Black Beauty

It's that time of summer when the the days get shorter, the nights get cooler and the list of sticky-sweet children's movies grows longer. Last year at this time, every other new film was about a kid playing baseball. This summer's theme is the return of the critter flick, as animal sagas unspool across the multiplex screen. First, it was Lassie doing her super-smart, collie-to-the-rescue thing. Coming soon is a girl-and-her-seal caper. Luckily, the current production of Black Beauty is the obvious class item of this pack. See it, then stop while you're ahead.

Based more closely than previous versions on the 1877 children's novel by Anna Sewell, Black Beauty is often more melancholy than sweet, offering a distinctly grim view of 19th-century England. Narrated by the horse itself, the film follows Black Beauty's rise and fall through the British class system as he's sold to a succession of masters. Most of his journey is a harsh, downward spiral that's made bearable primarily by the horse's sense of ironic detachment and knowledge of human foibles. Though the narration technique has resulted in a bunch of stupid Mr. Ed jokes by some critics, this Black Beauty is actually a reworking of Robert Bresson's Au Hazard Balthazar. Granted, it's a little odd to compare a kiddie movie to a French masterpiece, but Black Beauty is that well done.

This film marks the directorial debut of Caroline Thompson, who's previously worked as the screenwriter on Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and the most recent version of The Secret Garden. In some ways, she's not her own best director, but her sense of story craft and sympathy for outsiders still makes her one of the finest scriptwriters in Hollywood.