Charlotte’s Web

Charlotte’s Web If you’re going to take on a beloved childhood classic and translate it from the mind’s eye to the big screen, it’s best if you have someone still young enough to have their finger on the pulse of the material, and uber-scary pre-adolescent thespian Dakota Fanning most assuredly has the pull to get things done right. And here it shows. Despite a few tweaks for the contemporary audience, there is an admirable fidelity to the material. The story of the girl and the piglet she saves from the dinner table and the spider that mentors them gets an uneven CGI treatment here, but the youngsters hopefully aren’t jaded enough to quibble with that. The only possible downside for the older folks in attendance is that this entry in the talking-pig genre may suffer in comparison to George Miller’s Babe, but then, the target audience for this one wasn’t even born when that one came out, so there you go.