I didn’t have a good movie theme last weekend, aside from “fantasy movies based on books.” But I guess that is a good common thread.

First, I decided to rewatch The Black Cauldron. I remembered being very disappointed in it when I saw it soon after it was released, but I’d read all the books in that series not long before I saw the movie, so there was a chance that a lot of my disappointment was of the “that’s not how it happened in the book” variety.

Nope. I don’t remember much about the books at all now, and I still didn’t like this movie. The main problem seems to have been that they had no idea what kind of movie they were making. Yes, the books were aimed at children and included humor and some comic relief sidekick characters, but they were still fairly dark fantasy. This movie tried to be a typical Disney animated movie for kids, complete with wacky sidekick characters suitable for toys while also being about a villain raising an army of the dead to take over the world. The tonal shifts were jarring. It looked like a fun cartoon movie for kids, using the same kind of character design they’d used in other films aimed at kids (actually, they seemed to have done a lot of copying and pasting from The Sword in the Stone), but it wasn’t that kind of story.

Plus, they made the main character too stupid to live and the leading lady a twit with a weird baby voice. I don’t own the whole series of books, but I checked the first one out of the library to get the right story back into my head. The main character does have some dumb ideas at the beginning, but the story isn’t kicked off by him doing something really dumb.

This one’s high on my list for candidates for a live-action remake — but only if what they do is make a series of movies actually based on the books, not remake the animated film. They have the effects technology to tackle this story now, and since the books are relatively short, they should fit nicely into a film running time without mangling the story too badly.

Then I watched Peter Pan and Wendy, which I suppose counts as one of the live-action remakes, except it’s more like Cinderella than like all the others, in that it’s a new telling based on the same source material rather than an actual remake of the animated film. There are a few nods to the animated film, like incorporating the tune for the “You Can Fly” song into the score and doing some of the same moves with the crocodile, but otherwise it goes in some very different directions while still hitting all the major plot beats of the standard Peter Pan story.

This one is more Wendy’s story. She’s struggling with growing up (though her issue is going off to boarding school rather than having to get her own room), so going to Neverland seems like the perfect way to escape her problems, until she sees what happens when someone doesn’t ever grow up. In this story they manage to fix a lot of the things from the animated movie that made me cringe. The main thing is the treatment of the female characters. They don’t all hate each other because they’re jealous over Peter. The girls become friends and work together. The racism is also gone, with the Native Americans treated with respect (Tiger Lily is awesome). They did some odd things with Peter and Hook’s backstory that are very different from the book but that I think work. Jude Law plays Hook, but I don’t think his portrayal falls into the “hot Hook” subgenre that’s come up in books, TV, and movies recently. He’s pretty much unrecognizable.

I’ve seen some pretty bad reviews, but I found it delightful. It’s a fun little adventure movie with a dash of magic, and the cast is excellent. It might even make it onto a list of “comfort food” movies, the kind of thing you watch when you just want something fun and pretty.