What Do The Critics Say?

"A late entry in a crowded field, Spiderwick works hard to set itself apart from the competition, and almost entirely succeeds - no mean feat these days. From its opening, James Horner’s spot-on score and some great production design on the Spiderwick house will put even adults right where it wants you: part E. T., part Labyrinth, with a dash of The Goonies. Kudos to whoever thought to bring on Mark Waters as director. He has Mean Girls and Freaky Friday on his CV, and clearly has great recall of what he enjoyed on screen as a kid, because the real strength of The Spiderwick Chronicles is how well it brings to mind a lot of older entries in the genre." Sam Toy EMPIRE MAGAZINE "The Spiderwick Chronicles is a terrific ride for children who crave genuine excitement, not that tepid Scooby Doo stuff." Jeffrey Westhoff NORTH WEST HERALD "The Spiderwick Chronicles is fast, funny, and clever, with memorable creatures to sweeten the deal." Mike McGranaghan AISLE SEAT "The Spiderwick Chronicles is great family fun. Its edge o your seat action, charming cast, clever script and direction, and excellent special effects is something is everyone can enjoy. This film was a lot of fun. A real treat. While neither as high-minded or complicated as other popular fantasy book series adaptations, I enjoyed the relative lack of complication. The Spiderwick Chronicles had all the fun and magic of the Harry Potter films, minus the Dickensian teenage angst." Diva Velez MIGHTY GANESHA

"The people who made this film cared enough about it to give their all. The Spiderwick Chronicles is no kind of timeless classic, owing mainly to its thin script, but I liked it anyway. It's not a masterpiece, but I was never bored. For a children's movie, that's practically a rave." Tim Brayton AGONY & ECSTASY "Gorgeous cinematography from Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion) and wonderfully intricate production design from James D Bissell create a believably magical world of dusty tomes and toothy goblins." Nell Minow BELIEFNET "Spiderwick hits the high notes when it needs to, and kids who can handle the scarier parts will find it an enjoyable escape." Kim Voynar CINEMATICAL "The film is graced with a mostly superb cast, superior special effects, a sparkling musical score by James Horner and a fantasy-filled plot with a bit of moralizing, but, fortunately, only a bit." David Wiegand SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE "Spiderwick Chronicles, thanks to its fine craftsmanship, is very much more than the same old bedtime stories, digitally gussied up for profit if not fun." Bob Strauss LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS "The best fantasy movie to come along in a while. Spiderwick is miles better than the yawn-inducing adaptation of "The Golden Compass." It's smart, thrilling and funny, and it even features a good message about the importance of family. Director Mark Waters ("Mean Girls") and three credited screenwriters have captured the feel and spirit of Tony DeTerlizzi and Holly Black's best-selling book series." Jeff Vice DESERET NEWS

The Inside Story "The Spiderwick Chronicles" began as a popular series of books by co-creators Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black. There has long been interest in bringing the stories to the screen but DiTerlizzi and Black wanted to entrust their creation to capable hands. Ultimately, they saw Mark Canton ("George A. Romero's Land of the Dead") as the perfect producer for the film. To DiTerlizzi and Black’s delight, Kathleen Kennedy ("Jurassic Park") joined him as an executive producer. "A lot of friends and fans who had read the books and seen the art, thought this story would make a cool movie," DiTerlizzi recalls. "It was a dream of mine as well, but a lot of books get optioned to be developed into films; so Holly and I held out hope that it might actually happen. " In fact, it was probably to be expected, because as soon as the books were finished, approaches were made to option them. "I’ve always loved movies in the fantasy genre, and when I read these books I saw the opportunity to do something that hadn’t been done before: a movie that dealt with adventure, fantasy and incredibly interesting creatures, but wasn’t set in a far-off land with British wizards or Gothic orphans, or just some kind of strange, unrecognizable lead actors," Director Mark Waters explained adding, "the film features kid-characters audiences can easily identify with. They just seem to have been plunked down in an extremely extraordinary situation when the Grace family moves into this family estate they inherited and are slowly introduced to those creatures through a Field Guide. Here was an opportunity to make a movie that everyone could relate to immediately, and relate to just the fact that these kind of crazy, strange creatures could be around us at any time." One of the reasons the children in the story are identifiable, he says, is that they struggle with problems shared by many families today. "But the enchanted and often perilous journey they embark upon allows them to discover and draw on strengths they never knew they had as individuals, and, more importantly, as a family." Who are the family members? Mum Helen, daughter Mallory and the twins, Jared and Simon. Jared Grace is at a crisis point in his life, and it is through this extraordinary adventure that he comes to terms with his feelings about his parent's separation. Simon Grace is the nerdier of the two, but his quiet determination and attention to detail become great assets when the family is in danger. Their mother Helen Grace has just broken up with her husband. Unable to maintain their lifestyle, she moves into the old family estate, a dark, dilapidated Victorian house named for her great uncle, Arthur Spiderwick. No-one is happy about having to make the move, but Helen does have an ally in her daughter, Mallory. The catalyst to the adventure in the film comes from Arthur Spiderwick’s "Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You." What Arthur didn’t realize when he wrote the manual, was that the secrets he revealed about the hidden faerie world could act as a 'how-to manual' and be dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands. The previously unseen world of the faerie's is revealed when Jared discovers the manual, locked away in a trunk in the attic. Despite the warning he proceeds to open the book. By doing so, he exposes every member in the family to great danger from a ten-foot fearsome ogre named Mulgarath. Producer and co-writer Karey Kirkpatrick ("Chicken Run" & "Charlotte's Web") says that when he was first approached to help adapt the Spiderwick books into a screenplay, he immediately read the books to his children to gauge their reaction. "They were enthralled by the books and by the possibility that I might be involved with them in some way. I, like them, was really taken by the notion that the things we are unable to see, or choose not to see, are actually there all around us. I was drawn to the kids in the middle of this broken family and how the whole situation ultimately helped to bring them together." Canton says ultimarely they "wanted to make a movie that is honest to the language of the teenagers and the adults in the story, and honest to the problems teenagers have with one other and with their parents." Canton deliberately chose Mark Waters ("Freaky Friday" & "Mean Girls") to direct because he was uniquely capable of grounding all the fantasy elements in a palpable reality. "He has a way of conveying this without talking down to his audience. He was ideally suited to making a movie that is honest to the language and feelings of teenagers and their parents. Mark connected with the subject and understood how to convey it." Staring point for the story is the Spiderwick Estate, which is virtually a complete character itself in the movie. What at first seems to be a musty, secluded old mansion in bad need of repair, slowly opens up to reveal a fascinating and mysterious history. So many pivotal events in the film unfold there (both in the distant past and the present) that 2005 Satellite Award winning production designer Jim Bissell ("Good Night, and Good Luck") had to design it in such a way that audiences were able to appreciate the way it once looked and what remains special about it to this day. "Arthur Spiderwick built the estate in the early decades of the 20th century," Bissell explained. "He came from an old New England family and studied to be a naturalist." Bissell referenced the work of designer William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 1800's, known for their emphasis on organic motifs, for his design inspiration, as well as the Spiderwick books themselves. "The books are fantastic. I was familiar with them because my kids love them, and that’s what drew me to the project in the first place. Tony’s illustrations, his pencil drawings, his pen and inks, are just fabulous. So when I was designing the film, I kept them on the wall to inspire me." Did they find a suitable house for the film? The answer is, no. The production design crew would build one in Montreal, Canada. "We found a beautiful glade in a park called Cap-Saint-Jacques, and there was a little shack there, probably built in the nineteen fifties. The city and the park graciously let us tear it down and build our house there," Bissell said. Filming from late summer all the way through the autumn into early winter created some potential continuity issues. "So we built sixty trees between twenty and thirty feet high that had varying degrees of foliage and color," Bissell explained. "When we began filming in late summer, when the trees were leafy and green, we added some trees with colorful autumn foliage, and by late autumn we added some green trees to maintain a continuous look." Arthur's field guide was created by using diaries and journals from the early part of the twentieth century as models. They also looked at handwriting samples, and even evolved a font that they used for Arthur Spiderwick’s own handwriting. "When audiences get a glimpse of The Field Guide, hopefully they will sense the presence of Arthur Spiderwick and the almost two decades he spent working on it," property master Claire Alary ("The Day After Tomorrow" & "The Bone Collector") says. Part of the 'fun' of the film is it's unique characters: the goblins, hobgoblins, brownies, boggarts and ogres. The creatures fascinated the filmmakers. Some were sweet and charming, while others gave them the chills."When the movie starts it’s a little bit like a ghost story," says Kirkpatrick. "There is something or someone in the house with the Grace family and it’s telling them in an ‘Amityville Horror’ sense to get out." That somebody is Thimbletack, the house brownie. Brownies are also known to be very loyal to their masters, in Thimbletack’s case Arthur Spiderwick. "Spiderwick gave him one mission before he left, which is, ‘Protect the book.’ And that’s his whole life." They do have one nasty trait though: when they get angry they turn into boggarts; which is their ugly side, and it doesn’t take much. "He is not the typical bad guy; in faerie tales, it’s not black and white," says 2006 Visual Effects Society Award winner and ILM visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman ("War Of The Worlds"), "it’s more about grays." Then there's the evil nemisis the ogre, Mulgarath skillfully portrayed by actor Nick Nolte. Mulgarath is supported by an army of aggressive goblins are led by Redcap, a Bull Goblin. "He’s the majordomo to Mulgarath," says 1994 Academy Award winner Phil Tippett ("Jurassic Park"). Tippett, who founded Tippett Visual Effects Studio in Berkley, California, notes Redcap is like, "the sergeant at arms goblin. The only problem is, he’s a coward in the presence of his boss, Mulgarath." Another creature that lives in the woods which surround the estate is Hogsqueal. Hogsqueal is on a quest for vengeance. Mulgarath has killed his entire family, and he’s willing to work with the children because he wants to do something about it. The only problem is he’s a coward. And he too has some bad habits. "With him, there’s earwax, there’s butt scratches, and, uh; snot," says Tippett. It's not all about magical creatures. The human element is pretty good too. 2005 Golden Satellite Award winner Freddie Highmore ("Five Children and It" & "A Good Year") plays two roles, those of twin brothers Jared and Simon Grace. "It was very exciting to see him play the role of a kid with some real anger issues and tackling an American accent, which he did seamlessly. He’s a great presence on film," Waters observes. Sarah Bolger ("In America" & "Tara Road") was cast as the boys sister, Mallory. "She’s had to be kind of a mom looking after them because of what her mother is going through personally." Waters says she "is really amazing, an actress to keep an eye on. She’s really got the chops and pulls off the equally challenging role of Mallory with great aplomb." Emmy, Golden Globe and Tony Award winner Mary-Louise Parker was cast as the children's mother, Helen. Also in the cast are: 2005 Volpi Cup winner David Strathairn as Uncle Arthur: dual 2005 Golden Globe winnerJoan Plowright as his daughter Lucinda and voice cast members: 1992 Golden Globe winner Nick Nolte ("The Prince of Tides") as Mulgarath; EMMY Award winner Martin Short as Thimbletack and, Seth Rogen ("Superbad") as Hogsqueal. Synopsis

Peculiar things start to happen the moment the Grace family (Jared, his twin brother Simon, sister Mallory and their mom) leave New York and move into the secluded old house owned by their great, great, Uncle Arthur Spiderwick and great aunt Lucinda. At first they are none too enchanted by the rundown Victorian house, until the children discover an enchanted creature, a Brownie named Thimbletack, living in the walls. Then Jarad finds a book, Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You. It contains a warning which he ignores. The power of the book will lead to the opening of their eyes revealling an invisible, odd, and sometimes dangerous world of dragons and boggarts, phookas and fairies, sprites and goblins that is all around them. When they cross paths with the ogre Mulgarath, they quickly realize he will stop at nothing to get his hands on the Field Guide.

The Verdict "Like a number of Walden Media Films there is just something missing. Something that would realy define films such as "The Chronicles Of Narnia" and now, "The Spiderwick Chronicles". That doesn't mean the films they have chosen to produce are not watchable. They are! And, it doesn't mean they are not entertaining. Because they are! They just seem to be missing that little spark that fires a film up on all cylinders and makes you want to see it again, tell all your friends that it was a 'really, really good film' and lives you, when the occassion presents itself, craving a sequel. They got it right with "The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep", "Bridge to Terabithia", "Because of Winn-Dixie" and "Holes", yet recent releases such as "Nim's Island", 'The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising" and "Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium", they missed the mark by the proverbial mile. Part of the problem with "The Spiderwick Chronicles" lays with young actor Freddie Highmore. Playing opposed twin brother Jared and Simon Grace is a hard task. I have always had nothing but high praise for Highmore, who I hope will go on to mature into a highly accomplished adult actor. As Jared, Highmore is excellent. But as Simon, he appears to be in conflict with himself. The other downside for "The Spiderwick Chronicles" is that the story really does preclude parents bringing ankle-biters to the see film. It is far too scary for little ones and more suited to older children who won't feel threatened and unduly frightened by some of the film's scary creatures. Never the less, I found the film an enjoyable experience. While I won't be going ape over it, I do believe it offers excellent value for the money. And yes, I do hope there's a sequel. 4 STARS." Who's Who?

Freddie Highmore Sarah Bolger Mary-Louise Parker Nick Nolte Joan Plowright David Strathairn Seth Rogen Jordy Benattar Martin Short Andrew McCarthy Tod Fennell Mariah Inger Jeremy Lavalley Lise Durocher-Viens

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

Jared Grace/Simon Grace Mallory Grace Helen Grace Mulgarath Aunt Lucinda Spiderwick Arthur Spiderwick the voice of Hogsqueal Young Lucinda the voice of Thimbletack Richard Grace Helen's Co-Worker Nurse Tow Truck Driver Mrs Spiderwick

Run Time 96 minutes Rated PG [AUST] Copyright ©2008 - Paramount Pictures - All Rights Reserved ©2008 All Rights Reserved - Protected by Australian, International, Copyright & Trademark Laws.