I did not watch Bridge to Terabithia when it was released in the theatres years ago because I thought it was another kiddie fantasy movie, and aside from Harry Potter, that isn’t really my thing.
But I got curious about it when a couple of my friends blogged about how it was such a wonderful movie. It took a long time, but finally I found a DVD of it in the library, and I decided to borrow it and see for myself if my friends were right. They were.
Turns out the trailers were misleading on purpose, and the movie was not a fantasy tale at all… the “fantasy” world was in the children’s imagination.
The story is about two kids, Jess and Leslie, who are neighbors and classmates. Soon they become playmates when they venture into a forest near their homes and create a fantasy land that they call Terabithia, where they are king and queen and no one in the real world, especially school bullies, could hurt them. They could access this kingdom by jumping across a river using a rope swing, and their favorite spot is a an old tree house with they soon stock with stuff taken from their own homes.
One Saturday morning, Jess’s teacher, knowing that Jess is an artist, brings him on a field trip to the museum. He goes back home to find that his entire family has been worried sick about him, wondering if he was dead… because his friend Leslie had drowned in the river when the rope swing broke on her way to Terabithia.
At first, Jess is in denial about his loss, but after some time, he finally accepts the reality and goes to the river to send off his sketch of Leslie on a miniature raft. Then he builds a bridge to Terabithia and brings his sister there, where he crowns her as the princess.
I loved this movie not only because it caused me to cry a river, but because it brought me back to my childhood. I was reminded of the simple joys of being a child.
I did not come from a well-to-do family, and I never had the expensive toys and gadgets that my peers did, but I still enjoyed myself very much, thanks to my imagination.
I always wanted my own tree house, but since there were no forests on which to have them, so I settled for the nipa hut behind our house. I decorated the little room with stuff taken from our house. I papered the walls with my pictures that I cut out from albums.
I also crawled through the tangle of wild bushes in a vacant lot in our neighborhood, and at the center of it all, I found some round fruits covered in white chalky dust (probably melons covered with aphids). I pretended that I was a fairy and these were my eggs… the effect of watching Okay Ka Fairy Ko, a local sitcom about a mortal man who married a fairy.
Sometimes I would also crawl into the space between my neighbor’s wall and the Bougainvillea bush that covered it, where I found a small crevice that I soon thought of as my “cave.” In there was a piece of twig that looked like a lizard, and I made that into my imaginary pet and I would crawl into that space to visit and talk to my pet as often as I could.
When our lilies where in bloom, I would pluck those that were near dying so that my mother would not get mad at me for ruining the plant. These I would move around like dolls, and the games I played with them always ended the same way… with the “dolls” getting pregnant and then giving birth to “babies” which were actually the flowers’ ovaries that I would break off from the base of the stem.
As an adult whose real life is less than ideal, I escape by diving into books and movies to make me forget. But the child-me did not need other people’s imaginations to forget her real world. She had her own, and that was more than enough. And it is because of this that children would always have the advantage over adults.
adik