Why The Need for Wybie? A Critical Discussion of the Adaptation of Coraline

            In 2002, a slim book was published that pledged to tell the tale of the “marvelous adventure” of a girl who finds a twisted world behind a mysterious locked door in the drawing room, a fresh fairy tale set in contemporary times. As cliché and widely accessible as the portal fantasy narrative is in literature, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline proved itself an imaginative reinterpretation of a young individual’s coming-of-age story, where she must save herself and her parents from the clutches of evil. Then, in early 2009, a film was released that promised a spectacular display of 3D amazement and wild visualization through the technique of stop-motion. It too had the title of Coraline, and was directed by Harry Selick of The Nightmare Before Christmas fame. The film also featured a girl traveling to a sinister world to save her parents, but with one major alteration - the addition of a character named Whyborn “Wybie” Lovat, a talkative, slightly annoying (at least to Coraline) male character who provides much more than a mere companionship for Coraline. His addition to the story changes not only the ending, but the significance and meaning behind what is originally one young girl’s solitary quest for self-reliance and maturity.

            As the movie is an adaptation of the book, the audience must remember that to adapt is, by definition, “to adjust, to alter, to make suitable” (Hutcheon 7). Often when making the transition from print to screen, major changes are made to the story without much reasoning. Linda Hutcheon notes in A Theory of Adaptation that it is usually the case of taking things away, as when adapting a longer novel, “the adapter’s job is one of subtraction or contraction; this is called ‘a surgical art’ for a good reason” (19). Film is a visual medium and so much more can be shown than what can written about. But the case is opposite with Coraline. Gaiman says he was “aware [that] if you filmed the book faithfully, it’d be a 47-minute movie” (Selick and Gaiman, “Extras”), and so more background, dialogue and action needed to be included in the film to make it the longer 100-minute movie that audiences are used to seeing – and paying for. In the film, we see Coraline interacting with (or perhaps bothering) her parents more and her exploration of the new house occurs much slower than in the book, which helps demonstrate her loneliness at being away from her friends.  Therefore, it is no wonder that a new character was added who was not originally in the story, for this allows for a lengthening of the narrative, as well as filling in gaps and providing action.

            In the book, Coraline is a resourceful, independent, headstrong, stubborn, imaginative, and strong female role model. She enjoys exploring the limitations of her world, even against things that might frighten other little girls. After being told by her neighbors Miss Spink and Miss Forcible that she is in danger, she thinks to herself “In danger?... It sounded exciting. It didn’t sound like a bad thing. Not really” (Gaiman 21).  When her parents first disappear after being captured by the Other Mother, Coraline’s wicked witch figure, she calmly takes care of herself, brushing her teeth and taking a bath. She ends up crying in her parent’s empty bed – which, of course, what young child wouldn’t in a situation like that? – but as soon as she discovers that they are in danger, she sets about to save them. She even tells the cat, who guides her through her journey, that being brave is “when you’re scared but you still do it anyway” (Gaiman 59).

            She is radically different from other females in fairy tales and children’s stories, for she is not passive, obedient, co-dependent, or submissive in any sense or form. She openly defies and questions the adults around her, and remains throughout the story a tomboy of sorts, always looking for something to explore. The movie version even show her finding creepy-crawly bugs in a bathroom that she fearlessly smashes with her hand, very unlike what other little girls might do. Most significantly, she eventually escapes the Other world, saves the souls of the previous children the witch has trapped, rescues her parents, and puts an end to the Other Mother without any help. (It should be noted that the one exception to this is when the cat helps her collect one of the souls; however, his involvement in her quest is meant to show she has finally won his trust and respect.) Gaiman’s story ends with her affirmation that after what she has gone through, her upcoming first day of school was not leaving her “apprehensive and nervous… there was nothing left about school that could scare her anymore” (161).

            Truth be told, the movie version of the character Coraline is virtually the same; it is only through the inclusion of Wybie is her personality and circumstances altered slightly. A nervous, twitchy and awkward boy, Wybie is about as headstrong and eccentric as Coraline is, making him both a useful acquaintance and interesting opposition to her – she even refers to him initially as “too psycho to be friends with” (Coraline, “Deleted Scenes”). Adding Wybie allows Coraline to use him primarily as a sounding board to rely important discoveries and observations to the audience and to learn background, as Wybie’s grandmother has an awful and heartbreaking connection with the house. And just as there is an Other Mother and Other Father in the Other world, so there appears Other Wybie, who shows compassion and sorrow at Coraline’s doom if she decides to stay. The Other Wybie also helps her escape the Other Mother’s imprisonment. His rescue is sort of a deus ex machina, a significant break from the original story, where instead Coraline must wait by herself before confronting the Other Mother. And once more, at the end of the film, as Coraline is battling with the hand of the Other Mother, real Wybie appears on his bike to save the day, ultimately destroying the hand with a large rock.

            It stands to argue that perhaps the defeat of the Other Mother by the two children is intended to be a joint effort, a sort of combining of intelligence and strength in order to defeat the evil which threatens them both. However, it takes away from Coraline’s sense of achievement, for in the book, she carefully plans out how she traps the hand in a deep well all by herself. By doing this, she takes an active role in not only her own salvation, but also preventing other children from being threatened. One look at the princesses and beauties of fairy tales show that most of the time, the heroines are passive individuals with little to no input into their futures, and they certainly do not usually go around saving people. As Jack Zipes notes in Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, there is the perception that typical male heroes of fairy tales have “remarkable minds, courage, and deft manners… [whereas] the fairy tales dealing with women [have] the primary goal… [of] marriage” (42). The male figures are “active, pursue their goals by using their minds, and exhibit a high degree of civility” (42). Undoubtedly, these same characteristics can be applied to the character of Coraline, but she seems to be an exception to the general rule.

            On the other hand, Sheldon Cashdan notes in The Witch Must Die that the females in fairy tales have characteristically been the central focus, for “males figures are relatively minor figures… In many instances, the intervention of the prince is incidental to the heroine’s survival” (28). This observation of course refers to the original versions of the stories by Perrault and the Grimm brothers, not the Disney-ified, saccharine love stories of contemporary versions. Because reinterpretations and adaptations of fairy tales are products of the culture and time context in which they arise, Cashdan is not surprised that more recent tales show “heroines who [are] bold, resourceful, and sassy… more likely to rescue the prince than the other way around” (240) due to the feminist movements of the past century and the general trend in contemporary society towards female empowerment. The book version of Coraline obviously functions and gets along just fine, saving the day all by herself, without the inclusion of a male character. She shows herself to be as curious and intelligent as any other heroine of popular stories, and yet equally as heroic and resolute enough to get out of the trouble she gets herself into. Compare Caroline to other curious protagonists like Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Dorothy, and Alice, and it is clear that she is different because she does not wait for a man to save her. This is, of course, changed in the film by the character of Wybie.

            There is no dispute of Gaiman and Selick’s explanation of why a character needed to be added, because for an adaptation, it does make sense. Obviously, a film is going to be very different than a book. They are, after all, completely different formats, as “film adaptations obviously also added bodies, voices, sound, music, props, customs, architecture, [etc.]” (Hutcheon 37) to the ideas that stem solely from the written words on a page. There is the shifting from “imagination to actual ocular perception” (Hutcheon 40), which is precisely what occurs in the adaptation of Coraline.  The book is told from a third-person, limited point-of-view with Coraline as the focalizer. Due to this narration style, the reader not only sees and hears what Coraline does, but also read exactly what she is feeling or thinking. Because there is no narrator of the film Coraline and yet she remains the focalizer, something had to be altered in the adaptation process in order to have an organized flow of information to the story.

            Adding a character to aid Coraline is a logical choice, but perhaps a more unique and contemporary solution would have been the inclusion of another female character. Vera Sonja Maass raises this concern in The Cinderella Test, as “no other girls with similar or different qualities ever befriend [the isolated heroine] or help her. Healthy female relationships do not exist in fairy tales” (49). Indeed, the girl may be the focus on the fairy tale, but the minor female characters who appear are caricatured, archetypal constructs: the dead mother, the jealous stepmother, the greedy stepsisters, the evil witch. Even Coraline has its share of archetypes in her humdrum real mother (who for most the story is essentially “useless” to Coraline) and the scary, soul-sucking evil Other Mother. Much of the film is centered around Coraline’s relationship with her real mother, and if the character Wybie were a girl, then Coraline would gain two positive, beneficial female relationships at the close of the story.

            More significantly, the audience would be exposed to two tough, bright and dynamic female role models, girls who help each other solve puzzles and rectify their problems. This would be a “challenge [to] many of the underlying fairy-tale assumptions about male-female relationships” (Cashdan 240), and more importantly, to the stereotypes about female-female relationships. It is satisfying to believe that girl-Wybie and Coraline would make a great team together. Instead, the audience is left with a last incongruous scene in the movie in which Coraline punches Wybie one last time, thanking him for “stalking” her, to which he blushes and shyly smiles. In fact, this exchange seems to stir up only one essential query: Are they going to kiss now? Adding a character, one who ultimately helps the female protagonist in her quest, gives the movie version of  Coraline a sense that perhaps she could not achieve her successes without help. Furthermore, making the character a male allows the film fall back into outmoded, patriarchic literary assumptions that female characters need a male figure in order to solve their problems.

            Wybie or not, Coraline does remain true to herself. In both the book and the movie version, she is a positive role model for young girls, a literary figure that embodies all the strength and courage all young children should aspire to. It is encouraging to see authors and directors showcasing competent, self-motivated females who are interesting, complex and well-developed characters who do none of the waiting and all the doing. Interestingly enough is the fact that Gaiman himself is on record defending Wybie’s inclusion in the film because then “you don’t have a girl walking around occasionally talking to herself” (Selick and Gaiman, “Extras”). Coraline is already breaking the classical assumptions and stereotypes about female characters in fairy tales, so thus a bold question might be bounced back to Gaiman, as well as other writers of children’s literature: Just what is so wrong with a girl talking to herself?

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Works Cited

Cashdan, Sheldon. The Witch Must Die: The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Print.

Coraline. Dir. Harry Selick. Perf. Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Ian McShane. 

Focus Features, 2009. Blu-Ray DVD, 2010.

--- Deleted Scenes. Blu-Ray DVD, 2010.

Gaiman, Neil. Coraline. New York: HarperEntertainment, 2002. Print.

Maass, Vera Sonja. The Cinderella Test: Would You Really Want the Shoe to Fit? Santa Barbara: Praeger, an impint of ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2009. Print.

Selick, Harry, and Neil Gaiman, Commentary. “Extras: The Making of Coraline: Evolution of the Story.” Coraline. Dir. Harry Selick. Focus Features, 2009. Blu-Ray DVD, 2010.

Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

"What voyage this, little girl? This coming out of prison? God help- this life after death."

One of my main ideas for the upcoming critical essay was to pursue the topic of how girls are portrayed in the literature and films that we have examined in class. However, after some interesting reading, as well as pursing my classmate’s blogs, I have found that this topic seems to be very popular. It’s no wonder - for the most part, girls have been the central characters of the stories we have read and watched: Dorothy, Beauty, Alice, Wendy. Young girls who grow up through their respective stories is a well-crafted and oft-repeated tradition in literature and I find it immensely interesting. However, in order to stand out from the crowd, I have decided to try to pursue my essay in a different direction. While I attempt to remain close to the texts that I have read in class, the topic I choose will need some outside research as well, in addition to some outside reading.

One of the main points in some of our discussion of the texts has been if these girl characters are empowered somehow through their journeys. If they are, then of course we would have to consider them good role models for young girl readers, as well as adult women who look back at their childhood classic. However, I am going to argue in my essay that they aren’t empowered. In fact, their stories, trials and adventures have done nothing for them except push them back into submission, the ropes of their freedoms tightened and this has directly affected modern adaptations for the fiction and movies today still do not have strong women in leading roles. 

Popular culture and thus - as an extension, or perhaps reflection of - society have not caught on to the idea of giving females real power. For the most part, audiences are left with under-developed, scantily-clad and weak-willed girls in media, who rely solely on others to help them with their problems. And this is solely because the blueprints are flawed themselves. Dorothy, Alice, Wendy, Little Red Riding Hood – they all have wonderful adventures, expressive imagination and beautiful stories to tell when they come back from their adventures. But the stories end there. Nothing is said about their lives when they grow up – except Wendy, who’s short epilogue is over-shadowed by the reappearance of Peter and his newly-formed relationship with Wendy’s daughter. Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White and the other princesses of fairy tales are left married, happily it seems, but chained into the conventions of marriage, the family unit and societal standards. None of the princesses, at least in the original stories, become queens or show any political sway. They don’t go on further adventures or learn new things through their explorations. I would suppose that if we could see their lives further, we would see them with a bundle of children, up to their heads in mindless chores and endless processions of royal engagements – and this is only the princesses! Imagine the lowly girls who don’t marry into royalty and their lives afterward their stories end, and immediately we see Alice an obedient Victorian wife, Wendy frustrated with her children’s wild fantasies, and Dorothy living Kansas, married to some poor farmer, up to her ears in manure.

While nice to think about, there is no significant achievement or accomplishment in young women expanding their imaginations. Sure, daydreams of Neverland or Oz, or perhaps falling in love with a handsome prince, are a nice escape. But the texts of yesterday – these so-called “classics”  - have done nothing to change our present literary traditions. For the most part, girls and women in literature and film are still reduced to mere archetypes, left helpless while they wait for the man to save them. Sure, Tim Burton can have his grown-up Alice wield a sword against the horrible jabberwocky, then somehow feel empowered enough to blow off the restricting rules of Victorian society. And of course Little Red Riding Hood can be hyper-sexualized in modern re-tellings to make her seem more powerful and strong. But at the end of the movie version of LRRH released in 2011, it is Valerie’s lover Henry who kills her father the Wolf (a solution to an Oedipal complex, perhaps?) and Burton’s Alice still relies on a man (her would-be father-in-law) in order to expand her career horizons. Recent literary re-tellings of classic stories follow the same vein. In Angela Carter’s short story “The Bloody Chamber” – an adaptation of Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard – the young wife is saved from her murderous new husband by her mother. And 2011’s recent disastrous Sucker Punch (Jack Snyder) was marketed as a kick-ass blend of marital arts, big guns and strong women as they try to escape from a mental institution using their imaginations, a la Alice in Wonderland, only to leave audiences laughing in bewilderment and shock at the cliché dialogue, skimpy outfits and a overly-sexualized plotline involving the girls as dancing prostitutes in a brothel.

There are some hopeful glimpses into a future of where girls and women in literature will really feel empowered. Carter’s “In The Company of Wolves” leaves the young girl sleeping in the arms of the wolf after a passionate night, marking her maturity and shift from girl to woman. James Thurber’s two-paragraph “The Little Girl and the Wolf” is even more promising, which has our heroine shoot the wolf dead with an automatic after noting that obviously any conscious and mildly intelligent person would note that a wolf is not a grandmother, and ends with the moral “It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.” However, popular culture, namely films and TVs, as well as most of the widely-circulated literature, have obviously not caught on to how to update the fairy tale archetypes to empower their female characters.

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Title from: 

Sexton, Anne. "Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)." Don't Bet on the Prince. Ed. Jack Zipes. New York: Routledge, 1987. Print.

Note: I greatly encourage and welcome some feedback on this topic! Going back over what I have just written shows me that there perhaps is several different topics within the above text.

Alice thought to herself… Now you will see a film… made for children… perhaps… But, I nearly forgot… you must… close your eyes… otherwise… you won’t see anything.

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The study of how children’s literature is adapted – or perhaps, re-interpreted – for adults is a topic in which I am becoming increasingly interested in. I think there is something so remarkable, exciting and terrifying about returning to a favorite childhood narrative, only to find it warped or twisted beyond the familiar - changed somehow, so that it speaks to us more as grown-ups than small children. This is exactly how I felt when watching Jan Svankmajer’s Alice (1988) after watching Disney's Alice in Wonderland (1951) (which I had not seen since I was a kid). I really, truly feel that Svankmajer’s Alice is intended for an adult audience – I definitely will acknowledge that watching this would have sent me running to hide under the covers if I had seen this when I was a child. Even now, at age twenty-three, it still frightened me a little! 

While I did watch Disney’s Alice in Wonderland when I was younger, it was never my favorite Disney movie. I remember thinking Alice’s way of speaking (her diction, tone and mannerisms) were boring, too stiff and formal for my young ears. I never quite understood why the Mad Hatter and the March Hare were interesting, nor could really see what the lure of the White Rabbit was to Alice. The Queen of Hearts was ugly, but I think I knew that Disney would never actually show a head being cut-off, so she never scared me. I do remember liking the Cheshire Cat, if only because I’ve always been a cat-person. Despite the absurdity of the story, the characters and the plot, it’s always been for me an enjoyable movie. I found myself liking it more now as an adult, although that could plausibly be because I greatly enjoyed reading Lewis’s stories (I never read them as a kid). The Disney version is also entertaining: lots of brilliant color, and light-hearted, good-natured (albeit absurd) fun. We as the audience are delighted and thrilled to take part in Alice’s adventures in a Wonderland that is happy, bright, and interesting, full of catchy songs and exciting exploration. We see Alice as pretty, smart and full of emotion, and her ending is a happy one: she wakes up from her dream and everything is back to normal.

However, returning to Svankmajer’s Alice: WOW. I kept thinking I could do something else while the movie was playing – other homework, perhaps, or tidying up my apartment – but found myself unable to do so because of the lack of dialogue. Thus, forced to keep my eyes on the screen, I sat on the couch, fidgeting the whole time, taking glances at the clock and wondering how much longer this nightmare would continue (because, yes, it did feel like a nightmare to me). The constant repetition of the little girl’s mouth narrating the dialogue was like fingernails on the chalkboard to me. The tea party scene – which I had to suffer through again in class when we watched it then – dragged on, and on, and on, and on, with no end in sight. The slow, languid pace of the film heightened the unease I felt while watching, and I kept thinking to myself Why is Professor Hatfield making us watch this? Why, why?! The little girl playing Alice was cute, but somehow forbidding. Her clothes became dirty and tattered, she shrunk into a frightening doll (which totally reminded me of Chucky!) and her ending is not “happy” (at least I didn’t think so): she wakes up in her room, amongst all these possessions that have appeared in her dream, and finds that the stuffed white rabbit is gone for real. The scissors (a strangely haunting motif) she wields at the end make her seem like a creepy little kid, one I should run away from if I ever end up in a zombie/horror movie. Alice is devoid of emotion, a passive observer in her Wonderland, which perhaps is less a land of wonder and more like a house of horror. Seeing Svankmajer’s decrepit, decaying and dull world, I wanted to leave the nightmare and return to Disney’s pretty, sing-a-long vision!

Those are, of course, my own personal and perhaps hyperbolic feelings on the film. I know Alice is considered to be a cult classic, with a plethora of praise from critics, but it just made me feel uncomfortable. I think these feelings stem partly from my American-action-movie, bland cinematic upbringing, but also because of Svankmajer’s style of using ordinary objects in terrifying ways, which was the one element I did actually like and took notice of when watching and comparing the two films. Disney did this in part with the sequenced of birds created from pencils, umbrellas and horns as Alice cries, but they were cute, funny and – most importantly – non-threatening. Svankmajer instead has his heroine pull a sharp tack out of a jar of jam, find a rabbit who licks the sawdust from his open belly, wrestles with socks wriggling into holes like snakes – all these images are designed to send chills down our spines. This is why I believe that Svankmajer’s Alice is really for an adult audience. I think that when elements that would have entertained and excited us as children become startlingly horrible motifs, that is where differences lie between a story for children and a story for adults. Simply put, Disney’s version is made to delight and fascinate children and Svankmajer re-interpreted the story to provide a darker, more sinister take for adults.

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Alice (Neco z Alenky). Dir. Jan Svankmajer. First Run Features, 1988. Film. 

"Keep your eyes open. Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?"

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My group - which consisted of myself, Tenny, Amanda, Michelle and Jennifer - presented this week on the book The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe from The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, as well as the 2005 movie, directed by Andrew Adamson and released by Walt Disney Pictures. 

I read the seven books of the Narnia series maybe about five or six years ago. I actually never read any of the stories when I was a kid - I didn't even get Wardrobe as assigned reading in school, as so many people do! I did see the movie in theaters when it came out in 2005 and have always enjoyed the film adaptation, so it was nice to return to the story and movie for this presentation.

When we met to discuss our presentation, we decided that it was best to start out with some background information on Lewis, the series as a whole, the story and the characters, as well as some insight to the major themes and binaries. Unlike with the previous group's presentation on Alice in Wonderland, the class had not been introduced to the world of Narnia until this week, so we wanted to provide some context, both historical and story-wise. Thus, we each took a topic to focus on. 
 

I choose to make my PowerPoint slides and presentation on the binaries, major themes and archetypes that appear in the story. I wanted to do this because this - for me - is where the real story is, hidden within the narrative. The binaries of good versus evil, of ordinary children versus extraordinary heroes, as well as the themes of gluttony and salvation, are what really interested me in the story. Additionally, the edition of The Chronicles of Narnia that I have includes a short section in the back of "Excerpts from BEYOND THE WARDROBE: The Official Guide to Narnia". These short essay excerpts included lots of good quotes from Lewis himself. For example, in the short section about the White Witch, Lewis is quoted as saying " 'The Witch is of course Circe... She is... the same Archetype we find in so many fairy tales. No good asking where any individual author got that. We are born knowing the Witch, aren't we?' " To see that Lewis acknowledged the Witch in Wardrobe was an archetype following the great tradition of Greek mythology allowed me to connect this fantasy tale of four children to the greater narrative framework of literature. I also tried to provide some information about the rest of the series - because it is so much more than just the one book.

We agreed that our PowerPoint presentation should be short - after all, PowerPoint is often so boring. However, we really felt that it was necessary to provide some information about Lewis (as Michelle did) and the story (as Amanda, Tenny and Jennifer did) because Professor Hatfield provided similar information when the class started the Alice in Wonderland unit, and we feel that sort of information really helps in understanding the story. We each did our separate parts, and Michelle volunteered to compile them together to make it easier to present as a well.

We also picked two scenes - where the four children first enter Narnia and the resurrection scene (although that scene was plagued by human error, since I didn't check where we needed to start from). We choose these two scenes to focus our class discussion on because the children entering Narnia was such a pivotal moment in the story, as they first enter this fantasy world through the portal. Additionally, we felt the resurrection of Aslan was interesting - not only because of the religious implications and interpretations of it - but because it was shot in such a close adaptation from the novel. There weren't a lot of major changes with this scene, and we thought it would generate some thought about the adaptation process from book to movie.

I think our presentation went wonderfully! It seemed to me that the class was interested in discussing some of the aspects we brought up, as well as some things that Professor Hatfield pointed out. I felt that each member of my group researched and presented exactly what we agreed on. I'm glad I got to work with such a wonderful group! 

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Lewis, C.S. The Chronicles of Narnia. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble, Inc, by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers. 2010. Print  

"Because you're her mother. Mother is God in the eyes of a child."

So far in this course, we’ve been discussing adaptations from literature to film, and while this is most common form of adaptation is media today, I am more interested in the adaptation of other genres that don’t get much significant study, such as comic books and video games. Which is why I’m focusing on the Silent Hill movie that was released in 2006, loosely based in part from the first game in the Silent Hill franchise - Silent Hill (1999), released for the Playstation.

I should note here with great emphasis and honesty  that I have never played any of the games themselves personally. I have watched my roommate play most of them, so I understand the characters, various devices used in-game, general play style, and general story arcs. Additionally, I own the movie myself, and have watched it several times only to discuss with my roommate the differences, so I feel that while I don’t have a 100% grasp on every little detail in the game series, I am knowledgeable about it enough so to speak about the differences. I liked watching my friend play the first Silent Hill game, mostly because he would play in the dark – which, let me tell you, made the cut scenes WAY more frightening) – and was excited to see the movie when it came out. I’m not that much of a gamer. I’ve played World of Warcraft for several years (which is also getting a movie adaptation soon!) but online games are much different than console gaming, of which I’ve found myself never quite becoming accustomed to the joystick and triggers. I prefer to watch others play, if nothing more than for the storylines. The Silent Hill series – including the games and the movie – are interesting because there are a wide range of interpretations and ideas one can have.

First, because I’m much more familiar with the movie, I’ll give a basic outline for those who haven’t seen it: the movie begins with Rose and Christopher and their daughter Sharon, who we learn is adopted. Sharon has been having nightmares and crying out the name “Silent Hill”. In order to discover more about why her daughter is experiencing these terrors, Rose takes Sharon – without Christopher – to a town she finds called “Silent Hill”, only to engage in a police chase with a motorcycle cop (Cybil) and crashes her car atop a mountain road. She awakens some time later to find Sharon gone. Strange ash is now falling from the sky, blanketing everything in sight. She searches the town of Silent Hill after seeing a girl who looks like her daughter, only to encounter abandoned and decaying buildings, a cult of religious fanatic who find safety in a church, and horrific, mutilated monsters that spawn after the town warps into a twisted, demonic unreality. She eventually teams up with Cybil, who has also crashed on the road, in order to find her daughter and discover the secrets of the town, which center around the strange girl named Alessa (who looks identical to Sharon) and a cult ritual that went horribly awry years ago that was intended to “purify” Alessa but instead split her soul in two, and her evil side is what is making the town as it is. Meanwhile, as Rose and Cybil race around the town avoiding monsters amidst the falling ash, Christopher has also come to Silent Hill, but all he can see is a decaying ghost town, deserted from the coal fires that still burn underground that render the area uninhabitable, void of any people - or monsters.

Meanwhile, the storyline of the original Silent Hill game – by which the movie is loosely based on – is similar, although there are some notable differences. You play as Harry, who also must look for his daughter Cheryl after crashing his car near Silent Hill. Cybil and Alessa still make appearances, although their interactions with the main character Harry are different than in the movie – decisions involving Cybil impact the ending much more, for example. The town is covered in snow instead of ash (there’s no reference to any coal fires), while the memorable monsters (Pyramid Head and the Nurses) are mostly taken from the 2^nd Silent Hill game (2001). Like the movie, it is also the workings of a cult that have turned the town into an evil hell, but it’s because of the cult trying to birth their new god through Alessa. A Silent Hill tradition was also started with this first game, as depending on the player’s actions, the ending can be resolved in different ways. Four endings in all are included in this game, varying in degrees from good to bad (which depends on who you save/sacrifice), and a joke ending in which the characters are abducted by aliens.

So, when we discuss the adaptation from one visual media (game) to another (film), it’s both a similar and different conversation that what we would look at from a text (literature) to visual (film).  Linda Hutcheon remarks in Adaptation that “What gets adapted here is a heterocosm, literally an ‘other world’” (14), which I thought was a perfect description of the adaptation process of video games. Gaming allows the individual to become part of the story. In a well-designed game, it’s the player’s decisions, actions and will that directly change the course of the game, thus creating a different gameplay for each person. An individual may watch a movie and be able to come up with the same thoughts or experiences as another, but a game requires more hands-on interaction, a deeper connection with what is happening on the screen, giving a more personal experience. Gaming allows us to become participants in a different reality rather than casual observers, and this is what makes video games so unique.

However, this provides the biggest problem when creating a film from a video game. Trying to compact down a vast universe with complex characters, storylines, secondary-storylines and visual elements – like the Silent Hill series – into an easily digestible, comprehensible (to most) two-hour film (compared to a 12+ hour game), the viewer loses much of the interaction with the story. They are forced back into “casual observer”, pushed further away from the story. We also see this happen with books that have sprawling, imaginative universes, like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings – much of the sub-plots, digressions and secondary elements are dropped in favor of a neatly packaged (and marketable) story. Thus, I think this is the reason why the film’s director and writer made some of the changes to the story in order to fit it for a film. Director Christopher Gans, on the film’s website through Sony Pictures, has answered to a lot of these changes, including why he made the main character a woman and not a man. Gans says that “It quickly became clear… Harry [the game’s protagonist] never acted like a masculine character… we felt it was better to change to a female protagonist and retain all those important [character] qualities.” I myself applaud this change! The film focuses on the female characters – Rose, Sharon, Alessa, Cybil, Dahlia, Christabella – as the saviors and destroyers. In fact, the original script didn’t include the father Christopher; it was only the studio’s worry about a lack of a male lead that prompted the creation of his character (played by Sean Bean). Gans also said that he understands that not every fan of the game will be a fan of the movie, but that he thinks fans “want a movie that they can respect and a film that generates conversation and an exchange of ideas. I want the movie to reinforce the cult and intelligence that surrounds the game… To do this well I had to sacrifice key elements in the game” such as secondary plot-lines and greater reliance on the player discovering secrets and puzzles.

But, just as Gans hoped, I found myself enjoying the film – not because it was a “perfect” adaptation of the game’s storyline – but because it allowed conversation and deeper thought into the binaries of good vs. evil, heaven vs. hell, innocence vs. malice. I found my interpretation – and stop reading here if you don’t wish for the film to be spoiled for you – to be quite different than other peoples: I believe Rose, Sharon and Cybil all died in their car accidents, and their adventures in Silent Hill was their journey to escape hell. Cybil is unable to, and is consumed by the fires of hell. However, when Rose and Sharon leave Silent Hill and return home, only to find that the fog and ash of Silent Hill has followed them, they are unable to see or hear Christopher, who is in the same house in the “real” world. Rose and Sharon, even after their struggles with hell and damnation, are left without a heaven, denied the perfect afterlife. They remain trapped in a limbo state with only each other for company.

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Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York, NY: Routledge. 2006. Print.

Silent Hill. Dir. Christopher Gans. Sony Pictures, 2006. Film.

”Silent Hill: Notes From Director Christopher Gans.” Sony Pictures. Sonypictures.com, 2006. Web. 1 March 2011. 

< http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/silenthill/productiondiary/index.php>

Arthur looked up. "Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out."

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“Not nearly as good as the book.” – posted by RottenTomatoes.com user Lisa Leighton.

I have heard this exact proclamation used numerous times over when discussing the film version of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, released by Disney’s Touchstone Pictures in 2005. What users fail to remember – or at least recognize – is that the 1979 book is itself an adaptation of the original series, a radio comedy broadcast on BBC Radio in 1978. Furthermore, there is an abundance of additional adaptations, such as stage shows, a 1981 TV series, a 1984 computer game, and three three-part comic books published by DC Comics between 1993 and 1996, not to mention the fact that the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy story is really six books long – five of the original “trilogy” by Adams and a sixth book written in 2009 by Eoin Colfer (which, for me, surprisingly works well within the scope of the other books, and I think Colfer did a decent job at trying to write in an Adams-esque way without sounding like a phony).

I saw the movie in 2005, at the end of the theatrical release, in a tiny, run-down theater in Campbell, California with my father, who had introduced me to the HHGTTG books. After reading the books I was excited to see the movie, even though I figured going into it that the books would be better because Adams uses such a sinuous, unfastened and comedically dull language that it would be hard to convey all the “witty erudition, great gags and lengthy digressions” (Waters 1) that make the book so entertaining. And when I left the theatre, my expectations had been met: the movie was itself entertaining, but much of the humor (or should I say humour?) was lost. The movie was good, but the book was better.

So when I read Darren Waters’s (an entertainment reporter for the BBC News) review of the film, it fit within the scope of what I expected to hear from a reviewer – and what I thought myself personally about the film. As Waters thinks, the movie is “not as bad as I had feared. Then again, it is not as good as I had hoped… a number of scarifies [were made] to get the text into cinematic form” (1-2).

Waters raises the issue in his review, stating that “a lot of effort has gone in to keeping the film as faithful to Adams’ vision as possible” (1). He uses that word “faithful” almost casually, but the deeper implications of such a word choice are almost alarmingly obvious to a student of adaptation, such as myself. John Desmond and Peter Hawkes write in their book Adaptation that reviewers of film frequently rely on the terms "faithful" or "unfaithful" when discussing adaptations, and “this degree of faithfulness is either good or bad. The problem with this language is that it tends to imply that the book is better than the movie” (41). Because being “faithful” or “unfaithful” typically applies to the normal, every-day vocabulary of conversation to the degree to which an individual is honest and virtuous to his/her spouse, there is an often unconscious association with a film being “unfaithful” as cheating the viewer out of some emotional connection or full understanding of the original text.

I should note that I personally don’t feel cheated. The visuals were stunning in the film. Getting the chance to see distant planets and alien creatures made “real” was a great treat for me. I have always liked Alan Rickman, and I thought the vocals he provided for Marvin fit perfectly with what he sounded like in my head. Additionally, I didn’t have concerns about the casting of non-English people (such as Zooey Deschanel or rapper Mos Def) because the only person who “needed” to be English was Arthur Dent (played brilliantly by Martin Freeman). And who can find fault with Stephen Fry as the voice of the Book? (Nobody, that’s who!) I eagerly bought the film when it came out on DVD, and would continue to watch future films, if any, of the series. And while a visual presentation of the book’s story cannot ever truly capture the splendor and intelligence of Adams’ unique diction and tone, it still should not be forced so quickly into the category of “bad adaptations.” Desmond and Hawkes point out that “text’s verbal language and the film’s pictorial and aural language have distinct qualities that prohibit the exact replication of a text on screen” (34).

I think the true genius of the HHGTTG story is that it’s an ever-evolving story; the characters, the plot, the adventures are dynamic rather than fixed within tight limitations. Certainly there are characters and stories that are scrutinized down to the tiniest alteration with a fanatical precision. Even the creator of HHGTTG couldn’t tie himself down to just one telling! And therefore, I don’t think that adaptations should either.

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Adams, Douglas. The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. USA: Del Ray, imprint of Random House Publishing Group. 2002. Print.

Desmond, John and Peter Hawkes. Adaptation: Studying Film and Literature. McGraw-Hill Co. 2005. 34-49. Print.

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia.com, n.d. Web. 15 Feb. 2011.

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Movie Reviews, Pictures.” Rotten Tomatoes by Flixster. RottenTomatoes.com, n.d. Web. 15 Feb. 2011.

Waters, Darren. “Review: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” BBC News. News.bbc.co.uk, 20 April 2005. Web. 15 Feb. 2011.

"I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!"

Hello all who happen to stumble onto this blog, be it other members of Prof. Hatfield’s English 312 Literature + Film class, Prof. Hatfield himself (Hi!), or anyone else for that matter. I guess the beauty of the modern technology age is that no souls are clandestine anymore; we truly are a tuned-on, plugged-in world fully committed to exposing our barest selves to strangers in the hope that there are others in the world who think and feel like us.

Well, for a bit about me: My name is Leslie Kawakami and I’m 23 years old. I’m a Junior at California State University at Northridge, hoping to graduate in the spring of 2012 if all goes to plan. I’m currently taking 5 courses: Major Critical Theories, Theories of Fiction, Asian American Fiction, Women’s Sex Roles in Culture and of course Literature + Film. I have to say the Lit + Film class is already looking to be the most entertaining and interesting, although that’s probably because the other classes involve lots of heavy, tricky readings by academic bigwigs who publish, it seems, simply in hopes of impressing the other academic bigwigs.

I must say that the main focus of this course being portal fantasies in children’s literature is just about the most fascinating and intriguing topic I could have hoped for. I took an Introduction to Film class at Santa Monica College a few years ago which I greatly enjoyed, so I’m hoping what I learned from that course will transfer and enhance my understanding of topics raised in this one. When I signed up for the course, I assumed we would be examining literature that’s been adapted to film (and possibly the stigma behind the opposite, those “dreaded” cheap paperback movie tie-ins that only seem to exist to boost the studio’s earnings) but I have fond memories of the stories I read as a child, and appreciate how much they exercised my imagination and stretched the limits of my understanding of the world. So, I’m deeply excited to pursue this topic in this course!

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Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press Ltd., 2000. Print. 60.