E.B. White’s paradigmatic children’s book “Charlotte’s Web” has been adapted for the screen once before the new edition opening today. The 1973 version, produced by Saturday morning cartoon factory Hanna Barbera, uneasily married White’s words to musical numbers and Garth Williams’s illustrations to animation. Director Gary Winick’s new take on “Charlotte’s Web”goes the “Babe”route by combining live action with a (mostly) digitally animated cast of talking animals.

Heading the live action cast is Dakota Fanning, surely not the second choice for the role of Fern Arable, the farm girl who co-conspires with a barnyard animal community to save her pet pig Wilbur from the butcher’s cleaver. Heading the CGI cast is Julia Roberts as Charlotte the spider, characteristically leggy and brown-eyed here as in the flesh, only multiplied by eight. It is of course Charlotte who comes up with the means to keep Wilbur in one stilloinking piece by extolling his virtues in carefully chosen words woven in the web she maintains in one corner of the barn eaves.

Is Charlotte a do-good arachnid press agent? Are her barnyard brainstorm sessions with the other animals about which words would best brand Wilbur focus groups? Do the crowds that gather to gaze upon each apparent pagan miracle mating nature with human language question their own beliefs?

Not surprisingly, the movie doesn’t dig very deeply into those questions, or anything else for that matter. To the filmmakers’ credit, the central theme of “Charlotte’s Web” — the transitory nature of life, and with life, friendship — remains. Also to their credit, the creative team that assembled “Charlotte’s Web”version 2006 has set the film in an appealing undated era that, at least as far as the automobiles and fashions are concerned, stretches from the 1950s to the 1980s.

But the story itself (oddly bearing a shared credit with “The Waltons” creator Earle Hamner Jr.’s 1973 adaptation) is state-of-the-art Hollywood kid movie bluster through and through. White’s sublime opening, for instance, in which the answer to Fern’s innocent breakfast table question, “Where’s Pappa going with that ax?” perfectly posits innocence, imagination, and impending eye-opening reality, has been replaced with peals of late night Dolby thunder awakening Fern and CGI lightning illuminating her dad’s preparations to literally cut piglet Wilbur out of the pen.

Thankfully, Fern’s father (Kevin Anderson) listens to reason, but then again so does everyone in the film. Everybody in “Charlotte’s Web” is so agreeable and eager to grow and change for the better that there’s virtually no sustained conflict in the picture. Dad listens to Fern. Fern listens to the animals. Fern’s mother listens to a village doctor who tells her that Fern isn’t nuts for listening to the animals. The animals listen to Charlotte, and Charlotte listens to what nature’s ticking clock tells her about the deadline for her ad campaign on Wilbur’s behalf.

This is the kind of movie in which every other sentence out of each character’s mouth is a gentle epigram summing up of one of life’s lessons on friendship, kindness, forbearance, community, or all of the above, beginning with a patiently offered, slowly intoned “Sometimes…” or “Maybe…” When Fern’s father straight-facedly announces in top-shelf kid-movie singsong, “We’re all here because a determined little girl made a promise to a pig,” I began to wonder, as I do so often at the movies these days, how many of the people involved in this film’s creation ever watched an episode of “The Simpsons.” Plenty of kids do.

It’s disappointing to see such a beloved book brought to the screen by people who seem to not trust their original source. In the book, for instance, Templeton the Rat is a foil and catalyst. Here he laps up so much screen time that he threatens to take over the movie. It helps that Templeton is voiced by Steve Buscemi, who may be the only actor on earth able to crow “The rat rules!” and the rest of Templeton’s pro-wrestling-manager dialogue with a touch of Brooklyn bravado. Also, Robert Redford, doubly unrecognizable as the voice of an arachnophobic horse named Ike, has chalked up perhaps his bravest casting choice in 20 years.

If nothing else, Mr. Winick’s streamlined new “Charlotte’s Web” made me eager to re-read White’s book. Hopefully, the film, produced by a consortium of entities headed by Nickelodeon Films, will have the same effect on its target audience.