‘Little House’ feels like home

“Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie,” which begins Saturday under the aegis of ABC’s “Wonderful World of Disney” and continues Saturdays through April, is a straightforward adaptation of the third of the well-known series of autobiographical children’s books, which tells of a year spent in the abundant emptiness of Kansas in the early 1870s. Not all of its six hours were available for preview, but what I’ve seen is so beautifully, lovingly done I can’t imagine the rest won’t be as good.

In between Wilder writing “Little House,” first published in 1935, and the miniseries at hand, there was, you may recall, a television series of the same name, starring Michael Landon as Pa and Melissa Gilbert as Laura, which America so loved that it lasted all the way from 1974 to 1983. (Although, in the Wilder canon, it should technically have been called “Little House After Little House on the Prairie,” concerning as it did the Ingalls’ life post-Kansas.)

Directed by David L. Cunningham, the new movie has the wholesome virtues of the series, with the bonus of not having to stray far from the text.

There is some invention, naturally. Ingalls takes only 20 pages or so (small pages with big print) to recount the family’s farewell to their previous little house in Wisconsin and their journey by covered wagon to Kansas, which fills about an hour of screen time here; some things have been moved around, and baby Carrie has gone missing completely. But it’s true to the spirit of what’s on the page, and to the effortless, casual poetry of Wilder’s original prose. Screenwriter Katie Ford has done a good job of making up things for the characters to say that the original author, never dreaming of this day, didn’t need to.

One senses a more than usual amount of respect for the material, and of preparation. Whether or not this is how life was actually lived on the American frontier -- as represented by some unsullied, perhaps slightly too muscular tracts of Alberta, Canada -- I am quite prepared to believe it was. Like the book, the film is full of homely small detail that bring the past forward: This is what it might feel like to be camped in the woods with wolves all around, to build a log cabin, and just to fill up a day in a world without television and all the things that television sells -- a brave old world with fewer people in it, but more buffalo, deer and geese.

Cinematographer Robin Loewen moves his camera in unusually close to capture fine details -- the grain of a wagon wheel, the texture of cloth, the look of mud covering a boot, bare feet crunching in dead leaves, water running over stones. There is attention paid to the effects of weather and to the nuances of light on hair and skin. Indeed, the whole production is infused with a rapturous love for the physical world that may simply be meant to evoke child’s-eye wonder but that becomes the real subject of the film, even more than the story, which, being just what happened to Laura and her family, is more about incident than plot. (And it’s not particularly long on incident.) There are some exciting, even frightening passages -- the crossing of a frozen lake, the fording of a rushing stream, a flight from wolves. (“Were you scared?” big sister Mary asks Laura. “Oh, yes,” she replies, “it was great.”) But on the whole, it’s deliciously slow and, by contemporary reckoning, uneventful.

The adult cast -- including Cameron Bancroft as Pa, Erin Cottrell as Ma, and Gregory Sporleder is Mr. Edwards, their tobacco-spitting nearest neighbor, a “wildcat from Tennessee” in a coonskin cap -- is well chosen and has the added benefit of not being overfamiliar. And as impetuous Laura and her more serious sister Mary, Kyle Chavarria and Danielle Ryan Chuchran are wonderfully right. If Chavarria sometimes sounds like a child reciting lines, she makes up for it with authentic energy and a believable sense of sensory delight. Standing in the half-built new house, looking out across the plains, she asks, “What’s that smell, Pa?”

“That’s the smell of the prairie, mixed with cut wood.”

“I’ll never forget that smell,” she says, “as long as I live.”

*

‘Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie’

Where: ABC

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Ratings: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)

Cameron Bancroft...Charles Ingalls

Erin Cottrell...Caroline Ingalls

Kyle Chavarria...Laura Ingalls

Danielle Ryan Chuchran...Mary Ingalls

Executive producer, Ed Friendly. Writer, Katie Ford. Director, David L. Cunningham. Based on books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.