The acting is very good, the scenery is lovely, the filming is well done, but where did this story come from? I have just read the book for the first time, and then directly after that watched this film version. What a disappointment! What a modernized mess! (not in the physical things but in the sensibilities) I could make a list of a hundred things they changed that didn't need to be changed. It's as if the filmmaker thought people couldn't understand the subtleties of the actual story and had to hit us over the head with it. Obnoxious!
One example is that instead of the lovely magic that Colin works on his own health by telling himself over and over that he will get well, and by believing it and visualizing it, the magic is portrayed as a weird voodoo thing in the movie.
This is the same problem with the Anne of Green Gables movies. This book was published at the same time, and the dreamy delicate sweetness of the book is gone in the movie version. It's as though the way of seeing the world in the early nineteen hundreds is impossible to bring to the screen, at least in children's movies. (I don't believe it is impossible, but the filmmakers seem to have believed that).
One example is that instead of the lovely magic that Colin works on his own health by telling himself over and over that he will get well, and by believing it and visualizing it, the magic is portrayed as a weird voodoo thing in the movie.
This is the same problem with the Anne of Green Gables movies. This book was published at the same time, and the dreamy delicate sweetness of the book is gone in the movie version. It's as though the way of seeing the world in the early nineteen hundreds is impossible to bring to the screen, at least in children's movies. (I don't believe it is impossible, but the filmmakers seem to have believed that).