As with City of Ember, I found this movie first and then looked for the book that it was based on. Unlike City of Ember, however, the book and the movie are two completely different things. Overall, I liked the movie and found the book uneventful... and much less of a speculative story than I expected. I'm going to review and rate them separately in this post.
The Secrets of Moonacre
World-Building Rating: Great
Characterization: Great - Awesome (Sir Benjamin Merryweather)
I liked this movie a lot when I first saw it. The pacing was good, the setting and visuals interesting, and the characterizations good. I felt, near the end, that the fantasy element was getting slightly fairy-tale-ish, but it wasn't too annoying. It just could have done with more subtlety with the preachy aspect. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I especially enjoyed Ioan Gruffud's representation of Sir Benjamin Merryweather. The best parts of the movie for me were not the happy parts or the adventure parts, but the parts where we saw hints of Sir Benjamin's feelings and the deep sadness and loss that he was trying to hide/ignore. Overall, it was a good movie, slightly more on the kiddish side, but still enjoyable if you're an adult.
The Little White Horse
World-Building Rating: Decent
Characterization: Decent/Good
The expectations I had after seeing the movie left me kind of surprised by the book. From the beginning I realized that I had read about 30 pages without anything actually happening. This didn't change much throughout the book: it was filled with very detailed descriptions of every single article of clothing that everyone is wearing at every point and all the furniture in the room they happen to be in and so on. It was written in the 1940's, so that kind of explains the excessive descriptions, but I was surprised that there was next to no speculative or fantasy element in the book. The whole story, including the "legend" that they uncover is pretty much grounded in realistic events. I was also surprised by the characterization of Sir Benjamin, which was very different from his characterization in the movie.
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