Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

An Overview of Commercial Filmic Adaptation of Children's Fiction

1982; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chq.0.0132

1553-1201

Douglas Street,

Digital Games and Media

An Overview of Commercial Filmic Adaptation of Children's Fiction Douglas Street (bio) The practice of adapting fiction into commercially successful motion pictures has been a screenwriter's staple since the earliest days of cinema. A long list of noteworthy productions must share partial credit with the books whence they germinated. Silent wonders like Ben-Hur, The Wind, Greed, Birth of a Nation, and Nosferatu, and such sound classics as Wuthering Heights, Gone With The Wind, Grapes of Wrath, The Godfather and 2001: A Space Odyssey, were all built cinematically from successful literary creations. As production expenses continue to climb and competition for box-office dollars to pay those expenses escalates, the search for "can't miss" script material will continue to focus on best seller charts. The makers of children's feature films, recognizing the wealth of unfilmed, first-rate children's literary fare, have been, and continue to be, no exceptions. Appreciating the profits to be had from a loyal family audience (children and their parents will view together) major film-makers soon capitalized on the potential success to be had from the richness of the juvenile literary outpouring. Many features based soundly on successful children's fiction promoted and solidified the cinema's popular reputation from the infant days of the silents through today's era of Dolby Sound. They are solid, interlocking components in the history and artistry of the motion picture industry both here and abroad. As such they warrant more specific attention. The attentive investigator of this medium first realizes that, unlike the historian of the industry in general, s/he must proceed along a bifurcated path, since from the beginning live-action features developed simultaneously with feature-length animated film. Each medium has contributed immeasurably to the overall success of the commercial industry worldwide, and to the popularization (and at times discovery) of literary gems glamorized by cinematic adaptation. A brief overview of each is warranted. The animated feature film did not have its start at the Disney Studios. Walt Disney was the most visible (and most intimidating) practitioner of the medium, establishing supremacy during his glory years of the thirties and forties; yet the animated feature and short were alive and prospering at least two decades before Disney's seven dwarfs marched captivatingly across the screen. Several of the earliest attempts in feature animation were European, and between 1909 and the 1937 Snow White premiere, a number of these utilized stories from children's fiction. The first European project was Italian, Cesare Antamaro's 1911 Pinocchio. Antamaro inspired his countryman Raoul Verdini, twenty-five years later, to produce his own hour-long, black and white adaptation of the Collodi saga, a film which was finished in Rome the year before Disney's Snow White hit Hollywood. France, England, Spain, Belgium, and Gemany, all producing animated film in the early teens, had thriving production companies by the mid-thirties. Yet, the only artist to rival Disney in the thirties was the great Russian, Ptuschko, whose famous adaptation of Swift, the 1935 Novil Gulliver, and his encore, the 1939, Pinocchio-esque, The Little Golden Key, based on the children's story of the same name by Alexander Tolstoi, gave testimony to the possibilities for successful filmic adaptation in animation of quality children's fiction for the popular audience. In America, the decade of the 1930's was capped by three historically significant features, all adaptations. The first of Disney's lavishly executed, technically astounding features, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs opened to gushing critics and audiences alike in 1937. Disney's technical and artistic accomplishments in this work were so ahead of the competition that the industry voted the film a special Academy Award for its achievements. The second [End Page 13] entry was the 1939 release of Dave and Max Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels (based on the Lilliput episode). While it was evident to all that the Fleischers were hopelessly unable to match the animation sophistication of Snow White, they were able to introduce in this film a revolutionary new technique called Rotoscoping. In essence, the Rotoscope allows an animator to trace over live action and thereby to give it an...