Charlotte's Web (2006)

Charlotte's Web arrives in 2006 as the second theatrical treatment of E. B. White's 1952 novel, produced by Walden Media and Nickelodeon Movies and directed by Gary Winick with a placid competence that suits the material. Danny Elfman composed the score, having withdrawn from Spider-Man 3 to do so, which tells you something about the era's priorities. Dakota Fanning plays Fern with an unfussy conviction, and the animals are rendered in a hybrid of live action and computer imagery that has aged with dignity. The result is a film that behaves itself.

The voice cast includes Oprah Winfrey, Cedric the Entertainer, and André Benjamin, all performing as barnyard animals with no reference to race, identity, or anything beyond the business of being a goose, a gander, and a crow. This is colorblind casting in its purest form, unburdened by message. Fern is a determined girl who saves a pig, and Charlotte is a female spider who serves as the story's true hero, but these are inheritances from the source text, not arguments. Wilbur's status as a runt who is spared and then celebrated as Some Pig gestures faintly at the worth of the small and overlooked, though it remains an underdog fable, not a treatise on size acceptance. Templeton is greedy and self-interested. That is a rat being a rat.

The film offers no sermon. It does not lecture about the environment, the economy, or the arrangement of society, and it does not revise history to flatter the present. Its moral program consists of friendship and loyalty, demonstrated in a barn, quietly. We could call this a relic of a gentler mode of storytelling, except that the mode was never especially gentle. It was simply uninterested in instructing anyone. The production is modest, the stakes are a pig's life, and the whole enterprise sits comfortably at the low end of our contemporary taxonomy. A sommelier would call it a clean, unremarkable vintage, best served cold and without commentary.