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.
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