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Plot summary
Fern Arable talks her father out of killing the smallest piglet in a litter, and the pig she calls Wilbur becomes her pet. Weeks later the pig is sold to her uncle Homer Zuckerman's farm down the road, where a goose coaxes him into speaking his first words. Wilbur wants company, but the other animals in the barn turn him away, and a ram warns that Homer means to slaughter him for food. Charlotte A. Cavatica, a spider whose web hangs above his pen, introduces herself and promises to work out a plan to save him. One morning Homer's farmhand Lurvy sees words spun in that web, and the neighbors take the message as a miracle.
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Charlotte's Web (1973)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- E.B. White told Gene Deitch in a 1977 letter that “the Hanna-Barbera version has never pleased either of us ... a travesty”, and wrote of the film that the Blue Hill Fair he had tried to report faithfully in the book “has become a Disney World, with 76 trombones”.
- Tony Randall recorded all of his voicework as Templeton, but co-director Iwao Takamoto wrote that his readings “just went flat”, too sophisticated and too operatic, without enough of the raunchy feeling the character required, so Barbera replaced him with Paul Lynde.
- In January 1972 Debbie Reynolds was reported as the voice of Charlotte; Barbera wrote in his autobiography that Reynolds had called him and said she was willing to join the project even without being paid.
- The soundtrack was composed by the Sherman Brothers, and their father, songwriter Al Sherman, considered it their finest score, naming “Mother Earth and Father Time” his favorite song ever to come out of his sons. He died six months after the film's release.
- The film found a second life on television and VHS: in 1994, twenty-one years after its first premiere, it surprised the marketplace by becoming one of the best-selling titles of the year, a comeback no other non-Disney musical animated film has enjoyed.
- In a letter to E.B. White dated June 3, 1971, Gene Deitch said that Sagittarius had refused to look at his storyboards after six months of work on the project.
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