Disney's Huck Finn

I saw Disney's 1995 travesty of the Huck Finn story last night. There was so much that was wrong, I don't know where to begin.

The casting was wrong - Elijah Woods looks like he's about 7 years old. Although Twain never says exactly how old Huck was, he should be at least 12 or 13.

UPDATE: Twain described Huck Finn as a 12-year-old to William Dean Howells

In the opening scene, Huck is in a fistfight with another boy. This is so wrong. Although Tom Sawyer got into fistfights, the striking thing about Huck was that he was never portrayed as fighting anybody.

Instead of $6,000 in robbers gold, they instead give him $600 from his recently deceased, religious mother. The only thing we ever know from Twain about Huck's mother was that she was dead, and never learned how to read.

I thought it was fascinating that in the trailer that came with the DVD, they show a clip where Miss Watson threatens Huck with 'the bad place' and Huck says he wishes he was there. This scene was completely excised from the final cut.

But most egregiously, they completely cut out the most dramatic, pivotal scene in the entire story - where Huck has to make a choice between doing what his society says is right, and helping Jim and as a result, going to hell.

This is always the problem with adaptations of the Huck Finn story. People believe it's a story for children, and so bowlderize it freely to make it palatable for children, and most importantly, for their parents. No Disney film is going to allow the free and easy parodying of religion as a force for evil, or point out how integral slavery was to the antebellum South. So they not only have Jim teaching Huck that slavery is wrong, they have Widow Douglas explain to Huck at the end of the story that slavery is wrong.

By trying to cram an adult story into children's clothes, they strangle the life out of it.

And I have to wonder if Peter Jackson saw the Huck Finn film before starting on Lord of the Rings. The scene where Huck is lying in bed, recuperating from a bullet to the back (in the book it was Tom Sawyer, shot in the leg), receiving friends when he wakes looked exactly like the scene in Return of the King when Frodo is waking up and sees Gandalf and Sam.