YMMV / A Little Princess (1995)

• Adaptation Displacement: Due to this being a far more recent Hollywood adaptation than the 1930s version, which is remembered as being more of a Shirley Temple vehicle than an adaptation, this is often assumed to be Truer to the Text, and newer fans introduced to the book through this film can be surprised that it doesn't take place during World War I, Becky isn't black, and Sara's father actually does die.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: The 1995 film briefly shows Miss Minchin crying or almost losing control after abusing Sara. Notably, this happens after Sara brings up the fact that her father told her she was a princess, and asks whether Minchin's own father ever did, too. Viewers are apparently meant to speculate that Minchin had a difficult childhood with perhaps either an Abusive Father or a Disappeared Dad.
• Awesome Music:
  • The powerful swelling orchestral piece, titled "Papa", that plays as Captain Crewe is reunited with Sara.
  • The beautiful Leitmotif played on the harp whenever 'the magic' happens. This culminates in a beautiful rendition as Becky and Sara leave the school at the end.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Miss Amelia, especially her Big Fun portrayal in the 1995 film.
• Fridge Brilliance: Lavinia becoming paranoid about her hair falling out. She's used to the other girls brushing it for her so she likely has no idea that stray hairs are going to come off. But at the time Sara 'curses' her, all her Girl Posse has grown sick of her and she must brush her hair by herself.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Sara gets an extended sequence where she tries to escape the attic by crawling across a wooden plank connecting the two houses, and Becky stands there and watches. Her actress Vanessa Lee Chester would get to be on the other end in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, where she fights off a velociraptor with a gymnastics routine.
• Moral Event Horizon: Miss Minchin comes very close to this with her abusive treatment of Sara, and closer still by calling the police in to arrest her for theft, before finally and definitively crossing the MEH near the end of the film: after clearly recognizing the amnesiac Captain Crewe, she promptly lies and continues to falsely claim that Sara's father is dead, allowing the tearful girl to be dragged away by the police on false charges. Up until this moment, as terrible as Miss Minchin was, she had at least genuinely believed the Captain to be dead.
  Miss Minchin: [recognizes Captain Crewe] This child has no father. Take her away!
• Newer Than They Think: A large number of people attribute Sara's speech about how "all girls are princesses" (and deserve to be treated as such) to the book, when it was actually the invention of the 1995 film. The moral of the book was somewhat different.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The film adaptation adds Ravana, a great big grizzly Hydra creature made out of thorns, to the opening story.
  • The scene in which we see Sara's father in the war zone, with all of the dead around him.
  • Miss Minchin is scary; she threatened to throw Sara out in the street because she took Sara's insights into her behavior so personally, and Sara was trying to reach out to her.
  • Sara escaping from Miss Minchin and the police. Not only is she using a small and rickety piece of wood to climb from the boarding house over to the building where her father is, but she does it all in the rain. It becomes worse when the cops actually wriggle the board, first causing her to lose her balance and cling onto the board, then nearly fall to her death after the board eventually falls off.
• Retroactive Recognition: Ser Davos is Sara's father.
• Salvaged Story: This fixes the inherent classism found in the book by eliminating Becky offering to be Sara's maid after she loses her wealth, and ends with Becky being adopted by Captain Crewe.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Not as much goes into Lavinia's Heel–Face Turn as one would expect. She suffers a steady Break the Haughty as the others find Sara more interesting than her, and worries that her hair might be falling out after Sara jokingly 'curses' her and then doesn't appear again until the ending.