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I just got home from watching Bridge to Terabithia. Just to get it out of the way, I did like it. It was a film meant for a fairly young audience and expressed themes including handling problems with creativity, escapism, and coping with lose. It played the magical realism card, and I couldn’t help, since the last film I saw before this was Pan’s Labyrinth, but compare the two. Besides taking very different approaches cinematically, as well as being obviously targeted to different audiences, these two films are remarkably similar, in that they both deal with a child handling change through imagination. On the Pan’s Labyrinth side, the little girl Ofelia uses the fantasy world she creates in order to cope with the drastic changes in her new, basically conscripted life under her step-father Captain Vidál. While Jess is taught to harness his own creativity to overcome his problems in school and at home by the magical imaginings of his new friend Leslie. Both stories rely heavily on the fable structure, the lost-royalty-now-found archetype (must everything be Jungian?), and most interesting, they both pose the question of redemption after death - the dilemma of innocence and holy judgement. I suppose I could turn this into a five paragraph essay, but I’ll just leave it at a summary of sorts. If you’re feeling up to the comparison, I invite you to go see both movies and judge for yourself. (Pan’s Labyrinth is a must, by the way. Bridge to Terabithia was good, but I wouldn’t call it required viewing.)