WhatzUp

Bridge to Terabithia
by Derek Neff

The team at Disney in charge of promoting the family movie Bridge to Terabithia as yet another harmless fantasy featuring trolls and sprites and rainbows and waterfalls should be fired. It's not just that they have irresponsibly misrepresented their own movie (and insulted the movie-going public's intelligence in the bargain); even worse is the fact that they've left many well intentioned parents hoping to treat their children to a simple escapist fairy-tale completely unprepared for helping their younger children cope with the decidedly unfantasy-like tragedy that occurs two-thirds of the way through.

Look, I understand that a film's marketing department has a specific job to do: their task is to fill as many seats as possible on opening weekend. Period. But this can be taken too far, and the promoters here were perfectly willing not only to completely undersell their own movie by cynically pandering to the American public's perceived desire for harmless spectacle, but by also being willing to traumatize some young children who, frankly, didn't sign up for this. It's not that I think children shouldn't see films that deal honestly with themes of loss and grief; I whole-heartedly do. (One of my favorite family movies of the past 20 years is My Girl.) It's just that I think parents should be armed with enough information ahead of time to make intelligent decisions about the movies they're letting their young ones see. This cheap kind of bait-and-switch perpetrated by Disney's marketing department does no one any favors.

The good news is that, once you get past this roadblock, the film itself tells a wonderfully warm, perceptive, often funny and ultimately heartbreaking story about a friendship forged between two lonely fifth graders, outcasts who find in each other a haven of acceptance, imaginary adventurousness and courage. Jesse Arons (Josh Hutcherson) is ridiculed by his peers for sometimes having to wear his big sisters' hand-me-downs and is given a hard time by his hard-working father for his dreams of one day being an artist. But then a girl named Leslie Burke (AnnaSophia Robb) moves in nearby. Leslie, the only daughter of two free-spirited writers, is teased for not having a TV at home and, as the new kid, is generally lonely and left out, though none of this seems to bother her too much. (She is perhaps a tad bit too angelically centered to be believed.)

The movie's realistic episodes are the backbone of the story, but they're interspersed with brief scenes showing trolls and fairies and warthog-like soldiers that the two kids dream up when they're playing together. Though these scenes are grossly over-emphasized in the movie's commercials and one-sheets, they do effectively illustrate how potent and intense (and redemptive) collaborate play like this can be between young people.

The film is adapted from the beloved 1970s young adult novel by Katherine Patterson, and, although director Gabor Csupo and screenwriters Jeff Stockwell and David Patterson have updated the story for contemporary audiences, they have remained courageously faithful to the basic tone, themes and events of the source material. For parents of younger children who are prepared to help their children through the appropriately heartbreaking ending, and for tweenage and teenage kids unafraid to stray off the beaten path and prepared to shed a few tears, Bridge to Terabithia offers a richly rewarding experience.