One of the things I love about the movies lately is the huge number of great children's and young adult books being made into films — and more importantly, being made into good films (The Chronicles of Narnia, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and Ella Enchanted come to mind). Of course the Harry Potter films get better with each outing, and I have high hopes for next winter's adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass as well as 2008's Where the Wild Things Are. A couple of great adaptations of Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess and Jerry Spinelli's Maniac Magee and I'll be set.

Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia was one of the first incredibly tragic books I read. But more on that later. I remember it being about Southern poverty and unbridled childhood imagination, and the difficulty when adapting a book like that is usually that the images aren't nearly what a ten-year-old mind can conjure. We shall see.

Bridge to Terabithia will be in theaters February 16th, 2007. Click here to watch the trailer.

The trailer of the new film adaptation, which is being put out by Disney in February, opens with one of the most familiar scenes from the novel: tomboy Leslie challenging artistic Jesse to a footrace. The kids are played by the talented actors AnnaSophia Robb (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and Josh Hutcherson (Zathura). Everything starts to get mystical as a title says, "Somewhere beyond the road... somewhere across the stream..." and we see Leslie swinging across a creek on a rope, slowly and with a dazed awe on her face. I think they call it awe because sometimes it makes you go, "awww..." The title continues, "Something incredible... is waiting to be found" as Leslie murmurs, "You're not going to believe this" and she and Jesse are gazing down at a huge footprint. Kind of like the Rockbiter's in The Neverending Story.

And then Jesse and Leslie are watching as whatever made that footprint pulls up its roots to take a step, and this is really cool. The tree people in Lord of the Rings were kind of dull and uninteresting, I thought, compared to the vividness of the rest of the films, but this thing seems like the offspring of The Iron Giant and Grawp from the fifth Harry Potter book. Josh Hutcherson has the most perfect "WTF?" expression on his face as he's looking up at our new buddy, Shrub.

As the score gets very adventure-y (and kind of Narnia-ish), Jesse and Leslie climb a tree (can't tell if it's Shrub) to get a look at their kingdom across the water. She has that same dazed awe in her voice as she dubs it "Terabithia," which, if I'm translating correctly, means "Land of Moses' Adoptive Mother in The Ten Commandments."

We see various elements of Terabithia unfolding: Jesse and Leslie opening a wallet that appears to be possessed by a native American burial ground; giant birds (very Tolkien, that); small rodenty characters that might be inspired by C.S. Lewis's Reepicheep stalking them; and some fetching little flying bug soldiers. If Roald Dahl didn't think that up first, maybe he should have.

Cut to a pastiche of images of Jesse running through the woods and falling into Shrub's giant hand, a strange mechanical arm that's half James Bond and half Transformers, and those rodenty (or maybe feline?) characters attacking our two heroes. It's all very cluttered and I feel like the Terabithia stuff really only takes up a small amount of the book, but it all looks pretty cool, in that shiny, managed way Walden has with fantasy. And then Leslie delivers the trailer's closing line: "Just close your eyes — but keep your mind wide open."

Oh, I hate that. It's cheesy, it's obvious, it's focus-grouped — everything great movies for kids or adults aren't. The trailer doesn't touch on Terabithia's most lasting impact on most kids, the aforementioned tragedy, but it would be hideously unfair to put that in the trailer for anyone who hasn't read the book. So except for that last salvo, I love it.