Disney's 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas'

IF YOU mainly equate Disney with cuddly and fuzzy, then you are in for a shock if you settle down to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas expecting to leave the cinema with a warm glow. For while the film's title makes it sound like a cosy bedtime story, Mark Herman's (Brassed Off, Little Voice) brave drama, from Disney subsidiary Miramax, is ultimately the stuff of nightmares.

Though a tale of childhood set during the Holocaust, this is no Life is Beautiful. Where that film's mawkish coda offered the audience bogus consolation, the harrowing final few minutes of Herman's film rush us headlong into the infernal machinery of the Final Solution, to which the only responses can be silence, sorrow and tears.

Survivors' stories, or the stories of so-called righteous gentiles such as Oskar Schindler, may be uplifting and life-affirming, but they do not reflect the truth of the Holocaust: that most people perished. Irish author John Boyne's 2006 best-selling children's novella did not duck this truth, and neither does Herman's adaptation.

Even so, one British commentator recently accused the movie of representing a "Disneyfication of the Final Solution," before going on to wonder "whether The Gas Chamber ride is being installed outside Paris". It was a cheap shot, and Herman is rightly puzzled. "I found that a very muddled piece and didn't really understand what she was getting at because I can't find any Disneyfication in this film," he says. "I don't quite know what she means. It's almost as if that because it's from a child's angle, it becomes too sweet. But one of the points of the story is the innocence of the kids and the ignorance of the grown ups."

"The kids" are Bruno, the eight-year-old son of the newly-appointed commandant of a concentration camp, and Shmuel, the Jewish boy on the other side of the camp's electrified fence, whom he befriends. Despite the charge above, there is virtually no sentimentality in Herman's portrayal of their journey from innocence to a grim realisation about the adult world surrounding them.

Moreover, he has kept his word to Boyne that he would not dilute the book's shocking climax. "I met early with him and sort of promised that I would protect the ending. Although that was a promise, obviously, that wasn't really in my power to keep," he laughs, "because making movies doesn't work like that."

It appears that Herman did not just want to be faithful to Boyne's vision. "In a way, the ending is sort of payback to the ending of Life is Beautiful," he says, referring to Roberto Benigni's lugubrious Oscar- winning comedy. "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas accelerates to the end, it gets ahead of you, and then it's gone. There's no sort of, 'Oh, I can meet my mother out in the countryside.'"

The ending had actually been one of the key elements that appealed to Herman when he first read The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in galley form, prior to its publication. There was already a buzz about the book but, unusually, no-one had picked up the film rights. "I was kind of surprised because the word was so good," he says. "But then you think about the subject matter and you can perhaps understand why (the studios] stayed clear. I just felt that if people read the book, they might think it's difficult to turn into a film, so if a film studio could read a screenplay instead of the book, they might get it. But the only way of doing that was to buy the rights myself." So that is what he did.

Free to work without studio interference, Herman set about adapting the book. He took out one of his favourite scenes where Hitler and Eva Braun visit Bruno's family in Berlin – "we're making a fictional story, and putting in a real character would put it out of kilter", he explains – and made his version of the camp an unnamed place rather than Auschwitz, or "Out-With", as Boyne's Bruno calls it in the novella. Herman was fascinated by the ambiguities of looking at this world and its characters through the eyes of a German child. People who we would consider monsters in hindsight, such as Bruno's father (played by David Thewlis in the film), become more familiar. "These guys were really human beings," says the filmmaker. "They protected their family, they were decent fathers during the evening. And then the next day they'd go out and kill so many people. I love all that ambiguity."

It also makes for a less clear-cut emotional response as a viewer. When tragedy strikes at the end of the film, you are unsure whether to feel sympathy for two of the central adult characters – they're Nazis, damn it! – or say they had it coming. "I love the fact that people are confused about their emotions and their feelings towards them."

Researching the film was one of the most emotionally gruelling things Herman says he has ever had to do. Trawling the internet for information, "You find yourself on sites that you shouldn't be at, and you click a link and then you're on one that you really shouldn't be at. And then you get to a stage where you say, 'I really don't need to do research this far." It was a very depressing, upsetting time, really, while I was writing it." By the time he and everyone else arrived on the set, they had "all been to pretty dark places".

When The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas was first published, people questioned whether the Holocaust was a fitting subject for a children's book. Herman, though, is not even sure that Boyne's novella – despite its deceptively simple, fabulist form, which the director/writer has striven to recreate – is actually a children's book.

"I was always a little bit muddled about (that] because you have to be old enough to understand the Holocaust to be able to understand the ironies of Bruno's story, in a way," he explains. His film, he says, is only a family film in the sense that "parents can, and probably should, take their kids. I don't think it's specifically aimed at kids at all."

Nonetheless, it is children who are likely to benefit most from the film, because of the journey that it takes the audience on as the scales slowly fall from Bruno's eyes. A continuous undercurrent of dread lets you know that it will probably not end well. And when the tragic denouement arrives, it is as uncompromising as almost anything in The Grey Zone, Tim Blake Nelson's flinty film (now available on Region 2 DVD) about the sonderkommandos of Auschwitz-Birkenau – arguably still one of the toughest, bleakest and most honest movies about the Holocaust, and, in particular, the moral dilemmas faced by prisoners in the camps, ever made.

Shooting such scenes is always difficult, but staging the final moments of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was further complicated by the involvement of the two young boys playing Bruno and Shmuel, newcomers Asa Butterfield and Jack Scanlon respectively.

"That was just a nightmare on so many levels," says Herman. "You've probably got more lawyers there than filmmakers. You had all the legalities of kids in amongst grown-up naked people, who can be where and when, and what they can see. It was really horrendous. You'd got the parents with them and all sorts of helpers. It's disturbing for us grown ups, but I'm sure it's even more disturbing for the kids."

Viewers will have to decide for themselves whether it was worth it or not. But any parents looking for a way to introduce their children to one of the 20th century's darkest moments could do a lot worse than start here. According to Herman, the film has already received the seal of approval from several Holocaust survivors, including one woman who was herself in Auschwitz as a child.

"She was saying how the film is more powerful than actually taking a trip to Auschwitz now," he says, "because Auschwitz has actually become a museum and kids can't quite get emotional contact, whereas this film seems to do it for them ." Any movie that helps to throw light on this terrible period and encourage a new generation to talk about it can only be a good thing, Disney or not.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is released tomorrow

HOLOCAUST THROUGH THE EYES OF A CHILD

The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank – famous memoir of a Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam.

Surviving Hitler, by Andrea Warren – the true story of a Polish boy, Jack Mandelbaum, who was sent to Blechhammer.

I Am a Star, by Inge Auerbacher – first-person account by one of the 13 children who survived the Terezin camp.

Young Moshe's Diary, by Moshe Flinker – account written by a young Pole sent to Auschwitz with the rest of his family, where they were all killed.

Stones in Water, by Donna Jo Napoli – two Italian boys plan their escape from a labour camp.

Disney's 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas' - The stuff of nightmares