Last night, I watched a movie adaptation of Charlotte‘s Web with Ivy. There’s a bunch of children’s shows that I never saw because they came after I was a grown-up, but before I had kids. I have recently purchased a paperback copy of Charlotte‘s Web for Ivy who is a new reader, so of course she wanted to see the movie.
You never know if children’s stories are going hold up over the decades. Charlotte‘s Web is definitely a keeper. In fact, it’s much better than I remembered it seeing it through the eyes of an adult.
To refresh your memory, the story starts with a little girl seeing a pig in the barn give birth to one too many babies. The farmer goes to dispatch the smallest because there’s a limited number of teats on a mother pig.
The setting of the story is a rural American town, so they did not have extra time or resources to mess around with runty pigs. As an adult, I understand that better than when I read it as a child. As a child, I understood the pig better. When the fictional child, Fern, protests, the farmer relents and let her keep the pig to hand-feed it. The movie version Fern is played by Dakota Fanning, the preeminent child actor of the early aughts. She is a very talented actor because despite the CGI, it all feels very real.
Of course, shenanigans ensue with Fern taking the pig to school and dressing it up like a baby in a pram. It reminded me of the time I flew out of Erie airport and a woman in front of me had a suckling pig as a carry-on. I hadn’t worn my glasses and I thought that poor lady had the world‘s ugliest baby.
The farmer puts his foot down and says enough is enough. He has sold all the other pigs to make money, and if Fern she wants to keep the pig, she’ll have to put it in the barnyard of their neighbors across the street who have more room. What he doesn’t tell her is that the neighbor is going to sell the pig at the end of the summer for meat or eat it himself.
This article is getting longer than the story itself, but the crux of the drama is that a spider named Charlotte conceives a plan to save the pig from slaughter by writing words in her web. With the help of a rat, they find words from garbage to catch the short-lived attention of the towns folk. Nobody likes a dirty rat, and everyone is scared of a spider. Yet, by working together, they keep a Spring pig from becoming Christmas dinner.
The writer, E.B. White, is also famous for his work on Elements of Style with his buddy Strunk. I had to read it in college, and their message was, “Do not use a big word when a small one will do.”
The trick of Charlotte’s Web is White takes a big idea, and wraps it in a small story. The big idea is that teamwork, inclusion, and using the right words has the power to change people’s minds. Ironically, it’s the big words in his book that catch everyone’s attention, but in the end, it’s the love that makes it linger.
