There’s an argument to be made that E.B. White is one of the most important American writers of the 20th century, all the more so because he wasn’t flashy or ego-driven. Cartoonist and friend of White, James Thurber, said of the man that “he has avoided the Man in the Reception Room as he has avoided the interviewer, the photographer, the microphone, the rostrum, the literary tea, and the Stork Club. His life is his own.” A lifelong newsman who in his time wrote in Seattle and New York, White is probably best known for his children’s novels Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, cornerstones of the modern American kid lit canon and generally pretty fun little books for reading to your kids or letting them read on their own when they’re old enough.
But he was also the second author of The Elements of Style, a book originally written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918 and which White dragged out of mothballs to expand in 1959. The slim little volume shows its age these days, but it’s also one of the most useful books on the topic of writing anybody has ever written: I’ve more than once been given a copy when starting employment in a writing job somewhere. The Associated Press or New York Times or MLA style guides will dictate to you how to render numerals or street addresses, will yell at you about the serial comma, but White seemed interested in telling you how to actually write.
Knowing all this as you turn the pages of Charlotte’s Web is key to picking up some of the slyness hidden in plain sight in the children’s tale of a spider who, after working such PR magic that she keeps a pig from being turned to bacon, dies uncredited.
The barest bit of that bite makes its way into Hanna-Barbera’s 1973 film, which struggled to make it to theaters after changing hands creatively. It was one of the most poignant animated films of its era, falling into the time when Disney’s dominance over the cartoon musical flick was wavering and there was briefly a chance that maybe we could serve kids stories that acknowledged the real complexity of things like life and love and death and grief. Fifty years on, most animated movies that come out are barely concerned with any of that stuff.
White hated it, of course.
The movie just hits feature length by virtue of featuring a lot of musical numbers—incidentally one of White’s chief complaints. The tunes hit sometimes (just the sad and haunting ones, with the exception of Templeton the rat’s song about stuffing his face on garbage at the county fair, which is S tier and my personal anthem). It’s in service to a story that follows the book fairly faithfully, right down to dialogue and narration: Wilbur the pig (Henry Gibson) is the runt of the litter and destined to be turned into sausage gravy when he’s saved by the entreaties of the soft-hearted farmer’s daughter Fern Arable (Pamelyn Ferdin).
Figuring he’s teaching his daughter a lesson about farm living, Fern’s father allows her to raise Wilbur, but then sells him down the road to her uncle, Mr. Zuckerman (Bob Holt). It’s there, watched over by an oft-visiting Fern, that Wilbur befriends the spider Charlotte (Debbie Reynolds, known to you and everyone as Hollywood royalty and mother to Carrie Fisher). Wilbur knows it’s his lot in life to die once cold weather hits and Zuckerman wants some ham, but Charlotte decides to save her new friend. She does so with the mightiest weapon available to any of us, which is of course the written word. People will believe anything if it’s in writing, after all.