Kid Smart Films With Modern Stories Gain Popularity With Young Audiences

“A really fine story has no age limits. At the moment, ‘Babe’ is perceived as a children’s film. Yet it deals with death, dignity, destiny, passage to adulthood, courage and bigotry,” says George Miller, coauthor of the charming new film based on “Babe: The Gallant Pig,” the Dick King-Smith children’s book.

The rapturous movie about the swine who would be sheepdog is at the forefront of the latest, and most encouraging, Hollywood trend: films based on contemporary children’s stories.

Put the emphasis on “contemporary.” These books aren’t Victoriana such as “Little Women” or “The Secret Garden” - both recently adapted to the big screen. They’re present-day classics.

“The Indian in the Cupboard,” the enchanting film based on the 1981 Lynne Reid Banks book, opened five weeks ago and has earned $30 million. “Babe,” which has the crossover potential of an “E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial,” has taken in almost $21 million in two weeks. And “The Baby-Sitters Club,” inspired by Ann M. Martin’s series about entrepreneurial adolescents, opened Friday.

And that’s just the beginning. Also part of the kid-lit-on-screen tidal wave are adaptations of Chris Van Allsburg’s “Jumanji” (due in theaters Nov. 17), and “James and the Giant Peach” and “Matilda,” both by Roald Dahl and in preproduction.

“I find it heartening that these are titles that don’t just generate a ‘see the movie, buy the toy’ interest. They’re stories that children have really responded to,” observes Diane Roback, children’s editor of Publishers Weekly. Roback sees a trend away from “faddish fare such as ‘Mighty Morphin Power Rangers’ toward kid-tested and time-tested stories that people of all ages enjoy.”

Is this trend a function of Hollywood economics, an under-12 version of optioning the latest by John Grisham or Michael Crichton?

With the exception of the “Baby-Sitters” and “Goosebumps” projects (R.L. Stine’s scare series is being adapted for the Fox Network), Roback thinks not.

“It’s not just that these books have sold well,” she says. “It’s that there’s something substantial about the characters in these stories, something more fully formed than a group of people sitting around the room at a Hollywood concept meeting could think of.”

Unlike the sensation-filled works of Grisham and Crichton, popular kid lit boasts characters possessed of a strong moral compass.

For Miller, the creator of “Mad Max,” who also produced “Babe,” and for Melissa Mathison, who wrote the original screenplay for “E.T.” and adapted “Indian,” the trend is a function of baby boomers’ making movies they want their children to see.

“The boomers are now grown up and are making movies, having children. They’re remembering what it’s like to be young again,” says Miller by fax from Australia, where his wife just gave birth to a 12-pound baby boy.

“And in the absence of effective religious guidance, they’re beginning to recognize the power of the story,” he observes. Indeed, a trait these films share is that their characters’ adventures aren’t merely thrilling, they’re morally transforming.”

“There are suddenly people my age, primarily women, who are in a position of power to make these movies happen,” observes Mathison, who is parent - with husband Harrison Ford - to two children.

Speaking from the family spread in Wyoming, the 45-year-old Mathison notes that the industry forces encouraging the development of kid lit are women such as Lucy Fischer, the Warners exec behind “The Secret Garden” and “A Little Princess,” and Denise De Novi, producer of “Little Women” and “James and the Giant Peach.” “And, of course, Kathleen Kennedy,” who co-produced “E.T.” and “Indian.”

Also behind the trend are Columbia executive Lisa Henson, who developed “Little Women” and “Baby-Sitters”; producer Maggie Renzi, who developed and produced John Sayles’ “The Secret of Roan Inish,” and Scholastic Productions executive Jane Startz, who also had a hand in “Indian” and “Baby-Sitters.”

“It’s really a women-driven phenomenon,” says Mathison. “In the case of the classic stories, the women remember how wonderful the access to these stories is, how ‘The Secret Garden’ and ‘Little Women’ helped them become who they are. They want that for their children.”

“Mothers read stories to children,” agrees Startz. “My children have brought me stories I didn’t even know about.”

There are other motivating forces behind the trend.

One, of course, is money.

“Hollywood has realized that family movies make money,” observes Mathison, who correctly believes that kid lit equally appeals to adults. “I think ‘E.T.’ broke through the wall that separated so-called children’s movies from family movies.”

“I know how tough it is for adults to find movies for their kids that they would also want to see themselves,” Sayles told a reporter earlier this year. This motivated him to go ahead with ‘Roan Inish,’ a fable about a seal-woman that, like ‘Babe,’ resonates with the animistic connection between humans and beasts.

But there is another, purely practical reason why kid-lit such as “Babe” and “Indian” - insta-classics optioned almost immediately upon publication in the early ‘80s - are now seeing the screen.

“I bought the rights to ‘Babe’ nine years ago,” says Miller. “But we had to wait for the technology to catch up with what we wanted to do at a price we could afford.”

Mathison, who also adapted the Walter Farley classic “The Black Stallion” for the screen, thinks it’s a good sign that “Hollywood is moving away from those classics of another age” in favor of stories more immediate to contemporary kids.

“The stories my children consider classics are by Roald Dahl,” she says of the irreverent writer of “James and the Giant Peach” and “Matilda,” yet another child’s novel in the Hollywood pipeline.

“Dahl’s books are wonderfully nasty. The children exhibit bad behavior as they rise above adversity, evil and wickedness,” Mathison says with obvious relish. “They’re obviously not Victorian.”

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Carrie Rickey Philadelphia Inquirer