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The Best Scene From ‘Matilda’ Is Getting Some Inspired Fan Recreations

Matilda is a classic book and movie because it’s about a little girl who gets bullied and picked on, at school and at home, and then one day suddenly comes into her own power. No one can ever bother her again, because she can make them spin around on the ceiling if she wants to. That would be the start of a horror movie if the character weren’t so adorably played by Mara Wilson. She somehow makes someone controlling your ability to move cute.

Because of all that, the movie has a timeless charm and a million young fans, and they’re paying homage to the classic by recreating the scene where Matilda masters her powers while grooving to Thurston Harris’s “Little Bitty Pretty One.” She makes her doll dance, flings cards in the air, and generally causes a magical mess from the center of her living room. The special effects at the time were pretty low-fi, but that maybe makes it even better?

The #MatildaChallenge is convincingly creating a similar scene, where it looks like one person is moving objects around the room with the power of their mind. Some of them are pretty darn good. Some of them also include a very cute level of teen collaboration, like this one in a high school classroom:

In some of them you can kinda see the puppeteers behind the strings, but that just makes them funnier:

This one just has a guy doing an amazing little shuffle as random things start happening. I genuinely laughed out loud when the umbrella started opening and closing. This group clearly looked around the room and thought, “Hmm, what else moves?” And then a butt comes out.

This one literally falls apart at the end:

This one is a lot of curtain work, as they say in the biz:

This one should maybe get the award for most stuff actually happening, including a smoothie getting made:

And Mara Wilson herself has weighed in on the popularity of the challenge:

This is good, wholesome Internet content, just like Matilda would have wanted. If only all challenges were this pure.