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by Flick Chick Vique

Charlotte’s Web weaves 3 &1/2 Red Vines for being the tasty other, other white meat

Honestly, is there anything cuter than a piglet? That they are as cute as they are tasty is most unfortunate for all!

To be honest there was precious little I remembered from my childhood days of reading E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. I didn’t even remember Wilber’s name but for some reason the image of his buttermilk bath has remained crystal clear after all this time!

To refresh your memory, Charlotte’s Web is the tale of a runt piglet (Wilber) whose life is spared because a farmer’s daughter (Dakota Fanning as Fern) insists that no creature be put to death just because it’s too small. She vows to take care of it and reluctantly agrees to let the pet pig be raised on her uncle’s farm. That’s when the story comes to ‘life’, for you see barns are teaming with life!

Using the same technique used to film Babe, Charlotte’s Web is filled with real animals and people, not animation. And while I love this style of filming, you can’t make a movie about a cute pig trying to avoid being Christmas dinner and not feel compelled to compare it to Babe. That’s a shame because Charlotte’s Web is a very sweet movie with great lessons for kids about love, friendship and acceptance but it falls short of the pure magic that was Babe!

That being said, there are many positives to this movie. The cast of characters is outstanding! Oprah Winfrey is mother goose to goose-pecked gander Cedric the Entertainer, while Kathy Bates and Reba McEntire are a hoot as Bitsy and Betsy the boisterous bovines! Thomas Haden Church and Andre Benjamin are an absolute riot as crows that can’t cop a break in the corn crop, while John Cleese plays Samuel the head sheep, with proper indignation.

Julia Roberts provides the pretty voice for Charlotte but even her smooth charm couldn’t get me past the creepiness of her being a spider. Guess that’s one of the story’s ‘lessons’ that gets lost on me! Children will be more forgiving and open but us adults have our phobias and for me, spiders are on that list!

I was a little disappointed in Dakota Fanning’s performance. Don’t get me wrong, she’s still cute as a bug (just not a spider!) but I felt her ‘freshness’ a little compromised. I suspect a lot of it had to do with her dialogue. She just seemed too rehearsed. On the other hand, Dominic Scott Kay (Oliver Beene) had the perfect voice for Wilber and his acting was right on. Sweet, innocent, playful, scared, he made little Wilber sound as endearing as he looked!

The true star of this pic isn’t any one of those big names. Steve Buscemi must have had a ball playing Templeton the Rat! He simply chews up every scene he’s in and is the most fun thing this movie has to offer. I, for one, am more than a little bored with stars being attached to all these animated characters when they are NOT character actors and wouldn’t know a thing about playing anything other than themselves. Buscemi is a shining example of how much a real character actor can make a creature truly come alive.

He is amazing as Templeton. I would love to see footage of him ‘acting’ at the audio recording studio. He was so totally ON!