The New York Times critic Jeannette Catsoulis believed that the fantasy was kept in the background "to find magic in the everyday", and thought Csupó directed "like someone intimate with the pain of being different, allowing each personality more than a single characteristic". To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. One final aspect of the movie that deserves mentioning is the fact that it does not lean on special effects.

With regard to the character, Robb said "[Leslie]'s one of those people who's just always lit up, who has this glow about her, and no one can bring her down. Stretches to try and associate my ramblings about Transatlantic with this a discussion about this film aside (I hear director Gábor Csupó is a big Frank Zappa fan, so I'm sure he appreciates the promotion of cheesy progressive rock), at least when "The Chronicles of Narnia" dragged, it eventually ended up to some exciting intensity.I don't know, but when I find a fantasy film by Disney, I'm expecting something a little more exciting than a thoughtful meditation on how the friendship between and imaginations of two eccentric youths play an instrumental factor in their coming of age and finding paths in lives. From what I had seen in the trailers, I thought the movie would be about two kids that end up in some magical world, similar to the Chronicles of Narnia (clearly, I did not read the book). Josh Hutcherson was not their first choice for the role of Jesse Aarons, but they settled with him because they "felt the chemistry between AnnaSophia Robb and him".

Paterson had difficulty marketing the screenplay, mostly because of Leslie's death; "if you can believe this, I did meet with some companies that asked if I could just 'hurt' Leslie a little bit—put her in a light coma and then bring her out". It's debatable whether or not filler holds substance, as most beats in this story reinforce coming-of-age thematic depths, but they're ultimately too repetitious to be all that engaging, and some serious incoherencies to a near-unstructured plot body are by no means helpful.The life of Jesse (Josh Hutcherson), an adolescent, changes when he befriends Leslie (AnnaSophia Robb), the class outsider.

Well, this film is draggy, trite and all around cloying, but that's mostly because of storytelling, because in concept, this story, while minimalist something fierce, offers worthy coming-of-age subject matter that combines wonderment with grounded themes on friendship and bringing oneself to reality.For the next few days, Jess and Leslie spend their free time in the treehouse getting to know each other.

As for the premise, two young outcasts who go to the same school befriend and find a rope that they swing on in the woods to get to a made up "kingdom" they named Terabithia. On Metacritic the film received a weighted average score of 74/100 based on 25 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Cameron Wakefield as Scott Hoager, one of Jess's bullies who serves as the inspiration to the squirrel-like Squogres.

The film was Michael Chapman's last film as a cinematographer before his retirement and eventual death in 2020. He rides the bus to school with his younger sister, May Belle, where he avoids the school bully, Janice Avery. Hornaday wrote that although the final five minutes succumbed to "oversweet sentiment", viewers would remember the film's "warmth and respect with which it pays homage to first love". It is based on the 1977 novel of the same name by Katherine Paterson and stars Josh Hutcherson, AnnaSophia Robb, Bailee Madison, Zooey Deschanel, and Robert Patrick. Weta was already working on animating the creatures while the film was being shot, and Weta crew members were on-set for all the scenes that involved special effects during the filming.