By comparison, Wilbur is just more bacon in the makin', spared by an 8-year-old girl (Dakota Fanning) who can't bear to watch her father ax the runt of the litter. Whereas E.B. White's beloved novel introduced kids to the cycle of life, tenderly broaching the tricky subject of mortality, this latest movie version plays like just another piece of vegetarian agitprop.

Nothing against Gary Winick, who directed 2004's terrific 13 Going on 30, but would it have been so hard to find someone who actually grew up on a farm to tell this story? White captured the texture and smells of barnyard life, but this movie seems to think milk grows on trees.

What an opportunity missed. One of the year's best movies, an obscure documentary called Our Daily Bread, features impartial footage of where our food comes from, and the frightening truth is, the farm life we romanticize has been almost entirely replaced by machines and mass breeding facilities. A simple barnyard poses every bit as alien a backdrop to today's kids as the Maya rain forest Mel Gibson picked for Apocalypto, so why not show 'em what a real farm is like?

Instead, the filmmakers seem too busy congratulating themselves on their perfect casting, in which star voices are assigned to their obvious barnyard counterparts: Kathy Bates as a flatulent cow, John Cleese as a fussy sheep, Robert Redford as an easily-spooked horse and Steve Buscemi as the selfish rat Templeton. Yawn. What passes for personality depends entirely on each actor's off-screen celebrity, leaving adults to play "name that star" while trying to stave off boredom.

Even Fanning isn't quite right. No doubt the ubiquitous young lady is the first child actor anyone pictures as Fern, but is there ever a moment in which the audience isn't aware they're watching Dakota Fanning in the part?

Reduced to the usual platitudes about friendship and "spare the pig"-style pacifism, the movie is harmless in every way, and utterly unremarkable by extension. For example, when Fern tells her father, "I absolutely will not let you kill him," Winick cuts to a pan of sizzling bacon for an easy laugh but moves on before the irony sinks in. So here we have an adaptation of one of the all-time bestselling children's books that is merely adequate. Alas, Charlotte herself would have never settled for such a word.

[as featured in The Miami Herald]