"Charlotte's Web," the endearingly enduring 1952 E.B. White novel about friendship and salvation, has been turned into a beautifully rendered motion picture that's full of warmth, wit and wonder.

Where Paramount's 1973 incarnation was a traditionally animated, feature-length Hanna-Barbera production (featuring the voices of Debbie Reynolds, Agnes Moorhead, Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly), the new version takes its live-action cue from 1995's "Babe," combining real-life critters with CG-assisted animatronics, rather than going the fully computer-animated route.

The result, with its gently contemporized dialogue that still remains quite true to White's original wording, offers a family-friendly primer on the cycle of life that's careful to not overplay the inherent sentiment.

Factor in terrific work by an inspired cast of voices -- including Julia Roberts as Charlotte, Steve Buscemi (a perfect Templeton the Rat), John Cleese (an acerbic sheep), Oprah Winfrey (a chatty goose) and 10-year-old Dominic Scott Kay in the key role of Wilbur, the wide-eyed spring pig -- and you've got a license to spin boxoffice gold that should continue through the holidays and into the new year.

Pitch-perfect Dakota Fanning makes an ideal choice for the role of Fern Arable, the young girl who prevents her farmer father (Kevin Anderson) from disposing of the runt-of-the-litter piglet with the help of his trusty ax.

She finds an adoptive home for Wilbur over in the Zuckerman barn, where the naive porker ultimately learns from the other animals that a spring pig doesn't usually get a chance to see the first snow of winter.

Finding an ally in Charlotte, the barn's socially outcast resident spider, Wilbur is seeking nothing short of a miracle, and ultimately he secures one with the help of the articulate and artistic webmistress.

Director Gary Winick ("13 Going on 30"), working from a script by Susannah Grant ("Erin Brockovich") and "Over the Hedge" director Karey Kirkpatrick, achieves just the right balance of comedy and emotion, while his talented cast -- which also includes the voices of Kathy Bates and Reba McEntire as the quipping bovines Bitsy and Betsy, Robert Redford (!) as the extremely arachnophobic Ike the Horse and Thomas Haden Church and OutKast's Andre Benjamin as a pair of hapless, Heckle and Jeckle-type crows -- are uniformly terrific.

Meanwhile, visual FX supervisor John Andrew Berton Jr. seamlessly blends together the various old-school and new-school technologies, with the latter providing one of Charlotte's gorgeously rendered web-spinning sequences.

Elsewhere, rural Victoria, Australia, makes a genteel stand-in for Maine, while Danny Elfman's humble, eloquent score completes the extremely pleasing effect.