I had to rate this flick an 8, though when I was 8 years old I would have rated it off the charts.

The older you get the more you see beyond just the fantasy fun aspects to it's more poignant notes regarding growing up, escapism and it's place in a persons life. Of course, the older you get the more you notice the holes in the plot line, and the graphical genius becomes less and less amazing (which is only really an indicator of how awed we should be at what we get in live action\animation movies made today!).

Sonora Webster (Gabrielle Anwar), a runaway in the thirties, desperately wants to be a diving girl- a girl who rides on a diving horse as it drops from a forty-foot platform into a deep pool of water. She finally achieves her dreams, when it seems that it's all going to be taken away from her- she goes blind from an accident.

A stubborn elderly Jewish widow living in Atlanta can no longer drive so her son insists she allow him to hire a driver, which in the 1950s meant a black man. She resists any change in her life but, Hoke, wins her over with his integrity and charm. Over the course of 20 years the relationship dynamic evolves into an understated friendship that whittles away at what -should- be obsolete ideas and perceptions of people.

This movie will be well recieved by anyone who loved the genius of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) as it is of the same vein.