Opal Dream

This movie is advertised as "exceptional" and "heartwarming". My 8 year old daughter and I found it sad and disturbing at times. The jacket of the DVD shows perhaps the only three fun scenes in the movie. The rest of the movie was very stressful. The imaginary friends of the girl, Kellyanne, go missing. The children's father goes looking for the friends at an opal mine where he has a claim and where he had lost the friends when they were in his charge. The father is threatened and accused unfairly of a crime when he was looking for the missing imaginary friends. The man who threatens him, is very aggressive and violent and uses a gun, foul language and makes untrue accustions. This man sets the family's property on fire, burning down the special house that Kellyanne and her imaginary friends had used to play in. The dangerous man also burns an effigy of the father, that he has hung by the neck. A dead rat is tied to the brother's handle bars. The entire family is ostracized by the town and the mom loses her job. Kellyanne asks her brother, who is just a little boy, to go the mine in the middle of the night, because she fears her friends are dead and in the mine. He rides his bike to the mine and enters the dangerous mine in the dark, down a long ladder, with only a flashlight. He has a stressful experience of finding evidence of the remains of the imaginary friends under some rocks in the bottom of the mine. He determines the friends are dead, down in this awful place. Kellyanne becomes ill and has to go the hospital. In the end, the father is redeemed in court, the mother gets her job back and the entire town attends a funeral for the imaginary friends. Coffins for the friends are lowered into the ground. Though there is a message of redemption and healing, I feel it is a very stressful story not appropriate for small children. I feel it is a hurtful message to a young viewer that an imaginary friend can become lost and die in a scary way, never to return. Though imaginary friends may "disappear" as childhood evolves for children, this story send the message that it can be very sad, scary and confusing. My daughter asked me why anyone would make a movie where imaginary friends would get lost and then die. After the movie was over, she said, "It is the worst movie I ever saw. Never watch it."