After the first Harry Potter book burst on to the scene in 1997 and took the world by storm, pretty much every fiction publishing company went on high alert. “Children’s books?” they said to themselves, “making vast piles of cash, transforming the fortunes of a struggling publishing company and making the author richer than even the Queen of England? Who’d have thought it? And how do we get in on the action?”

After the first Harry Potter film took nearly a billion dollars worldwide in 2001 – even more than the first Lord of the Rings film, released the same year – the big Hollywood studios began to have similar thoughts. This is why the past couple of years have seen so many attempts to cash in on the same highly lucrative market, with films such as The Chronicles of Narnia, The Dark is Rising and The Golden Compass all based on similar children’s fantasy novels.

Though of varying quality, they’ve also all managed to make Hollywood vast amounts of cash, largely due to having been able to draw on existing fanbases, as the novel source material for each already had a strong following. The Narnia books, after all, have been around since the 1950s; the novel on which The Dark is Rising was based came out in 1965; and The Golden Compass was originally published to widespread acclaim as Northern Lights back in 1995.

Now, however, Hollywood has begun to run out of long-established children’s fantasy books – especially ones with sequels. In 2006 we saw the first attempt to bring a newer fantasy book to the big screen with the rather disappointing Eragon, based on the novel of the same name first published in 2003 – the first in a planned series. Now it’s the turn of another post-Harry Potter children’s adventure, Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black’s The Spiderwick Chronicles, five books of which were published in 2003–04, with a number of spin-offs having followed this initial splurge.

You can see what attracted Hollywood’s attention. Five books in two years is pretty impressive by anyone’s standards, even if they are aimed at children and relatively short. The fact that DiTerlizzi is an artist, so his contribution was a succession of distinctive drawings and paintings throughout the books, only added to the appeal. After all, no films have done better business in the past few years than ones adapted from comic books, and a children’s novel packed with illustrations is the next best thing, allowing studio executives to quickly imagine how the finished film might look.

Nonetheless, and despite impressive sales, these books are a bit of a risk. Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings succeeded not so much because they were aimed at children, but because adults could enjoy them as well. The Spiderwick Chronicles books, on the other hand, are aimed at much younger children, DiTerlizzi’s illustrations being included largely because a decent chunk of the target audience is of an age where the books will have to be read to them, as they are as yet unable to read for themselves.

So, a potential problem from the point of view of the studio is a likely lack of mass appeal. But for parents with young children, is this film version anything to get excited about? Well, thankfully yes. A sensitive, quality adaptation of a classic adventure as three young siblings discover a wonderfully rendered fantasy world, rather than being the derivative, quickly churned-out rubbish that studios are wont to produce when chasing the zeitgeist, we instead end up with a quality addition to the fantasy genre.

Yes, it may still be very much a children’s film, but that’s no bad thing. Not every film for the kids should try to do a Shrek and appeal to their parents as well – more often than not, both target audiences end up disappointed.


• Above: Jared Grace (Freddie Highmore) tries to discover the mystery behind some strange disappearances in The Spiderwick Chronicles.
Credit: Takashi Seida