The Wind in the Willows (1996) — Terry Jones' adaptation · The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949) — Disney's animated Toad
Watch a film for Toad, read the book for everything else, and know that they are simply different meals. If your kid meets Toad on screen first and loves the poop-poop of it all, good, that's a real door in. But the half of this book families remember decades later is the riverbank, and the riverbank only exists on the page, a chapter a night, ideally at bedtime with Bransom's plates along the way.
Toad has the plot: motorcars, prison, escape, the battle for Toad Hall. So every adaptation builds itself around him and shrinks the riverbank half, where Mole and Rat picnic and nothing much happens. Nothing much happening is what the book is for.
The 1949 version is half an hour of pure Toad, sharing a bill with Sleepy Hollow, and it invents a horse named Cyril to keep up with him. As a Toad delivery device it's genuinely funny; as the book, it's one chapter of twelve.
Terry Jones' version gives the weasels an industrial scheme and a plot to demolish and develop. Grahame's weasels just squat in Toad Hall because Toad left it empty. The film needed stakes; the book runs on friendship and picnics.
A chapter that is practically a poem, in which Rat and Mole meet something holy at dawn on the river. Some kids are transfixed and some fidget, both are normal, and no film has ever dared include it.
Mole catches the scent of his own forgotten home on a winter night and it nearly breaks his heart. The kindest chapter in the book, and the one that tends to stay with the grown-up reading it aloud.
A seafaring rat's stories very nearly lure Ratty away from his river forever. A strange, wistful chapter about wanting two lives at once, cut from every adaptation.
The breathless picnic list, the river explaining itself to Mole, sentences that beg to be read aloud. This book's plot fits in a paragraph; its sentences are the reason it has lasted.
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