Choosing a Theme and Sticking to It

Abstract

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.