I presume you're in this far, obscure, little-visited corner of IMDb because of an interest in Stevenson's exquisite and timeless book, which renders so poignantly the childhood experience of dreamy illness, imagined spaces, distance and isolation. (Bachelard named that realm "intimate immensity"; an alternative title for "A Child's Garden of Verses" might well be, to borrow from the French philosopher, "The Poetics of Space, for Very Young Children".) In a more sophisticated, dense poetry for adults, Rilke wrote

The school's long stream of time and tediousness / Winds slowly on, through torpor, through dismay. / O loneliness, O time that creeps away ...

And, later in the same poem ("Childhood"):

And hours on end by the grey pond-side kneeling / with little sailing-boat and elbows bare; / forgetting it, because one like it's stealing / below the ripples, but with sails more fair ...

Rilke captures (filtered through the adult "memory" and intellect) what Stevenson locates, in "Child's Garden", in the eternal present of childhood. The lack of the Rilkean filter (irony, yearning, nostalgia) in Stevenson means that the worst of the poems in "Child's Garden" are twee, inert, insubstantial. 

But the best, a handful, are miniature masterpieces.

Which brings us to this '80s HBO travesty. It's basically as if a little-house-on-the-prairie aesthetic has kidnapped the Stevenson texts, then raped, brutalized and abandoned them. You need a syrup-alert. Jonathan Pryce supplies the token mellifluous British accent, but the rest are weirdly out-of-place American accents. The boy's mother even says she'll bring him a cup of tea and a "scone" (rhymes with "bone" rather than "con"). I get that this was made on a shoestring (clearly! -- the animation is simply awful) but it's hard to imagine who the audience is even meant to be here. The music is abominable -- the poems, as songs, lose all their limpid grace, and get screeched, as if they're songs from a musical that just wasn't quite good enough to make it onto Broadway. 

If you have even a modicum of affection for the Stevenson originals, this is torture.

Animation is a form of visual storytelling that involves creating visual art and motion through the use of various techniques and technologies. In animation, images are manipulated to create the illusion of movement, bringing characters, objects, and environments to life. Animation can encompass a wide range of styles, themes, and intended audiences, making it a diverse and versatile form of storytelling.

Daveigh Chase, Rumi Hiiragi, and Mari Natsuki in Spirited Away (2001)

The family genre features stories specifically created to be suitable for a wide range of age groups within a family. Family-oriented content is designed to be enjoyed by both children and adults, often providing entertainment that is wholesome, relatable, and appropriate for all members of a family to watch or experience together.

Drew Barrymore and Pat Welsh in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

A young boy, confined to his bed, uses his imagination to find the fun and excitement he can't experience in real life. Tony Award-winning actor Jonathan Pryce "'Miss Saigon'" lends his voice to this animated musical based on the life and beloved children's poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson. Songs composed by Charles Strouse.

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A Child's Garden of Verses

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