The Art of Childhood

WHAT: FIVE MOVIES ABOUT KIDS

WHERE: FROM THE U.S., EUROPE AND THE GREAT FRENCH NORTH

THE BOTTOM LINE: Hollywood can still spin a cute kids' fable, but a film from Quebec gets the magic and fear right.

America is the land of the perpetual teen. We want to stay young forever, to build longer-lasting bodies and minds nourished on fantasy. Let somebody else play grownup; we're all too busy being Aladdin, pledging for Animal House, romping in the backyard with a dog named Beethoven, living in Wayne's World.

In Europe kids grow up different -- earlier and tougher. Parents still wield authority; Papa could be Yahweh with a toothache, and Mama could sell her daughter into child prostitution. And because Death hangs around the house like a spinster aunt, the kids must ever be packed off to relatives for whom child care is just the latest of life's dirty tricks. Sometimes the kids run away and never come back. No wonder children in European films often look like stunted adults. Since birth they've been in a dress rehearsal for distress.

The proof of these dour bromides is found in five new movies about kids. Two are from abroad: Gianni Amelio's Italian drama Il Ladro di Bambini (Stolen Children) and Jean-Claude Lauzon's Leolo, from Quebec. Three are from Disney: Duwayne Dunham's Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, Mikael Salomon's A Far Off Place and Stephen Sommers' The Adventures of Huck Finn.

Blame it all on Mark Twain. His novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn established not only the quest theme for 20th century American literature but also the matter and manner of kids' movies. Sommers' brisk, pretty version of Huck's wayward youth gets most of Twain's words right, even if the music sounds like a TV jingle. Huck (plucky Elijah Wood) eludes his troglodyte father (Ron Perlman, doing an uncanny Tom Waits impression) for an eventful honeymoon on a raft with Nigger Jim (just plain Jim here, in a nicely balanced performance by Courtney B. Vance). Huck's runaway mouth gets them in trouble, and his wit gets them out.

The other two Disney films have similar plots. Indeed, add a female character and the two pictures have identical plots. In A Far Off Place, three kids in their early teens -- a New York City boy (Ethan Randall), a white girl raised in Africa (Reese Witherspoon) and a Bushman (Sarel Bok) -- find that poachers have massacred the white children's parents, so they resolve to cross 1,300 miles of the Kalahari Desert to alert the law. The cutesy Homeward Bound is the same story, with three variations: the family is missing, not dead; the hostile terrain is the Western U.S.; and the intrepid youngsters are two dogs and a cat (voiced by Michael J. Fox, Sally Field and Don Ameche). Only the species have been changed to protect the copyright.

These and other American films about children are like a progressive preschool. In them, youngsters learn social skills through fantasy war games. Most of the favorite American kids' films, from The Wizard of Oz to E.T. and Home Alone, are rites of self-reliance. Children face adult obstacles (or rather, superhero torture tests) and in surmounting them become adults (or rather, Hollywood's ideal of adults, as kids with weapons). Real parents are redundant in fables for latchkey kids; all authority figures are oafish, evil or, mostly, absent. The lost child finds his own way home.