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Five Children and It: the book vs. the movie

Five Children and It (2004) — Kenneth Branagh as Uncle Albert, Eddie Izzard as the voice of It, and a Psammead built by the Jim Henson Company; sold on disc as 5 Children & It · Five Children and It (1991) — the BBC's six-part serial — the adaptation that actually follows the book

Read first, or watch first?

Read first, though not for the usual reason — the 2004 film shares so little with the book that it can't really spoil it. The problem is the reverse: it sets up a missing father and a race to save him, and a child who meets that first will spend the novel waiting for a plot that never arrives, because Nesbit's book is a comedy about wanting things badly and asking for them carelessly. Come to it cold and the shape makes sense immediately. If you want an adaptation that follows the story, the 1991 BBC serial is the one, six half-hours of it, currently streaming — and it works best after the book, as a reunion. The 2004 film is perfectly pleasant on its own terms; just treat it as a different story that borrowed a sand-fairy.

What the movie changed

A war got added

In the book the parents are simply away: father left suddenly on business, mother has gone to nurse Granny, and the house is quiet. The film makes it summer 1917, sends the father to the war, and reports him missing in action — so the children are wishing their way toward a rescue. Nesbit's children are wishing their way through an empty August with nothing much at stake, which is a completely different kind of book.

The gravel-pit became a beach

Nesbit is exact about the ground: past the chalk-quarry, before the gravel-pit, a place 'like a giant's washbowl' with stringy purple and yellow wildflowers round the top. It is ordinary Kent working landscape, and the children dig in it because there is nothing else to do. The film gives them a secret door down to a beach.

An uncle, and a villain

The film sends the children to stay with eccentric Uncle Albert and gives them a cousin, Horace, who catches the Psammead and plans to dissect it in his laboratory. Neither exists in the book — and more to the point, the book has no villain at all. The only antagonist Nesbit needs is the children's own careless phrasing.

Four wishes instead of eleven

The novel runs a fresh wish through nearly every one of its eleven chapters. The film keeps four, and only two of them — the wings and the wealth — come from Nesbit at all. Most of what the book actually spends its time on simply is not in the movie.

What only the book has

The chapters nobody filmed

The house turns into a besieged castle with a real army outside and no dinner inside. Robert is wished bigger than the baker's boy and ends up exhibited at a fair. And the baby grows into a grown man for a day — a tremendous young gentleman who objects to being called the Lamb and informs his brothers and sisters that his name is Hilary, or St. Maur, or Devereux.

Learning to word it properly

The real comedy is legal. The children gradually work out that the Psammead grants exactly what was said, so they start drafting — and still lose, because there is always one more crack. By the last chapter they are negotiating like solicitors with a creature that has been doing this since the megatherium. A ninety-minute film has no room to slow down for that, and it is the best thing in the book.

Nesbit talking to you

She interrupts constantly. She tells you which parts she is skipping and why, apologises for the ones she isn't, warns you that you would have done exactly the same in the children's place, and at one point declines to explain something on the grounds that you can work it out. Half the pleasure of reading her aloud is that voice, and no adaptation has ever found a way to carry it.

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