The movie looks really good; I want to see it. I'll probably end up waiting till it's out on DVD, though. I've heard the book is really good, but I'll cry at the drop of a hat over anything to do with animals, so thanks for the warning.
When I was in college, in one of my English classes for elementary education majors, the professor put us in groups and gave each group a children's book to read and discuss together, then share with the rest of the class. We got a book called Faithful Elephants, which I had never heard of before. It's the (true) story of what happened to the elephants in a zoo in Tokyo during World War II. The zookeepers were mandated to put down their large and dangerous animals because everyone was afraid of what would happen if the city was bombed and the animals got out, so they started poisoning the animals. But the elephants were smart and wouldn't eat poisoned food, and they didn't have needles strong enough to penetrate their skin, so they couldn't inject them with anything. So they let them starve to death instead. This is a children's book, complete with painted illustrations, and it's horribly, horribly sad. I sat on the hallway floor in a circle with this group of girls in my class, and one of them read the book out loud, and by the end, we were all crying. We came back into the classroom all teary-eyed, and the other groups looked at us, like, WTF? It's possibly the saddest book I've ever read LOL.