Adaptation studies scholars suggest that no matter how interesting it may be to pick apart a film’s consistency with and departure from its source, these approaches can be limiting because books and movies operate as two very different mediums. Children’s Books on the Big Screen moves away from this approach by tracing a pattern across films for young viewers to highlight a consistent trend: when films are adapted from children’s and YA books, concepts like self/other, male/female, and adult/child become more strongly contrasted and more diametrically opposed in the film version. Children’s Books on the Big Screen describes this as binary polarization, suggesting that more stark opposition between concepts leads to shifts in the messages that texts send, particularly when it comes to representations of gender, race, and childhood. After introducing why critics need a new way of thinking about children’s adapted texts, Children’s Books on the Big Screen uses middle-grade fantasy adaptations to consider the reason for binary polarization and looks at the ideological results of polarized binaries in adolescent films and movies adapted from picturebooks. The text also explores movies adapted from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to dig into instances when multiple films are adapted from a single source and ends with pragmatic classroom application, suggesting teachers might utilize this theory to help students think critically about movies created by the Walt Disney corporation. Drawing from numerous popular contemporary examples, Children’s Books on the Big Screen posits a theory that can begin to explain what happens—and what is at stake—when children’s and young adult books are made into movies.
Serving primarily as an introduction, chapter one has two functions: explaining binary polarization and suggesting why scholars will benefit from thinking about children’s adapted film in a new way. This first chapter defines key terms, describing how film adaptations widen the divide between concepts to rework power structures. Chapter one explores why, even in the face of a critical movement away from fidelity-based studies, scholars are still drawn to hierarchical approaches, and in particular, why there may exist a particularly strong pull toward this kind of study in children’s and YA criticism. As such, chapter one not only articulates the text’s theory of children’s and YA adaptation, but also explains the need for such an approach.
Chapter five traces multiple adaptations across many decades, wherein each adaptation interacts not just with the source text, but also with other adaptations. This chapter builds from theorists like Bakhtin to suggest that in the case of multiple adaptations of a single source, one ideological ramification is adaptive dissonance, or an increased ideological conflict within the adaptation as compared to the source. More than simply a divergence from or conflict with the ideologies of a precursor text, adaptive dissonance describes an internal conflict that manifests within each new adaptation. Considering The Wiz: The Super Soul Musical (1978), The Wiz Live! (2015), Muppets’ Wizard of Oz (2005), and Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), this chapter considers the implications of such adaptive dissonance, especially when it comes to depictions of race and gender in contemporary Oz retellings.
Chapter two describes an important cause for binary polarization: children’s films often focalize around a single theme from the source text and make it a driving element of the adaptation, amplifying the weight and intensity of that theme. First, this chapter explores binaries in Henry Selick’s adaption of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline to claim that instead of distorting some of Gaiman’s themes, Selick makes them stronger, leading to a widening of independent/dependent, real/other, and adult/child binaries. The chapter next highlights how the movie adaptation of The Tale of Despereaux amplifies a set of overlapping binary systems, and then uses the film version of How to Train Your Dragon to illustrate how thematic amplification is culturally bound and historically situated. Overall, the chapter suggests that when film adaptors select a theme of the novel and use it as a cornerstone in the adaptation, the result is binary polarization.
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