The Year Hollywood Made Two Snow White Movies

Posted on May 15, 2026 by stationmaster

That year was 2012 and the two reimaginings of the Snow White fairy tale were Mirror, Mirror from Relativity Media and Snow White and the Hunstman from Universal Studios. [1]Actually, it wasn’t just Hollywood. There was also the Spanish-French coproduction Blanca Nieves and on TV, there was ABC’s Once Upon a Time. It was really the year of Snow White. Both movies begin with prologues in which we learn that Snow White’s mother died when she was a child and her father, the king (Sean Bean in Mirror, Mirror, Noah Huntley in Huntsman), remarried a beautiful but evil witch (Julia Roberts in Mirror, Mirror, Charlize Theron in Huntsman) who put him out of the picture and took over the kingdom, plunging it into darkness. In the present, when Snow White (Lily Collins in Mirror, Mirror, Kristen Stewart in Huntsman) comes of age, the Queen realizes she’s a threat and tries to have her killed. Snow White flees into a monster ridden forest where she meets a band of dwarfs (Jordan Prentice, Mark Povinelli, Joey Gnoffo, Danny Woodburn, Sebastian Saraceno, Martin Klebba and Ronald Lee Clark in Mirror, Mirror, Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone, Nick Frost, Eddie Marsan, Toby Jones, Johnny Harris and Brian Gleeson in Huntsman) who have been reduced to bandits by the Queen’s tyranny.[2]Incidentally, in the Italian variant of Snow White, Bella Venezia, the equivalents of the dwarfs are also robbers. Did the filmmakers know this? With the help of these dwarfs and a love interest or two, Snow White defeats the Queen and restores the blighted land to its former glory.

Despite those similar outlines, the two movies are mirror images of each other in many ways. Snow White and the Huntsman is a dark action movie aimed at adults. Mirror, Mirror is a wacky family comedy, somewhat in the style of Shrek. Of the two approaches they take to adapting Snow White, I theoretically prefer Snow White and the Huntsman‘s. I like it when fairy tale adaptations take their source material seriously rather than simply parodying it. Not that parodying fairy tales can’t be fun, but they play by such different rules from those of modern storytelling that it’s almost too easy and can reek of “chronological snobbery.” It’s more interesting to watch modern storytellers try to accept fairy tales on their own terms. That’s not to say either of the two movies under discussion in this blog post hew very closely to the original Grimm fairy tale. But Snow White and the Huntsman includes relatively more plot points from it.

Again, that makes Huntsman more interesting (to my way of thinking) in theory.

But in practice, Snow White and the Huntsman is so lacking in humor that it’s honestly quite boring and the characters are all sort of flat and lifeless, apart from the occasional hamminess of the villains. (When they get angry, they tend TO TALK! LIKE! THIS!!!) Of course, the characters of fairy tales are designed to be archetypes, not three-dimensional human beings, so I guess this is also true to the spirit of the source material. But I’ve seen fairy tale adaptations that captured the spirit of their source material while also having much more memorable characterizations than this one.

Does the humor of Mirror, Mirror work? Well…comedy is so subjective. Mirror, Mirror is the kind of silly comedy that some people find really funny and others find stupid. There are a lot of goofy sound effects and jokes about underwear being exposed which will appeal to kids but not many adults. On the other hand, there’s also some explicit sexual humor which many parents won’t feel comfortable enjoying with their children. (The Queen really enjoys seeing the prince (Armie Hammer) in his underwear.) I’m not sure if there’s a good audience for the movie except that, well, I enjoyed it on the whole. For me, there were enough clever jokes (mostly in the first half) to balance out the less than clever ones (which are mostly in the second half.) Your mileage may vary.

Let’s talk about the leading ladies. I know Kristen Stewart has been roasted to death on the internet for her dull performance in the Twilight movies. From the clips of them I’ve seen, I’d say she deserves it but during the first half or so of Snow White and the Huntsman, I was prepared to defend her acting chops a little bit. Not that she’s exactly livelier here but I felt like her quietly miserable performance made sense for a character who has been kept imprisoned in a tower with barely any companionship and finally escaped only to be lost in a hostile environment and hounded by an evil queen.

But here’s the thing. She’s like that the entire movie with no progression. At the end, when she’s crowned queen, she smiles and it feels like she’s barely any happier.

To be fair, Stewart’s quietly miserable performance matches the tone of the movie. And it’s not like the script gives her much with which to work. Even more so than Disney’s 2025 Snow White, this one spends too much time telling us that its heroine is special, how she’s the only one who can defeat the Queen, and not enough time actually showing her do anything special. Weirdly, even though a lot of emphasis, is put on Snow White’s purity making her the antithesis of the Queen, the way she ultimately defeats her doesn’t have anything to do with purity. It’s just a generic fight scene.

Mirror, Mirror‘s Snow White doesn’t have the best structured character arc. Ostensibly, her goal is to help the common people who have been bled dry by the Queen’s taxes but there’s only one scene of her doing that. (To be fair, that scene is one of the movie’s nicest character moments.) Most of her heroic deeds are her rescuing her comrades. There’s also a scene late in the movie where she gets discouraged and ready to throw in the towel and the dwarfs encourage her by reminding her of all she’s accomplished which feels more like it’s there because such scenes are standard in third acts rather than because it makes sense for Snow White to be so discouraged all of a sudden. Still, I’d say she’s a more engagingly written character than the Snow White in Huntsman and the writing is elevated by Lily Collins who is sweetly appealing in the role.

This is her moment that’s the equivalent of the one portrayed by Stewart above. World of difference, isn’t there?

Both Snow White’s though are inevitably upstaged by their stepmothers who are the most charismatic characters in their movies. Charlize Theron’s Queen is a vampire-like villain who sucks the youth, beauty and life out of young women. (At one point, we meet a community of women who have deliberately disfigured themselves out of self-preservation.) There are some attempts to make her a tragic villain. She seems to genuinely love her equally evil brother (Sam Spruell) and has a tragic backstory albeit a thinly sketched one. In one scene, she claims she’s actually kinder to the poor than people were to her as a child. In another, Snow White says she used to hate her stepmother but now feels sorry for her though I’m not really sure why. (She isn’t privy to that tragic backstory, not at that point in the story anyway.) The defeat of the Queen seems like it’s meant to be partially a mercy killing, putting an end to her cursed immortality. All that is conceptually interesting anyway though I find it too undercooked to actually be very interesting. Julia Roberts’s Queen is also obsessed with retaining youth and beauty but she’s a more prosaic tyrant who bleeds the common people dry with taxes to support her lavish lifestyle and there are no tragic undertones to her character.[3]Except perhaps in the very last scene. She’s easily the funniest part of the movie with her cattiness and unintentionally self-indicting complaints. When narrating the film’s prologue, she snarks that Snow White’s parents chose her name “because that was the most pretentious name they could think of.” Her interactions with her long-suffering servants (Nathan Lane and Mare Winningham) are also great.

Both movies are creative in how they depict the magic mirror. In Snow White and the Huntsman, it’s a gold disk that melts and reforms into a featureless figure who advises the Queen. I say it has no features, but the Queen can still see a reflection of her face in its. In Mirror, Mirror, it’s a full-length mirror which the titular incantation turns into an entrance to the Queen’s inner sanctum where there’s another mirror within the mirror. The Queen’s reflection in that mirror is a spirit with whom she communes and who acts as a twisted conscience to her. Well, she’s not exactly the Queen’s reflection. “I have no wrinkles,” she observes.

It’s in the visuals that Mirror, Mirror really shines. An arthouse director like Tarsem Singh seems like a surprising choice for this kind of kids’ movie but he really elevates the script with his visual imagination. Production designer Tom Foden’s sets are sumptuous, surreal, almost Seussian.

Also, visually fun are Eiko Ishioka’s costume designs, especially at a costumed ball in an early scene.[4]Remember what I wrote about the Queen’s lavish lifestyle.

Snow White and the Huntsman also has some surreal visuals, mostly to do with creature design when the characters a fairyland called Sanctuary. They’re not so much Seussian as Guillermo Del Toro-esque.[5]I’m not into horror so I haven’t actually seen any movies by Del Toro but his name has come up in criticism of Snow White and the Huntsman.

Generally, though, the visuals are pretty prosaic compared to Mirror, Mirror‘s. That’s part of taking the material seriously, which I’ve gone on record as theoretically preferring. But I’m afraid watching the two movies back-to-back doesn’t do Huntsman many favors.

Compare this castle to the one from Mirror, Mirror. It’s handsome on its own terms but the other one looks so much more interesting.

Something else that elevates Mirror, Mirror‘s script is the movie’s soundtrack by Alan Menken. He’s mainly known for composing showtunes but he’s capable of great film scores as well. His music makes Mirror, Mirror at least twice as good as it might otherwise have been. James Newton Howard, who did the soundtrack for Snow White and the Huntsman, is another talented composer but his work on it isn’t his best. The music is fine, but it doesn’t really make the movie any better than it would otherwise have been.

This post is coming across as very pro-Mirror, Mirror and anti-Snow White and the Huntsman. Maybe I should mention something about the former that doesn’t work. Well, the romance is rather flawed. The prince is brave and honorable, but he also comes across as something of a “twit,” to use the dwarfs’ word. He’s condescending to them and even to Snow White herself at times. And he walks right into the Queen’s trap even though Snow White twice tells him that she’s evil.[6]It’s an ironic accident of history that the 2025 Snow White got all the reputation for being all obnoxiously girl power-y when it leaves its male characters with far more dignity than does … Continue reading What does our heroine see in him? He does help out in the climax, but a speech given about his heroism in the end really doesn’t feel earned. Spoiler Alert. Why is this the only modern Snow White movie to explicitly end with a wedding when it has the least worthy love interest?

The duel between the Snow White and the prince is kind of interesting. I’d expect a “girl power” movie like this to have the female lead mop up the floor with her male opponent. Instead, he has the upper hand for most of the duel and Snow White only wins in the end, thanks to a clever trick. I don’t know what that says about the movie’s gender politics but it’s different from what I expected, which is nice.

Snow White and the Huntsman has two love interests for the heroine or two potential love interests anyway. There’s her childhood flame, the prince (Sam Claflin), and the huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) who was initially hired by the Queen to destroy her but ends up becoming her protector and mentor. The latter character gets points for having an occasional sense of humor, giving him a tad more personality than everybody else in the movie. The huntsman and Snow White are sort of like Han Solo and Princess Leia if you extracted 90% of the humor from Han and 100% of it from Leia. The rest of this paragraph is full of spoilers. The story seems structured to make us root for the huntsman to be the one to end up with Snow White. The prince is absent for large periods of time and when the Queen tricks Snow White into eating the poisoned apple, she’s disguised as him. That’s not the prince’s fault, of course, but it feels like a subliminal way to make the viewers root against him. He kisses the unconscious Snow White to no effect. Later, in private, the huntsman kisses her and his kiss revives her.[7]I keep waiting for an adaptation of this fairy tale to have the piece of apple be dislodged from her throat by the jostling of the coffin as in the source material. Or did she need both kisses to bring her back? I’d probably find the ambiguity interesting if I found the characters in general interesting. In the end, it’s not clear if either love interest ends up with Snow White.[8]An earlier draft of the screenplay, available to read online, had the huntsman explicitly leave Snow White and go back to the forest in the end. Was this supposed to make us angry about the class … Continue reading

So, yeah, I’ll take Mirror, Mirror over Snow White and the Huntsman. Sometimes dumb but fun trumps tasteful and boring. For me, this is one of those times. Of course, I still prefer the 2001 made-for-TV movie Snow White: The Fairest of Them All to either of them. That movie, in my opinion, manages to be both tasteful and fun.

References

References
↑1 Actually, it wasn’t just Hollywood. There was also the Spanish-French coproduction Blanca Nieves and on TV, there was ABC’s Once Upon a Time. It was really the year of Snow White.
↑2 Incidentally, in the Italian variant of Snow White, Bella Venezia, the equivalents of the dwarfs are also robbers. Did the filmmakers know this?
↑3 Except perhaps in the very last scene.
↑4 Remember what I wrote about the Queen’s lavish lifestyle.
↑5 I’m not into horror so I haven’t actually seen any movies by Del Toro but his name has come up in criticism of Snow White and the Huntsman.
↑6 It’s an ironic accident of history that the 2025 Snow White got all the reputation for being all obnoxiously girl power-y when it leaves its male characters with far more dignity than does Mirror, Mirror.
↑7 I keep waiting for an adaptation of this fairy tale to have the piece of apple be dislodged from her throat by the jostling of the coffin as in the source material.
↑8 An earlier draft of the screenplay, available to read online, had the huntsman explicitly leave Snow White and go back to the forest in the end. Was this supposed to make us angry about the class divide or something? Maybe it was to imply that he still wasn’t over his deceased wife. From what I understand, the sequel has his wife turn out to be alive after all, so that checks out.
Posted in Comparing Different Adaptations | Tagged , | Leave a comment

A Look Back at Some of my Old Blog Posts

Posted on May 2, 2026 by stationmaster

I thought it might be fun to write about some of my old blog posts and what I’d do differently if I were writing them now. Well, I thought it might be for me. I don’t know about you guys. Some of the things I’d do differently would be because of information I have that I didn’t have then. Some of the things I’d do differently would be because my opinions have grown more complex.

Which Friday Is the Freakiest?

In this post, I speculated that Mary Rodgers, the screenwriter for the 1976 Freaky Friday movie and author of the original book, had been forced by the producers to put in the overelaborate slapstick climax since it didn’t really fit in with the rest of the film and felt like a concession to the Disney formula of the 70s. It turns out I was right, even more so than I suspected. According to her memoirs, while she was the only credited screenwriter, Rodgers despised the 1976 movie, claiming that Disney destroyed her vision by forcing to include things like that slapstick climax and a scene with a sexy secretary (played by Brooke Mills), which she considered a sexist cliche. I’m a little surprised by that last bit since the secretary scene is actually entertainingly written and doesn’t feel shoehorned in the way that climax does.[1]The acerbic Rodgers seems to have forgotten that she apparently won a minor victory with that scene as the secretary ends up being humanized by a twist at the end. Anyway, none of that changes my own positive opinion of the movie but I wish I’d known that when I wrote the blog post since it’s interesting behind-the-scenes trivia.

I was really ignorant of how to do blog posts when I wrote this series on Freaky Friday. I didn’t even know how to do YouTube screenshots hence the complete lack of images in the section on the 1995 made-for-TV movie, the most obscure version. Thankfully, my brother told me how to do them before I did my post on the Peter Pan musical. I suppose I could go back and add YouTube screenshots now. But the 1995 is my least favorite of the Freaky Friday movies and that feels like too much work for it. Here’s one screenshot at least.

When writing the Freakiest Friday series, I titled the section on each movie with a thematically linked line from it. (“I’d like to be you for a day” “Someday you ought to try my life” etc.) This was back when I tried to be creative with my titles on this blog. Nowadays, I’m lucky I can come up with even a generic title. There are actually five Freaky Friday movies now with Freakier Friday, the recent sequel to the 2003 film. Maybe I should do a new post to finish my series, especially since I’m so strapped for ideas that I’m writing about blog posts I’ve written years ago. But I just don’t really have any interesting thoughts on Freakier Friday. It’s not that good. It’s not that bad. Whatever.

Davies Does Dickens

The thing I (sort of) regret about this two-part series on screenwriter Andrew Davies’s adaptations of Charles Dickens is that Bleak House (2005) and Little Dorrit (2008) are actually not the only ones. While I had seen The Signalman (1976), I wasn’t aware that Davies had written it. The reason I only (sort of) regret it as opposed to just regretting it is that I don’t really have anything to say, good or bad, about The Signalman, either the original short story by Dickens or the made-for-TV movie by Davies. Honestly, I think the series works better with just Bleak House and Little Dorrit even though it’s technically incomplete. Those two miniseries feel of a piece with each other, yet their strengths and weaknesses are just different enough to make for interesting contrasts. The Signalman, on the other hand, would just feel random.

The Storyteller and his Sources

I’m not sure if this old post really works at all. I wanted to write about how Jim Henson’s The Storyteller combines different fairy tales into new stories. But the result may be that if you’re familiar with the tales I mention, the blog post spoils a first-time viewing experience and if you’re not familiar with them, well, then the blog post is just incomprehensible, isn’t it? But what can I say? I love this little show, and I really wanted to write something or other about it and this was the best I could do.

What I really regret though is that I only wrote about how the episode Sapsorrow combines the stories of Cinderella and Allerleirauh without typing a word about how it takes some cues from the Norwegian fairy tale, Katie Woodencloak.[2]Or Kari Woodengown. English translations vary. The reason for this was that I wasn’t familiar with that particular tale at the time. Here are the relevant parts. Like Katie Woodencloak, Sapsorrow, when disguised as a lowly and dirty servant, delivers clean towels to a handsome prince who responds rudely. But he falls in love with her when she appears to him later in her true form as a beautiful princess. Before she runs away, he begs to know from where she comes, and she leaves him with a riddling clue to her identity. (“I live where hens catch mice and cats lay eggs.” It makes sense in context.”) Sapsorrow might not do as much as it could to do redeem its snobby prince but to its credit, it does more than Katie Woodencloak, which does nothing.

A Mild Defense of Disney’s Recent Line of Nostalgia Bait

I wrote this one in a spirit of defiance-well, as defiant as can be while only defending something mildly. To hear the internet talk, you’d think Disney’s recent nostalgia bait movies were the coming of the antichrist. While only the 2015 Cinderella is a huge favorite of mine, most of the Disney nostalgia bait movies that had been made at the time I wrote my defense struck me as solid B+. Like a certain Disney heroine, I didn’t see how a world that made such wonderful things could be bad. (Of course, that heroine’s love for that world led her to make a disastrous bargain that ended up turning her father into a polyp and an evil witch taking over her kingdom, so maybe not the most felicitous analogy.) I’m still happy with the three blog posts I wrote about my three favorite Disney nostalgia bait movies, but I’ve come to feel like my initial (mild) defense was something of a failure. While I enjoyed organizing the movies into different categories and I still think their focus on parents is an interesting trend, the main body of the blog post would have been better spent detailing the ways in which I thought the various movies were well done, such as which visuals impressed me, which actors’ performances I enjoyed, which lines I thought were well written, etc.[3]I guess what I was trying to say with the thing about different categories was that some of the complaints about Disney nostalgia bait strike me as selective and therefore dishonest. When people … Continue reading I could do a new blog post that does so but the reason I wrote the original when I did was because I wanted to do it while there was still more good Disney nostalgia bait than bad. Nowadays, it’s probably half and half, so the new blog post would be less contrarian and therefore less fun for me.

I’ve come to realize that I don’t get angry about remakes of movies I like. I even enjoyed that gender flipped remake of the beloved It’s a Wonderful Life from the 70s. If remakes are good, they’re good and if they’re bad, to me, they just make the original look even better. [4]Though, again, I don’t think Disney’s recent remakes have all been that bad. The ones I dislike I’d describe more as boring than as unpleasant. Some of them even rise to the level … Continue reading I don’t see how they tarnish the legacy of the originals or whatever. I guess for cinema aficionados though (and apparently people who aren’t cinema afficionados but really like Disney), the memory of a bad remake sours the experience of rewatching the original. That’s kind of how it is for me with bad adaptations of books. (Thankfully, I can usually put the adaptations in the back of my mind and just enjoy the originals again after a year or so.) So the people who most hate nostalgia bait and I will probably never understand each other. Ah well. C’est la vie.

Another List of Great Screenplays

This blog post, in which I listed the best movie scripts based on classic literature that are available to read online, is the only one where I’ve actually changed my opinion about a movie’s quality. I was always a little unsure whether Eleanor Catton’s screenplay for Emma (2020) deserved to make this list, even as an honorable mention. But I told myself that most of my problems with the movie were problems with the direction and the actors’ performances, not the script. Time has convinced me though that significant problems were in the script right from the beginning. I won’t go into how because I already did an entire blog post about this revelation. Suffice it to say, I now feel like the problems with this script are too glaring for it to earn even an honorable mention. It really is a pity Douglas McGrath’s screenplay for the 1996 Emma[5]The theatrical one, not the made-for-TV one. That was written by Andrew Davies. isn’t available to read online. If it were, it would have gotten more than an honorable mention on the original blog post.[6]You can purchase an earlier draft of that screenplay online from ScriptFly.com but, being an early draft, it’s not as polished as the final version. You can also, by the way, purchase an … Continue reading

Sometimes I wonder if I should have included Todd Louiso, Jacob Koskoff and Michael Lesslie’s screenplay for Macbeth (2015.) It’s quite an interesting read. I ultimately didn’t include it though because I felt like it’s interpretation of the source material was a little forced. While the violence of war and the pain of childlessness are major motifs in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, I’m not sure that they’re supposed to explain the main characters’ actions the way Louiso, Koskoff and Lesslie seem to want them to do. In general, I wish I could blog more about movies adapted from Shakespeare plays but they tend to feature nudity and I’m against onscreen nudity, so I don’t like to promote them.

The Adaptation Station’s Two-Year Anniversary Top Ten List (in Alphabetical Order)

With this post, the challenge I imposed upon myself was to find new things to say about ten things about which I’d already written.[7]Eleven things, actually, since I counted Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 as one movie. I think I succeeded with all but Les Misérables (2012) and the Fantasia movies. With those, I basically just repeated what I’d already written in the original blog posts. I still don’t have anything new to say about the latter two, but I thought of something for Les Misérables. I read a thesis somewhere online that men are deeply moved by movies about men struggling to do the right thing while undergoing great physical suffering and women are deeply moved by movies about women struggling to do the right thing while undergoing great emotional suffering. Well, it occurs to me that Les Misérables has both men and women struggling to do the right while undergoing great physical and emotional suffering. It’s the total package! Of course, as I wrote in the original post, there are plenty of people who dislike the 2012 Les Misérables and even some who dislike the story in general, so that thesis arguably doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny but, hey, I found something to write about the movie that I previously hadn’t.

Well, hope you enjoyed that slightly rueful little retrospective. I promise my next blog post will be about an adaptation about which I haven’t already blogged.

References

References
↑1 The acerbic Rodgers seems to have forgotten that she apparently won a minor victory with that scene as the secretary ends up being humanized by a twist at the end.
↑2 Or Kari Woodengown. English translations vary.
↑3 I guess what I was trying to say with the thing about different categories was that some of the complaints about Disney nostalgia bait strike me as selective and therefore dishonest. When people complain that the movies are all carbon copies of the originals, they’re referring to what I dubbed Type B nostalgia bait and ignoring the other kinds. When people complain that they all subvert the originals, they’re referring to Type A nostalgia bait and ignoring the other kinds.
↑4 Though, again, I don’t think Disney’s recent remakes have all been that bad. The ones I dislike I’d describe more as boring than as unpleasant. Some of them even rise to the level of guilty pleasures.
↑5 The theatrical one, not the made-for-TV one. That was written by Andrew Davies.
↑6 You can purchase an earlier draft of that screenplay online from ScriptFly.com but, being an early draft, it’s not as polished as the final version. You can also, by the way, purchase an earlier draft of Mary Rodgers’s Freaky Friday script if you want some insight into how her vision and the Disney company’s differed.
↑7 Eleven things, actually, since I counted Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 as one movie.
Posted in Remakes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

You Can’t Take It with You: Another Great Adaptation of a Stage Play

Posted on February 15, 2026 by stationmaster

I really should have sold this domain months ago. I’m not exactly rolling in money and it’s silly to pay for a blog month after month if you’re not going to do any new posts. But I loved making this thing and I can’t bear for it to vanish off the internet. Now I’m glad I didn’t sell it because I recently had the idea for this blog post. Appropriately enough, a big theme of the play/movie under discussion is doing what you love even if it doesn’t make financial sense.

You Can’t Take It with You (1938) begins with a group of evil businessmen plotting to take over a neighborhood for some evil business purposes.[1]Do the specifics really matter? They’ve been able to buy every house except one owned by an extended family of kooky bohemians. The family’s easygoing patriarch, Grandpa Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore) refuses to sell his home at any price. The leader of the evil businessmen, Anthony P. Kirby (Edward Arnold), has his real estate broker (Clarence Wilson) try to get the family in trouble with the law, to pressure them into selling. Little does he know that his son, Tony (Jimmy Stewart), has fallen in love with his secretary, Alice Sycamore (Jean Arthur) Vanderhof’s granddaughter. Disaster and hilarity ensue when Tony brings his parents[2]Mary Forbes play his mother by the way. to a dinner at Alice’s family’s place.

You Can’t Take It with You was based on a stage play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Its screenwriter was Robert Riskin, and its director was Frank Capra. If you’re familiar with any of the creators, you can guess which elements the film owes to which. The breezy comedy is attributable to Kaufman and Hart and the earnest, moralizing melodrama to Capra and Riskin.[3]Well, maybe that’s not fair. While his most famous work (It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) is dramatic, Capra directed more than a few screwball comedies. Still, the … Continue reading In the play, Kirby was only upbraided by Tony and Grandpa for giving up his hobbies to focus on the joyless pursuit of money and pressuring his son to do the same. This is still a theme in the film. In an early scene, Grandpa convinces a man (Donald Meek) to leave his boring desk job and pursue his real dream of making music boxes and Halloween masks.

But the cinematic Mr. Kirby is condemned less for putting the pursuit of money over hobbies and more for putting it over human relationships.[4]Given the iconic status of It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s rather amusing to watch a Frank Capra film in which Lionel Barrymore plays the relatively poor guy and Jimmy Stewart the rich one. A late scene of Ramsey (H. B. Warner), Kirby’s business rival and former friend, warning him that they’re both going to die friendless is particularly contrary to the fluffy spirit of the source material.

Some Kaufman and Hart fans may feel like Capra and Riskin sullied the tone of the play, but I’m inclined to say they improved upon it. Mind you, I don’t want to dismiss Kaufman and Hart’s contributions. A big part of the movie’s appeal is the zany characters they created like Alice’s mother, Penny (Spring Byington), an amateur playwright and painter, Alice’s father, Paul (Samuel S. Hinds), whose hobby is making fireworks in the basement with his friend, Mr. DePinna (Halliwell Hobbes), Alice’s sister, Essie (Ann Miller), an aspiring ballerina who makes candy on the side, and Essie’s husband, Ed Carmichael (Dub Taylor), who plays the xylophone and prints revolutionary materials, not out of any revolutionary sentiment but simply because he enjoys printing anything.

But to my way of thinking, it’s the combination of the comedic and the dramatic that really make You Can’t Take It with You great. Both the save-the-neighborhood plot and the class-crossing-romance are pretty generic but combining them makes for something special. I love the irony of Kirby trying to get Grandpa in trouble with the law, only to get arrested himself for being at his house. It’s also great fun to see the Kirby family’s night in jail, something we only hear about in the play.

Alice is the most interesting character in the original play, dramatically speaking, since she loves her kooky family but is also the only member to find it somewhat embarrassing. The movie makes her even more interesting. In the play, after the mortifying meeting between the two families, she simply became despondent, sure that a marriage between herself and Tony would never work. The movie has her be mortified too but also angry at the Kirbys and she memorably stands up for her family’s dignity.[5]I’m sorry to be spoiling so much of the plot but hardly anyone watches movies from the 30s nowadays. Hopefully, those who do will have seen this one already. I also love the habit the film gives her of sliding down the banister, giving her an embarrassing eccentricity of her own, not just an embarrassing family. Despite Alice and her grandfather being such major characters, they barely interacted with each other in the play. This adaptation gives them a touching conversation in which we learn about Alice’s grandmother.

Tony also has a bit more of a character arc in the movie. I like that he’s a bit more overwhelmed by Alice’s family at first than he is in the play but never is he as snobby towards them as are his parents. The film also emphasizes how spoiled he is initially, boasting that his whole life all he’s ever had to do to get what he wants is scream. This makes his eventually turning his back on his father’s lucrative business even more impressive. And giving both Tony and Alice stronger character arc also makes their romance more compelling.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention something the movie adds which is very much in the spirit of the play: the emotional finale in which Mr. Kirby plays Polly Wolly Doodle on the harmonica with Grandpa. Two old men playing Polly Wolly Doodle on the harmonica may not sound like much of an emotional finale, but You Can’t Take It with You makes it one.

References

References
↑1 Do the specifics really matter?
↑2 Mary Forbes play his mother by the way.
↑3 Well, maybe that’s not fair. While his most famous work (It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) is dramatic, Capra directed more than a few screwball comedies. Still, the more earnest parts of You Can’t Take It with You do strike me as Capra-esque.
↑4 Given the iconic status of It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s rather amusing to watch a Frank Capra film in which Lionel Barrymore plays the relatively poor guy and Jimmy Stewart the rich one.
↑5 I’m sorry to be spoiling so much of the plot but hardly anyone watches movies from the 30s nowadays. Hopefully, those who do will have seen this one already.
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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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