Suzie Templeton's 2008 stop-motion short Peter and The Wolf is a stunner for all ages. It's not just that it's visually impressive - and it really is - but it's also the way it shows Peter's anger as a righteous source of strength. Lots of children's entertainment goes out of its way to paint life in exclusively sunny colors, but it's fair to say that most children have some impressive stores of anger and frustration, too. Very impressive, at least in the case of my pre-schoolers. Templeton's take on Sergei Prokofiev's Peter is not the cherub of the Disney short nor the high-pitched simpleton Elmo, to name two other versions that have passed through our house. Instead, she sees Peter as a sad child, cloistered by his grandfather behind high walls, and mostly friendless.
The darkness of her version reached its most terrifying moment early in the short, when Peter accidentally bumps one of the hunters in the street of his unidentified (but vaguely Eastern European) town. The hunter, face scrunched in a universal look of sheer meanness, grabs Peter roughly and shoves him into an alley, where he tosses the child into a dumpster and points his gun at him just for kicks. My son gasped in disbelief at the cruelty. I gasped, too, (well, inwardly, I guess) because I realized that the movie was not going to follow the story closely, and all bets were off.
Later, locked behind the high gates of the home he shares with his grandfather, Peter allows his only friends, a duck and a crow with a broken wing, to convince him to steal the key and escape into the forest. Perhaps you know how things proceed here. Prokofiev's composition uses orchestral specific instruments to depict the characters: Peter is a string section, the duck an oboe, the bird a flute, the cat a clarinet, Peter's Grandfather a bassoon, the wolf French horns, and the hunters tympani and bass drums. There are no words in Templeton's short. Her visual sense is strong enough that words are unnecessary.
So Peter and his animal friends play in the forest. In a nice touch, Peter ties a balloon to the crow (the bird is not always a crow in the story of Peter and the Wolf, but having the bird be a crow here is itself a nice touch) to help it fly up into an ugly gnarled tree. The forest has a large industrial pipe leading to a frozen pond. Bucolic, it is not.
Peter's Grandfather realizes that the boy is out of the gate and brings him back into the compound, leaving the animals outside. Peter immediately hears the sound of the forest change, and he pulls back a piece of metal to look out. Standing on the pipe, stock still and as mangy and ferocious as any wild predator, is the wolf. Will your children be upset when he gulps down Peter's only friend the duck? Mine weren't, but mainly because my wife reminded them that this is the way of nature. My children were, however, pleased to see how seriously pissed-off Peter gets. As was I. It's not pride that leads Peter to capture the wolf. It's revenge. And, as all bets are off on how closely the story will hew to the original, the short injects the capture with a tense feeling of danger, especially when the the wolf gets a paw onto Peter and leaves a bright-red gash.
It is only after the wolf is captured, though, that the story veers off into unchartered waters. The hunters do not save Peter, but he is indeed saved. In the aftermath, Peter gets his revenge on the hunters, and he comes to terms with the wolf in a surprising way. The whole movie is only a half-hour long, but it feels complete and honest and true, and those are unfortunately rare qualities in children's entertainment.