Barnes & Noble

There’s a ready audience for Because of Winn-Dixie, specifically because of Kate DiCamillo’s Newberry Award-winning coming-of-age novel, on which it’s based. And director Wayne Wang, whose resume includes the adaptation of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, mostly succeeds in mining the books humane and quirky charms, aside from a few heavy-handed departures into slapstick. Ten year-old Opal (the adorable AnnaSophia Robb) is struggling to adjust to her new home in a small Florida town. Her distant father (Jeff Daniels), a preacher, conducts his services in a convenience store. Opal hasn’t made any friends. And she still laments her absent mother, who abandoned the family when she was a baby and about whom her father refuses to talk. Her luck changes when she encounters a scruffy mutt at the local Winn-Dixie grocery and adopts him, naming him for the store. And so, as Opal narrates, she meets and befriends a gallery of colorful local characters, all because of Winn-Dixie. These include: Miss Franny (Eva Marie Saint), a librarian who tells fanciful stories about a bear she fought off with a copy of War and Peace; Gloria (Cicely Tyson), a blind woman thought by the town's kids to be a witch; and the guitar-strumming pet-store caretaker Otis (Dave Matthews), who shares a dark secret from his past through song. As in the book, Because of Winn-Dixie makes references to the town’s defunct Litmus Lozenge Co., where each sweet drop contained a measure of “sorrow.” This metaphoric conceit worked better on the page, yet this Winn-Dixie still has complex charms all its own. Donald Liebenson

All Movie Guide

It's not finishing school or a traditional upbringing that causes ten-year-old Opal to learn about the world outside of her own backyard, but rather a particularly awkward-looking mutt named Winn-Dixie. Based on a novel by Kate DiCamillo, Winn-Dixie and Opal not only become privy to the eventful, if eccentric, lives of their neighbors (including a librarian who fought off a bear with nothing but a novel, a blind woman who claims to "see" with her heart, and a sensitive ex-con turned pet store clerk), but Opal herself manages to reconcile some of the depression left over after her mother had abandoned the family seven years earlier. ~ Tracie Cooper, All Movie Guide

Product Details

• UPC: 024543189718
• Source: 20TH CENTURY FOX
• Region Code: 1
• Presentation: Pan & Scan, Wide Screen
• Language: English
• Time: 1:46:00
• Sales Rank: 3,460

This DVD is also available as part of a box set:

• Doggie Tales Collection

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