Rating: 4/5
Fern Arable, a little girl who lives on a farm with her mother, father, and brother, sits up one day and asks her mother where her father was going with an axe. When she gets the response of ‘some pigs were born last night’ she doesn’t understand. Unaware of her child’s sensitivity, she tells her that there was a runt born, and he is of no use. Her father, she said, had decided to do away with it. Immediately the little girl’s temper rushed through her little nerves to her clever brain, and she reacted to the ‘case of injustice’, which was what she called the dreadful deed, by dashing outside and telling her father about the unfairness of killing a pig that was simply smaller than the others. At first, her father didn’t understand.
Little Fern, though, was completely firm of what she was saying. Finally, John Arable just about gave in, and he said that he would come back in half an hour or so with the runt. That way he would let his daughter raise the pig on a bottle and see how much trouble a piglet could be. So he came back with the pig and let Fern raise it. She named him Wilbur.
But Wilbur had to be sold at some point, so the Arables sold him to Homer Zuckerman, the uncle of Fern and her brother Avery. Wilbur grew up to be a fat little pig, who made friends with a spider called Charlotte. Join them on their adventures as they figure out that the pig will need to be killed at Christmastime…