very weird

[winterbadger]

I have always been astonished by the regularity with which the Newberry Award-winning book "Bridge to Terebithia" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_to_Terabithia) shows up in banned books lists. I watched the 1985 film a year or two ago, to try to better understand the animosity to it. Still don;'t get it.

Now Disney is coming out with a new film. 'Cool,' I thought, 'a new challenge to the incredibly reactionary people who keep trying to keep kids from understanding that life involves loss and sorrow.'

But I just saw a preview for it on TV, and apparently it's a fantasy movie, all about the imaginary land that the two kids create. But (and I guess I need to reread the book), the point as I recall is that the land *is* imaginary, that it's something they share but not something real. The crux of the story is what happens to the kids in the real world, not their imaginary creation.

Does this mean that the movie is going to ignore the essential elements of the book? That would be very strange.

EDIT: OK, I went to IMDB and read posts by people who have seen advance screenings of the movie. The trailers are completely misrepresenting the movie; it *is* a faithful rendition of the book, according to those who have seen it. Even weirder.

Comments

[kmusser]

If I remember right the book does contain the word fuck, which all by itself is enough to throw it onto the banned books lists. It was also one of my favorite books growing up :-)

[pusscat.livejournal.com]

I never understood why it was banned either, although I posted about this on my lj once and someone suggested it was because Jess's family were atheists. Not sure how I feel about them making a film of it, I almost don't think I could sit in a cinema with other people watching a faithful adaptation of the book, it's just too intensely emotional. And it's not just me - a few years ago I had reread the book and been raving about how it was even better than I remembered, and then I came home from work to find AB sitting on the sofa with tears streaming down his face. "I read 'Bridge to Terabithia'", he told me, "It's very beuatiful". Bless.

[winterbadger]

The 1985 movie of it was charming and earnest and really pretty mediocre, in that way that late 1970s and 1980s films made by well-meaning adults to address pre-teenagers' questions about Life, the Universe, and Everything inevitably seemed to be. I found that terrifically nostalgic and touching, because it recalls to me a different time, when actors portraying parents and children usually seemed to carry out their roles with that degree of halting embarrassment and woodenness that resembled how real kids and parents usually interact, instead of the smooth and polished perfect families that we see in television and movies nowadays. Actors looked a lot more normal IMO then, now everyone seems to look like a perfect ideal.

[pusscat.livejournal.com]

I remember taking that one out from the library as a teenager but oddly enough the only bit of it I can vividly recall is the almost supernatural cuteness of the puppy.