Five Children and It

Dir: John Stephenson

2004

****

E. Nesbit's classic novel was always a big favourite of mine as a child. The BBC made a series in the early 90's which I remember being quite good so I was looking forward to this one. All in all, I was quite happy with it, all the things I didn't like about it (Freddie Highmore, dodgy CGI) were outweighed by the things I did like such as Eddie Izzard voicing the Psammead, Kenneth Branagh's eccentric Uncle and best of all, the unexpected but really welcome Norman Wisdom cameo. It's not as wonderful as the book, it would have been hard to get all of it into a 90 minute film but it gets the same message across. Not all the CGI was bad though, and I'm not just saying that because an old friend did the SFX but I would have liked to have seen the Psammead as a puppet. The sad truth is though that kids aren't interested in this kind of story anymore, it's a classic but I don't know that many people who even know the story, and that makes me sad because it's really quite lovely and actually quite relevant today.