The adventures of Huck Finn

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Movie
German title The adventures of Huck Finn
Original title The Adventures of Huck Finn
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1993
length 108 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
Rod
Director Stephen Sommers
script Stephen Sommers
production John Baldecchi
Steve White
music Bill Conti
camera Janusz Kamiński
cut Bob Ducsay
occupation

The Adventures of Huck Finn (original title: The Adventures of Huck Finn ) is a Disney - adventure film of 1993 with Elijah Wood and Courtney B. Vance in the lead roles. The film is based on the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and shows the journey of Huck Finn and Jim, an escaped slave.

action

The Southern States in the first half of the 19th century: Huck Finn lives with the widow Douglas because his father is a drunkard and a drifter. Huck is supposed to bow to the unpleasant constraints of life, including going to school and wearing clean clothes. Instead, he fights himself down on the Mississippi and bypasses his duties whenever possible. One day his father comes back to town. He takes Huck into custody and hopes to get a ransom from the widow Douglas.

However, Huck escapes by pretending that he was murdered. Then Huck's father and two other men are looking for Huck and the slave Jim. He flees to Jackson Island in the river and on the way meets the slave Jim, who fled in the excitement of his murder from Miss Watson. Jim is on the run because he was about to be sold and is now suspected of murdering Huck. The two go on a raft down the Mississippi to secure Jim's freedom. You experience all kinds of adventures and meet diverse characters, including some criminals who die on a sinking ship, hostile neighbors (The Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons), an immortal impostor, the King and the Duke. Huck has to recognize in the experiences that the skin color of a person does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about his character. He helps Jim escape the slavers several times, handing Jim over to a slave trader at the Grangerfords who he later regrets deeply. Likewise, however, Jim has kept the death of Huck's father secret on the criminal ship, which Huck finds difficult to forgive him.

Only after Huck is shot in the back at the end of the film and Jim misses the only steamboat to Cairo does Huck trust him completely and bequeath him the fortune that the three Wilks sisters gave him.

Reviews

The international critics rated the Disney film adaptation as not being critical and complex, like the original itself. The US trade journal Variety certified Stephen Sommers a "conventional literary film adaptation, in which the acting of the two main actors never goes beyond mediocrity and thus never reaches the touching mood of the book". The film-dienst saw the endeavors of the film in the form of “delightful locations and dedicated camera work”, but missed “nuances that would be sacrificed to fashionable effects”. In this way, the "transformation of the young hero into a person with a moral attitude" is not sufficiently illuminated. The website kino.de found that Sommers did not find “much contemporary” in the story of Twain and instead staged the youth novel as a “casual, episodic raft trip”, “in which no southern cliché remains unused”. The TV magazine TV Spielfilm also attributes superficiality to the film. The film is a "glossy version" of the material, which captivates above all through its "noble actors". The magazine prisma compares the film with Michael Curtiz ' Adventure on the Mississippi (1959), which the Disney film adaptation does not come close to. In addition, the scenes with the brutal father are not suitable for smaller children. The American film critic James Berardinelli , however, was taken with the film. He is "good entertainment" and offers solid acting so that he deserves "attention and appreciation". The issue of race is also taken up, despite the usual weakening of themes that are not “child-friendly” for Disney, by showing the “atrocities of slavery” and the film revealing a “social agenda”. Even Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times praised the film as "good film with strong views," "but missing some lows" the. Although the “humanistic message of the film is not the focus”, it is “at least there”. Ebert also criticized Huck's inadequately elaborated change, which was neglected in favor of a broad representation of the "picaresque adventure".

Differences from the novel

  • Tom Sawyer is not mentioned in the film, although he plays a large role in the novel.
  • Huck wears shoes throughout the film, but in the novel he almost exclusively walks barefoot.
  • The ending of the film is very different from the novel. In the novel, Jim is sold to a farmer who is a relative of Tom Sawyer. Huck then tries to free Jim and runs into Tom Sawyer on the farm. The two team up to free Jim, which lasts several chapters in the novel and ends with Tom being shot and Jim ultimately a free man after he was caught again. In the film, Jim is never caught, and Huck and Jim are accused of stealing gold. Huck is shot while trying to escape and Jim is saved from the gallows by Mary Jane. She then tells him that he is a free man.
  • The incident with Peters Gold is the climax of the film, whereas in the book it is more in the middle of the plot.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Film review for The Adventures of Huck Finn , film-dienst
  2. ↑ The Adventures of Huck Finn  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Variety, Emanuel Levy. December 31, 1992. Retrieved September 26, 2010.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.variety.com  
  3. ^ The adventures of Huck Finn , kino.de. Retrieved September 26, 2010.
  4. ↑ The Adventures of Huck Finn , TV feature film . Retrieved September 26, 2010.
  5. Jump up ↑ The Adventures of Huck Finn , prisma. Retrieved September 26, 2010.
  6. ^ A b The Adventures of Huck Finn (1993) , James Berardinelli. Retrieved September 26, 2010.
  7. ^ The Adventures of Huck Finn , Roger Ebert. April 2, 1993. Retrieved September 26, 2010.