderella didn’t just wait for her prince to come. She went to the ball and got him. That’s true of Fairest of Them All‘s version too[15]The script gives her noble intentions, but the plot seldom allows her to act on them. and you know what? I’m fine with it. I read and watch stories from so many different time periods; it really doesn’t matter to me whether they live up to modern society’s dramatic expectations. Why pretend something bugs me just because society says it should bug me? I just mention that the movie doesn’t quite succeed in giving Snow White a character arc in my opinion because, objectively speaking, failing in what you attempt is a flaw though, subjectively speaking, it doesn’t bother me.

If there’s something about the script that does bother me it’s the shallowness of the romance between Snow White and the prince. As I mentioned, the two of them meet early in the story and the prince gets more screentime than in the old Disney movie but he spends most of it separated from Snow White. Early on, she rebuffs his advances somewhat angrily, saying that all he knows about her is that she’s beautiful which doesn’t tell him anything about her character. He argues that the two of them do know each other in their hearts or something like that. I guess that line of reasoning works because when we next see them, they’re about to smooch. As I wrote in my last blog post, I think there’s something to be said for just using the love-at-first-sight trope rather than having fictional lovers start out hating each other and giving them a manufactured conflict to overcome. But why bring up the fact that they haven’t had time to really get to know each other if that’s not going to have changed by the end of the movie? Maybe if the actors had better chemistry between them, it would work.

Let’s get back to positives. The queen’s ultimate fate tends to vary in different versions. In Grimm, she’s forced to wear red-hot iron shoes at Snow White’s wedding and dance to death. Often translations or retellings for children will tone this down by simply giving the queen a heart attack upon learning that Snow White is alive yet again and married to a prince. In Disney, she tumbles off a cliff, gets crushed by a boulder and has her remains eaten by vultures, which is less dark in that it’s quicker and isn’t directly inflicted on her by the heroes but scarcely less gruesome. A beautiful picture book written by Josephine Poole and illustrated by Angela Barrett has the queen bring a poisonous flower to the wedding to place under the bride’s pillow. When she sees that it’s Snow White, she angrily crumples it in her hand, accidentally(?) killing herself. I’m fond of the ending of the Faerie Tale Theatre episode where she’s cursed to never be able to see her own reflection and goes mad from the horror of it. But the queen’s comeuppance in this movie, which I’m not going to spoil, is the one I find most satisfying.

Of course, talking about spoiling Snow White: The Fairest of Them All presumes that other people would like it, something I can’t guarantee. There are people out there who’d find it too dark and strange and others who’d feel like it’s not dark or twisted enough for their tastes. But for me, this particular fairy tale film really hits that sweet spot and if I were to adapt a classic fairy tale into a movie myself, this would be one of my main models.

References

References
↑1 Who played a similar character on an episode of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller.
↑2 It seems to be relatively common for modern Snow White reimaginings have the evil queen start off as plain or even ugly and use magic to make herself more beautiful. cf. Mirrored by Alex Flinn and Fairest by Gail Carson Levine
↑3 A hint of The Snow Queen.
↑4 Well, actually, it was her lungs and liver in Grimm. I don’t know if the Disney movie was the first to have the queen request her heart or if some other translation or adaptation did that first.
↑5 Something borrowed from another Grimm tale, The Juniper Tree, as well as several classical myths.
↑6 Though the 2012 movie, Mirror Mirror, does have a little allusion to this in its last scene.
↑7 He’s the one who might be a stand in for Grumpy.
↑8 Dopey.
↑9 Who would go on to play a dwarf in two unrelated Snow White movies.
↑10 From what I hear this is because the CGI people are so overworked.
↑11 He also scored Faerie Tale Theatre‘s excellent Aladdin episode.
↑12 This is arguably reminiscent of the beginning of The Blue Bird, a lesser-known French fairy tale.
↑13 That could apply to either the 1937 movie or the 2025 one.
↑14 As Walt Disney once pointed out, Cinderella didn’t just wait for her prince to come. She went to the ball and got him.
↑15 The script gives her noble intentions, but the plot seldom allows her to act on them.
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