Just Imagine: Animated Adaptations of Previously Published Material
© Enoch Allen
Okay. I get it. This is a really long title for an article, and this article won’t be nearly as ambitious as I hoped it would be. But then, I will only do ambitious articles once in a great while.
Once in a great while, for me, means doing it every two weeks. Unfortunately, with my kind of schedule, I can’t do it much more often than that. In addition to working on a screenplay, I am also working on a second novel--which I am worried, that my publisher might sell all the rights of that novel to Disney, and then they can screw it up and the material will start to stink to high heaven.
This article will be about adapting previously published material for the big screen. Does it work? And, given the track record of those who “tampered” with published material in the past, can it ever work?
It doesn’t for Disney. As you should recall, not too long ago they released an unfaithful adaptation of Victor Hugo’s bestselling classic, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”. Roger Ebert gave it four stars, for some inexplicable reason. Many critics were sharply divided over this pitiful excuse for an adaptation. Some hated it; others were madly in love with it. Unless if you treat the source material with enough respect, that you would faithfully and acceptably transpose someone else’s work onto the sliver screen, it’s not an adaptation. It’s a crap job.
Oh, and by the way, I don’t have a publisher yet. But I was using the second paragraph to illustrate exactly what I don’t want to happen--the destruction of delicate material.
I suppose that the American public can reason out for themselves that the novel is not all that bad. Whether they’d want to read it after the filmmakers and the studios turned the material into a cinematic travesty is completely up to them. But I’m willing to bet that they wouldn’t go within one hundred yards of the novel, because of the powerful images, which has been indelibly planted into their heads.
What about “Peter Pan”? The novel by J.M. Barrie that got turned into a beloved classic? That’s an adaptation done right, if you ask me. But the material suited the medium just fine--after all, it was a “children’s novel”. Don’t get me wrong, even at the grand old age of 17 I still read those kinds of books. Because they tell important, meaningful stories.
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