'Little Big Man' is 'Forrest Gump'

Yes, I've read that comparison many times since the release of "Gump." I don't think Jack Crabb was suffering any impairment like Forrest Gump though.

I have to say that the book that "Gump" is based on wasn't as "nice," or sanitized as the movie was. Forrest of the book wasn't the loveable stuffed teddy bear Forrest of the movie. Something similar happened with "The Natural"...the gave Roy Hobbs a thorough delousing before bringing him to the screen.

Forrest Gump is the most derivative movie ever made. It not only steals from Little Big Man, but also Being There, Zelig, Midnight Cowboy, The Great Santini, Apocalypse Now, Mask, Superman, Cutter's Way, just to name a few. It only bears a passing resemblance to Forrest Gump, by Winston Groom, however.

"I'm not sure if anyone else has seen the similarities in these two films. The weird thing is that they both come from novels written entirely by different authors."

True. I also see parallels to "The General" with Buster Keaton, where a man's life comes full circle through different experiences that he sort of gets to have twice.

Yeah, there are similarities between "Gump" and "Little Big Man", but the latter is sooooooo much darker in tone. I prefer "Little Big Man".

Yes you are absolutly right. The storyline is of course not the same, but little big man seemed to be everything gunfighter, indian, soldier, drunk, business man etc ... and he meets a lot of famous people like Wild Bill,Buffalo Bill and General Custer. Great Movie with a great cast.
In Literature I think they call storytelling like in little big man a Picaresque novel. In Europe it has a long tradition to tell stories like that way, but I think Mark Twain and others wrote also some stories like this.

The genre that both films belong to is called "picaresque." It has a long history, dating, at least in English literary terms, all the way back to Bunyan's "Pilgrims's Progress" hundreds of years ago, and in classical Spanish literature even further back, to at least "Don Quixote." And Homer's "The Odyssey", dating back thousands of years, is certainly picaresque. But nonetheless "Forrest Gump", as others have mentioned, is extremely derivative. It's also a lot different than the novel it was based on. I think that "Little Big Man" is far, far superior to "Forrest Gump" -- more purposeful, darker in tone, sharper-edged, wickedly humorous, and more "visionary." It holds up fantastically well as both a revisionist western and a searing commentary on the time in which it was made: right around 1970, when the Vietnam War was still raging and the country was in turmoil, with deep questions about the national sense of purpose and the American soul right at the surface. In fact, I've wondered if Tom Hanks, although he won an Oscar for his portrayal in "Gump", hasn't looked back at that film and felt a little embarrassed about it. Playing an idiot savant always seems to be a great pathway to the Oscar dais (or at least to a nomination), but that film is so simplistic, and in some ways even reactionary, that when I saw it recently on TBS it seemed incredibly inconsequential and even a bit pathetic. "Life is a box of chocolates" as a key line?

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Both films are loosely based on Voltaire's "Candide."

I suppose the OP is right, but, goodness... LBM was an innovative, risky foray into superlative filmmaking and FG is a derivative piece of shmaltz that makes me sneer to even think about it. It is the most overrated piece of American film trash in the last 30 years.

"He makes her feel like a woman. And that frightens her."