Why Kung Fu Panda is no Winnie the Pooh

I will admit that I enjoy watching movies more than reading. I also will fess up to enjoying the films To Kill a Mockingbird and The Godfather more than the novels, although in both cases it was incredible performances that made it so. I can also state, I think without too much debate, that perhaps the worst film adaptation of a great book was Bonfire of the Vanities, which turned one of the lead characters, an old Yiddish judge, into Morgan Freeman (?!) thus destroying one of the major subplots.


So I was somewhat hesitant when I took Elijah to go see the film version of Where the Wild Things Are, a classic children's book that consists of maybe 100 words, yet was over an hour and a half long as a movie. We had already experienced Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, which besides the title, shared little with the book we read together on many nights. My fears about the Maurice Sendak classic turned out to be well founded. Although Elijah seemed to enjoy the movie (though restlessness was evident on occasion) the charm of the book was completely lost in the midst of what I would call a movie not about childhood escape but about monster angst.

As draining as watching the tortured souls of the "Wild Things" was (the anguish of new friends, old relationships and anger management were constant topics for discussion), it was a joy compared to the "live action" versions of the Dr. Seuss classics How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat in the Hat. Whoever was responsible for those travesties needs to be locked in a room for a weekend and be forced to view them over and over again.

Since Elijah's arrival, I have watched enough cartoons and kids movies to revisit my childhood many times over (OK, I'll admit I owned a lot of those films already) and unlike most of today's stuff, it holds up pretty well. Even after viewing the cartoon Grinch numerous times, both Elijah and I can still enjoy it a great deal, which is not the case with just a repeat viewing of Fly Me to the Moon (even with the 3-D). The Disney "Classics," the original Horton Hears a Who cartoon, and the Peanuts Trilogy (Charlie Brown Christmas, Thanksgiving and Great Pumpkin) show what a child's cartoon film should be about....entertaining fun, memorable music and no more than 80 minutes long.