If you pick up this movie thinking you are getting a knockoff of THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, who could blame you? That’s what it was marketed as, but unfortunately that isn’t what the movie is.
The school year starts as dismally as it could for fifth-grader Jess Aarons (Josh Hutcherson); the bullies are lurking everywhere, the teachers are meaner and he has to wear his sister’s pink hand-me-down shoes. Then, enter new girl and neighbor Leslie Burke (AnnaSophia Robb). She dresses funky and her parents (authors, both of them) don’t own a TV — she’s got it rough too. The kids are drawn together; they build a tree house deep in the woods behind their parents’ properties and create an imaginary world called Terabithia.
It takes the movie a little over half an hour to get to this point, and with a running time of 96 minutes, it is apparent that the real world — not the imaginary one — is the focus of this movie.