(this is a review by request)

When the PR guy wrote me asking if I’d like to check out the new Bridge to Terabithia movie I said absolutely because I’d told Noah if he read the book, we’d go see the movie. I told him it would be his first really grown-up book even though to his eye it looked pretty short and easy.

So he read it and he choked up although I cried a lot harder when I reread it. I don’t remember reading it as a kid since I went out of my way to avoid books with unhappy endings. When I finally did read it — in my twenties — I found it awfully dated but also awfully compelling. I wondered if the dated aspect would make it a tough read for a modern-era kid so I wasn’t sure what Noah would think of it and I was glad the seventies feel of it didn’t prevent him from enjoying it. (And really, he thinks of the seventies as way back when the way I thought of the fifties growing up so to him it rang just as true as his beloved Henry Huggins and Ginger Pye.)

Anyway, since he read it he got to see the movie.

You may have seen the previews for the movie, which makes the story look like a Lord of the Rings wannabe. I was cussing and fussing at the commercials, mad as hell that they screwed up a classic. (Side note: Next on our read to see the movie list is Tuck Everlasting. It looks like they made that a romance. Grrr.) I can generally take movie adaptations that stand on their own — I’m not that much of a purist — and I think part of the cinematic art is knowing when to take liberties when translating a story to the screen but it takes a deft touch to get it right. I was worried that the Terabithia people were too enamored with their computer-graphics program to handle such a delicate story. Happily I was wrong.

There aren’t too many changes to the original story’s trajectory and what there are feel necessary to the story. Since so much of Terabithia is subtle — Noah missed some of the finer points of the relationships until we talked it out later — the changes made sense. But over all it’s very true to the book.

I liked the casting. Although the young woman who plays Leslie is incandescent and looks unreal against the rest of the more ordinary looking actors. A little over-the-top since one of the strengths of the book, I felt, was that Leslie was an ordinary kid with an extraordinary outlook. But I also understand why they did it. Likewise the computer animation helps kids understand how Terabithia is real to Jess and Leslie and I’m sure that’s a help to some of the audience play along with the just-pretend even if they’re not prone to imaginary kingdoms themselves. But the casting and the graphics maybe make it all too much other-worldly, which takes away from the prosaic story itself. In other words, it might leave the kids in the audience thinking that the point is Leslie’s magic and not her magical personality that changed who Jess was.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised by it and I recommend the movie — but only after the kids read the book.

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