Five Children and It film

Yesterday I finally got around to borrowing the movie of Five Children and It from the library. I've been meaning to watch it ever since seeing Freddie Highmore in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Finding Neverland. It's a funny and entertaining film (Kenneth Branagh and Eddie Izzard, who voiced the Psammead were very good), but it bears very little resemblance to the book on which it's allegedly based - I felt the same sort of bewilderment whilst watching it that I felt on watching the movie of Howl's Moving Castle ! I can't imagine why the writer, David Solomons, and the Director, John Stephenson, felt it was necessary to set the film during World War One, or why Robert (Highmore) was so much at odds with his siblings. I could have understood them modernising the story to make it appeal to modern children, but this was just baffling, and frankly odd.

If you want a good adaptation of E Nesbit's book, then I would recommend the BBC Five Children and It miniseries which I remember watching on the television back in 1991.

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One positive addition to the Beta version of Blogger is that I can now label posts (as LiveJournal users can add tags to theirs) - which means future movie reviews can be labelled as such. But it's not retrospective - so I will have to go ahead and gather my film reviews together and listen them on my PBWiki at some stage...