A Curious Dream: Imagination, Adaptation and the Role of Literature in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

When describing a book, I am careful to avoid calling it a “fantasy” story because of the assumptions people make about the genre. If the series is Lord of the Rings, it’s difficult to avoid the subject, but if I can introduce someone to an “alternative history novel” (The Golden Compass comes to mind) or an “exploration of dualism” I’ll do that instead. In fact, the assumptions people make about fantasy are probably mostly informed by Disney’s aggressive marketing; in the minds of Americans, at least, Fantasy literature and Children’s literature occupy the same oppressively negative space. But that doesn’t do either genre justice.

Fantasy literature, Children’s literature and Fiction in general all serve the same purpose: to challenge and explore the assumptions of the audience in some form (of course, they also entertain us; perhaps that’s why it’s popular in spite of the stigma). That’s what all good literature does, regardless of classification. In many cases, of course, it is difficult for audiences to allow Fantasy or Children’s literature, or Children’s Fantasy Literature to also be “good” literature, and this is in part because of the way that Disney has pre-packaged so many great works as explicit morality tales. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is no exception to this rule, as the original text is quite rebellious yet the Disney version removes the startling imagination in favor of overt didacticism. Carroll’s habit of creating imaginative landscapes populated with challenging puzzles and characters is a feature of all good literature, and by creating a challenging world he transcends the boundaries of “mere” fantasy.

As an anecdotal aside about “all good literature” challenging expectations, I watched an episode of House, M.D. nearly a year ago, back when I was still shocked by the realization that House and Wilson were modern day Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Because it was a season finale, it was a two-part episode, and once again the camera dove into the subconscious of the good doctor, probing his psyche for strange delights. That wasn’t the interesting part; as House episodes go, it was pretty standard, and I’m sure you’re waiting for the part of this story where he did something silly with his cane/made a sexually charged remark at a female colleague/did something illegal.

The interesting part (and the point of this anecdote) was that the hallucination that had plagued him for the last half of the season made a fascinating point: “We all tell ourselves stories. What story did you make up for yourself this time?”

House does it. I just did it (told a story, that is. The season 5 finale really was about House hallucinating an alternate series of events). Lewis Carroll did it, maybe without even realizing it. Everybody tells stories about their lives to each other, and to themselves, either to reassure themselves or to convince others of a point, or maybe just to pass the time with an entertaining tale. Our lives are set adrift in the sea of uncertainty, and we collect sticks of narrative driftwood in some hope of ensuring floatability.

While episodes of House, M.D. aren’t exactly fantasy epics, there is a tendency of the season finales to delve into House’s subconscious in a way startlingly reminiscent of fantasy stories. Lori Campbell explores this psychological echo in her book “Portals of Power,” explaining how the world created is often a reflection of the main character’s mind. She says:

These ‘Other-worlds’ are generally accessed through the use of magical passageways or conveyances that allow exploration of the complexities of the secondary space, most often implied to be externalizations of the hero’s inner workings (Campbell 6)

and she also argues that

In marking these “in-between” spaces, the portal connotes a myriad of power associations and imbalances, centralizing and making transparent the ways in which literary fantasy attacks real-world problems (6).

Campbell is arguing that the purpose of fantastical fiction is to explore complex real-world dynamics in the context of another world. This same logic can be applied to all literature; when a writer talks about a mythical doctor who can solve all ailments with his powerful brain yet suffers from a God complex and an addiction to pain medication, what the writer is really doing is setting up a fantasy world to explore power dynamics. Doctor Gregory House is merely the product of this exploration of the psyche, revealing to the audience certain truths about themselves or life in general. Of course, where writers are concerned, the truth is always subjective…

This raises the somewhat disturbing question of what stories in general, and children’s stories in particular, are trying to accomplish. Is J. M. Barrie merely entertaining us with a diverting tale of a small boy trapped forever in a fairy tale of his own devising? Or is there a deeper message? Is it even realistic to think that an adult can write a story for children, or that an author can avoid being didactic on some level?

When speaking of children’s stories, the Victorian period is a fascinating example of didacticism run rampant. Tess Lewis, in an article titled “Defending Children Against Fairy Tales” makes the statement that

Victorian writers are primarily responsible for bringing fairy tales into the nursery. Driven by their overriding concern for productive activity and proper behavior, Victorians found fairy tales to be ideal instruments of education and socialization and perfected the art of didactic fiction (403).

This approach to Victorian children’s literature is not an uncommon one. Carole Rother refers to Victorian children’s literature as “oppressive didacticism” (89) and Gillian Brown goes into the history of using books as moral instruction, describing John Locke’s affection for picture books as the ideal medium of education, going on to say that “Newbery’s best-selling juvenile books . . . are both didactic tales about the rewards of diligently pursuing one’s studies” (356).

The thought that children’s literature (and to be fair, children’s cinema as well) is used as an introduction or a reinforcement of a moral and social lesson is hardly difficult to accept. This is true even after the Victorian era; most children since Disney’s Bambi (my father’s generation for sure) are aware of the extremely didactic nature of “children’s” cartoons. Deborah Ross laments the Disneyfication of stories, saying that “By the time our eight-year-olds have developed the vocabulary and syntactical sophistication to appreciate the humor and style of Milne or Grahame or Carroll they reject their work as ‘baby stuff’” (222). This is in reference to the simplification of theme and moral, the pre-packaging of kid’s films that introduce classic works to a young audience in the form of easy-to-swallow parables.

Obviously there is a tradition in literature to use the story as a vessel, teaching a moral lesson even as it entertains the child (à la Newbery). This is especially true of Victorian literature, where even the stories for adults were often cautionary or didactic. Though it pains me to do so, I must extend this criticism to Lewis Carroll, but with a few reservations.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a didactic work, in that it teaches children some very specific lessons about the world. What those lessons are varies from critic to critic. Rother explains how Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is meant to allay children’s fears of personal destruction:

Alice’s adventures involve continual perils, emotional pitfalls, and an underlying sense of anxiety, these are balanced throughout by a mood of playfulness and fun, reinforced by the optimistic tone of the narrative voice, as the intrepid Alice learns to cope with each new challenge (90).

Brown, on the other hand, believes that not only the story, but the actions and conversations Alice performs “[coordinate] associations she has learned, heard, remembered, read elsewhere, or just put together, intermittently accompanied by an adult voice” (354). Brown’s position throughout “The Metamorphic Book” is that the medium of a children’s book is itself ideally suited to education.

But the most fascinating position taken by nearly all writers who speak of the didactic or educational value of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is also the most ironic one: the lesson of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is to question everything. The strength of Carroll’s Alice is her constant challenging of the world around her, which is a significant departure from the moralizing works of his contemporaries.

Tess Lewis writes that “Fairy tales and children’s fiction did not emerge from the stifling hold of didacticism until the revolutionary amoralism of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books” (403), and Carole Rother notes that in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland “If rules are not acknowledged . . . they lose their power” (94). These are somewhat paradoxical statements on the order of a Zen koan: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is didactic because the lesson it teaches is to reject (or at the very least question) the moralizing of stories.

In addition to questioning the status quo, the qualities Carroll imbues Alice with are far from “proper.” Alice is rude (though unintentionally) as in the scene where she cannot stop talking about cats and dogs to the mice and birds. She becomes angry and frustrated and is not afraid to show it, as we see in the scene with the smoking caterpillar. Alice rejects her role as a caregiver; not particularly interested in caring for the Duchess’s baby/pig. Even when faced with unconscionable rudeness, she perseveres (when arriving at the mad tea party, she sits down despite the March Hare’s cries of “No room! No room!”)

In short, Alice is constantly beset with rudeness, contrariness and tangled logic, yet she perseveres. Carroll provides a space in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that allows children (and particularly female children) to explore an oppressive world and gives them an example of a hard-headed, rebellious young woman to look up to.

And then Walt Disney had to go and louse it up.

In her article “Home by Tea-Time: Fear of Imagination in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland” Deborah Ross discusses this extensively. Her main point is that though the original text was imaginative and liberating for young women, Disney strategically removed or rewrote important scenes, turning the text into a bland shadow of Carroll’s vision. The problem, Ross asserts, is that the “supposedly decorous original . . . is ‘anarchic’ or surrealistic – in its substitution of dream logic for waking logic” and “therefore even a faithful or ‘realistic’ rendering of Carroll’s prose will seem imaginative” (221). “The overall effect” she writes, “is to make Alice less a subject than an excuse for presenting images to the audience” (220).

The tendency of Walt Disney to gentrify texts to fit a somewhat conservative mindset (“conservative” in this case referring to extolling traditional family values) takes Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and makes it into a series of spectacle shots, with little or no connectedness in theme. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland it wouldn’t be uncommon to watch as Alice encountered a situation, jumped into the middle of it, was reprimanded, but persevered anyway (the mad tea party comes to mind, and so does the trial at the end). Disney’s Alice in Wonderland appears to have removed all the adventure from our heroine along with removing it from the title, and we have situations where “Alice” instead will encounter a situation, try to politely avoid it, become entrapped, and eventually run away (think of the white rabbit ordering her about to fetch his gloves).

Despite the failure of Disney to accurately translate the spirit of rebellion to the silver screen, this is still the image that most people associate with Alice. But the original Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was attempting to do so much more with itself, and fantasy stories of this type in general try to answer basic questions that we have about our lives.

Fantasy stories are, in that respect, not merely didactic tales for children. Lori Campbell talks about the way fantasy stories, when well-written, act as testing grounds for children and adults to explore moral and social conundrums. Challenging and exploring concepts is a large part of fantasy stories “Because the writer can never completely detach from the Primary world . . . [The] Secondary cannot help but absorb the questions, relationships and troubles of that [Primary] world” ( Campbell 4).

Carroll, whether he realized it or not, was performing a very similar task. While on the surface he was mocking the establishment and creating a very anti-didactic tale of a small girl in a fantasy world, he was actually prompting his readers to use imagination, a controversial stance in an age when girls were put in their place early on (and in the Victorian Age, it wasn’t a very creative place). The purpose of fiction is to challenge our assumptions about life in general, to provide us with a framework that we constantly modify and adapt to our surroundings. Lewis Carroll does this throughout Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and his ability to write a “children’s book” that still appeals to adults. The question is not whether the book is really for children, or if “adult” fantasy can really be for kids; real fantasy literature is truly for all ages, because a good story can be told over and over without losing any of the flavor. The real question is:

How can we show the world that fantasy is just as relevant as every other genre? If there’s anything I took away from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it’s that a story about a little girl in a pinafore is just as insightful as a television show about a cranky genius with a cane, if not more.

Works Cited

Brown, Gillian. “The Metamorphic Book: Children’s Print Culture in the Eighteenth Century.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39:3 (Spring 2006): 351-362. Web. 5 December 2010.

Campbell, Lori M. Portals of Power. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. 1-15. Print.

Carroll, Lewis, and Richard Michael Kelly. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2000. Print.

Le Guin, Ursula. "Imaginary Friends: Tales of Talking Animals and Fantastical Adventure Aren't Just for Children, Argues Ursula Le Guin--we Can and Should Return to Them Throughout Our Lives." New Statesman (1996), 135.4823-4825 (2006): 86.

Lewis, Tess. “Defending Children Against Fairy Tales.” The Hudson Review 46:2 (Summer 1993): 403-408. Web. 5 December 2010.

Ross, Deborah. “Home by Tea-time: Fear of Imagination in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland.” Classics in Film and Fiction. Ed. Deborah Cartmell et al, Film/Fiction Volume 5. London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000. 207-227.

Rother, Carole. “Lewis Carroll’s Lesson: Coping with Fears of Personal Destruction.” Pacific Coast Philosophy 19:1/2 (November 1984: 89-94. Web. 5 December 2010.

Critical Essay Rough Draft

When describing a book, I am careful to avoid calling it a “fantasy” book because of the assumptions people make about the genre. If the series is Lord of the Rings, it’s difficult to avoid the subject, but if I can introduce someone to an “alternative history novel” (The Golden Compass comes to mind) or an “exploration of dualism” I’ll do that instead. In fact, the assumptions people make about fantasy are probably mostly informed by Disney’s aggressive marketing; in the minds of Americans, at least, Fantasy literature and Children’s literature occupy the same oppressively negative space. But that doesn’t do either genre justice.

Fantasy literature, Children’s literature and Fiction in general all serve the same purpose: to challenge and explore the assumptions of the audience in some form. That’s what all good literature does, regardless of classification. In many cases, of course, it is difficult for audiences to allow Fantasy or Children’s literature, or Children’s Fantasy Literature to also be “good” literature, and this is in part because of the way that Disney has pre-packaged so many great works as explicit morality tales. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is no exception to this rule, as the original text is quite rebellious and the Disney version removes the startling imagination in favor of overt didacticism. Carroll’s habit of creating imaginative landscapes populated with challenging puzzles and characters is a feature of all good literature, and by creating a challenging world he transcends the boundaries of “mere” fantasy.

As an anecdotal aside about “all good literature” challenging expectations, I watched an episode of House, M.D. nearly a year ago, back when I was still shocked by the realization that House and Wilson were modern day Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Because it was a season finale, it was a two-part episode, and once again the camera dove into the subconscious of the good doctor, probing his psyche for strange delights. That wasn’t the interesting part; as House episodes go, it was pretty standard, and I’m sure you’re waiting for the part of this story where he did something silly with his cane/made a sexually charged remark at a female colleague/did something illegal.

The interesting part (and the point of this anecdote) was that the hallucination that had plagued him made a fascinating point: “We all tell ourselves stories. What story did you make up for yourself this time?”

House does it. I just did it. Lewis Carroll did it, maybe without even realizing it. Everybody tells stories about their lives to each other, and to themselves, either to reassure themselves or to convince others of a point, or maybe just to pass the time. Our lives are set adrift in the sea of uncertainty, and we collect sticks of narrative driftwood in some hope of ensuring floatability.

This raises the somewhat disturbing question of what stories in general, and children’s stories in particular, are trying to accomplish. Is J. M. Barrie merely entertaining us with a diverting tale of a small boy trapped forever in a fairy tale of his own devising? Or is there a deeper message? Is it even realistic to think that an adult can write a story for children, or that an author can avoid being didactic on some level?

Tess Lewis, in an article titled “Defending Children Against Fairy Tales” makes the statement that

Victorian writers are primarily responsible for bringing fairy tales into the nursery. Driven by their overriding concern for productive activity and proper behavior, Victorians found fairy tales to be ideal instruments of education and socialization and perfected the art of didactic fiction (403).

This approach to literature is not an uncommon one. Carole Rother refers to Victorian children’s literature as “oppressive didacticism” (89) and Gillian Brown goes into the history of using books as moral instruction, describing John Locke’s affection for picture books as the ideal medium of education, going on to say that “Newbery’s best-selling juvenile books . . . are both didactic tales about the rewards of diligently pursuing one’s studies” (356).

The thought that children’s literature (and to be fair, children’s cinema as well) is used as an introduction or a reinforcement of a moral and social lesson is hardly difficult to accept. Most children since Disney’s Bambi (my father’s generation for sure) are aware of the extremely didactic nature of “children’s” cartoons. Deborah Ross laments the Disneyfication of stories, saying that “By the time our eight-year-olds have developed the vocabulary and syntactical sophistication to appreciate the humor and style of Milne or Grahame or Carroll they reject their work as ‘baby stuff’” (222). This is in reference to the simplification of theme and moral, the pre-packaging of kid’s films that introduce classic works to a young audience in the form of easy-to-swallow parables.

Obviously there is a tradition in literature to use the story as a vessel, teaching a moral lesson even as it entertains the child (à la Newbery). This is especially true of Victorian literature, where even the stories for adults were often cautionary or didactic. Though it pains me to do so, I must extend this criticism to Lewis Carroll, but with a few reservations.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a didactic work, in that it teaches children some very specific lessons about the world. What those lessons are varies from critic to critic; Rother explains how Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is meant to allay children’s fears of personal destruction:

Alice’s adventures involve continual perils, emotional pitfalls, and an underlying sense of anxiety, these are balanced throughout by a mood of playfulness and fun, reinforced by the optimistic tone of the narrative voice, as the intrepid Alice learns to cope with each new challenge (90).

Brown believes that not only the story, but the actions and conversations Alice performs “[coordinate] associations she has learned, heard, remembered, read elsewhere, or just put together, intermittently accompanied by an adult voice” (354). Brown’s position throughout “The Metamorphic Book” is that the medium of a children’s book is itself ideally suited to education.

But the most fascinating position taken by nearly all writers who speak of the didactic or educational value of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is also the most ironic one: the lesson of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is to question everything. The strength of Carroll’s Alice is her constant challenging of the world around her, which is a significant departure from the moralizing works of his contemporaries.

Tess Lewis writes that “Fairy tales and children’s fiction did not emerge from the stifling hold of didacticism until the revolutionary amoralism of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books” (403), and Carole Rother notes that in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland “If rules are not acknowledged . . . they lose their power” (94). These are somewhat paradoxical statements on the order of a Zen koan: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is didactic because the lesson it teaches is to reject (or at the very least question) the moralizing of stories.

In addition to questioning the status quo, the qualities Carroll imbues Alice with are far from “proper.” Alice is rude (though unintentionally) as in the scene where she cannot stop talking about cats and dogs to the mice and birds. She becomes angry and frustrated and is not afraid to show it, as we see in the scene with the smoking caterpillar. Alice rejects her role as a caregiver; not particularly interested in caring for the Duchess’s baby/pig. Even when faced with unconscionable rudeness, she perseveres (when arriving at the mad tea party, she sits down despite the March Hare’s cries of “no room! No room!”)

In short, Alice is constantly beset with rudeness, contrariness and tangled logic, yet she perseveres. Carroll provides a space in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that allows children (and particularly female children) to explore an oppressive world and gives them an example of a hard-headed, rebellious young woman to look up to.

And then Walt Disney had to go and louse it up.

In her article “Home by Tea-Time: Fear of Imagination in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland” Deborah Ross discusses this extensively. Her main point is that though the original text was imaginative and liberating for young women, Disney strategically removed or rewrote important scenes, turning the text into a bland shadow of Carroll’s vision. The problem, Ross asserts, is that the “supposedly decorous original . . . is ‘anarchic’ or surrealistic – in its substitution of dream logic for waking logic” and “therefore even a faithful or ‘realistic’ rendering of Carroll’s prose will seem imaginative” (221). “The overall effect” she writes, “is to make Alice less a subject than an excuse for presenting images to the audience” (220).

The tendency of Walt Disney to gentrify texts to fit a somewhat conservative mindset (“conservative” in this case referring to extolling traditional family values) takes Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and makes it into a series of spectacle shots, with little or no connectedness in theme. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland it wouldn’t be uncommon to watch as Alice encountered a situation, jumped into the middle of it, was reprimanded, but persevered anyway (the mad tea party comes to mind, and so does the trial at the end). Disney’s Alice in Wonderland appears to have removed all the adventure from our heroine along with removing it from the title, and we have situations where “Alice” instead will encounter a situation, try to politely avoid it, become entrapped, and eventually run away (think of the white rabbit ordering her about to fetch his gloves).

Despite the failure of Disney to accurately translate the spirit of rebellion to the silver screen, this is still the image that most people associate with Alice. But the original Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was attempting to do so much more with itself, and fantasy stories of this type in general try to answer basic questions that we have about our lives.

Fantasy stories are, in that respect, not merely didactic tales for children. In her book Portals of Power Lori Campbell talks about the way fantasy stories, when well-written, act as testing grounds for children and adults to explore moral and social conundrums. Challenging and exploring concepts is a large part of fantasy stories “Because the writer can never completely detach from the Primary world . . . [The] Secondary cannot help but absorb the questions, relationships and troubles of that [Primary] world” ( Campbell 4).

There are two other quotes from Campbell that are particularly relevant to the topic of exploring abstract concepts through concrete fantasies. She says that

These ‘Other-worlds’ are generally accessed through the use of magical passageways or conveyances that allow exploration of the complexities of the secondary space, most often implied to be externalizations of the hero’s inner workings (6)

and she also argues that

In marking these “in-between” spaces, the portal connotes a myriad of power associations and imbalances, centralizing and making transparent the ways in which literary fantasy attacks real-world problems (6).

Campbell is arguing that the purpose of fantastical fiction is to explore complex real-world dynamics in the context of another world. This same logic can be applied to all literature; when a writer talks about a mythical doctor who can solve all ailments with his powerful brain yet suffers from a God complex and an addiction to pain medication, what the writer is really doing is setting up a fantasy world to explore power dynamics. Doctor Gregory House is merely the product of this exploration of the psyche, revealing to the audience certain truths about themselves or life in general.

Carroll, whether he realized it or not, was performing a very similar task. While on the surface he was mocking the establishment and creating a very anti-didactic tale of a small girl in a fantasy world, he was actually prompting his readers to use imagination. The purpose of fiction is to challenge our assumptions about life in general, to provide us with a framework that we constantly modify and adapt to our surroundings. Lewis Carroll does this throughout Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and his ability to write a “children’s book” that still appeals to adults. The question is not whether the book is really for children, or if “adult” fantasy can really be for kids; real fantasy literature is truly for all ages, because a good story can be told over and over without losing any of the flavor. The real question is:

How do we keep Disney from ruining it?

Moral Lesson

There is a certain irony in telling children to think for themselves. I suppose we should be grateful that we're exposed to irony early on, just so we're not surprised when it bites us in the ass later.

Brainstorming: Critical Essay

One of the larger topics we've discussed in class is if/how a work is didactic. What moral or practical lessons are presented? how do the stories reinforce the status quo or challenge it?

To write this piece, research on the time period of the literature would be necessary, as well as a comparison to how the moral/lesson is translated to film (successfully or unsuccessfully). In addition, the author's history would be instrumental in examining the moral lessons (or lack thereof) present in the text/film.

Major texts to draw from:

Alice in Wonderland
- victorian england
- dodgson/carroll as a schoolteacher
- satire used to teach critical thinking
- cartoon doesn't carry over the underlying message/the focus of the cartoon is not on satire

Peter Pan
- edwardian england
- role of women in society
- reinforces status quo
- film plays it straight; moral lesson carried over quite well

Narnia
- lewis as a christian
- text as didactic
- moral lesson carried over quite well

Did the Castle Move for You, Too?

Did the Castle Move for You, Too?

How does a writer (or a director, for that matter) choose what to reveal, and when? When a director adapts a book for the screen, this question can become the central focus, overshadowing and detracting form other aspects of the film. Slavish attention to plot and dialogue when adapting a movie can result in gibberish, the screen failing where the book succeeds. The reverse can also be true (though perhaps not according to literature majors, who seem insistent that “the book is better than the movie), especially when the original book is not particularly deep, or only explores one aspect of a theme or character. Adaptations, more than anything, make choices, and those choices define the film.

What kind of choices do directors make when adapting a book? Take “Howl’s Moving Castle,” for instance. It’s easy enough to summarize the plot: “A teenaged girl is transformed into an old woman by a wicked witch. Through a series of adventures and encounters, she falls in love with Howl and restores his heart, freeing both herself and him.” This seems simple enough, doesn’t it?

It is amazing how differently that plot can play out, depending on who’s directing it. Dianna Wynne Jones is a masterful writer, and manages to spend more than a hundred pages describing how Sophie (the teenaged girl) makes hats without it getting boring. This is important, because Jones is establishing her character; setting the scene, if you will. Hayao Myazaki (another master of his craft), on the other hand, spends far less time cramming all the detail he can into the first fifteen minutes of his film, establishing his characters visually instead of using a narrator or introductory text.

The choice that Jones made is a strength of her book; by the same token, the choice that Myazaki made is a strength of his movie. This is not to say that Myazaki could not have spent the first hour rehashing Sophie’s daily routine; the question becomes “Would it have been as effective?” Would the audience have cared more about Sophie? Perhaps not.

This brings up an argument about the different mediums that has a long and glorious lineage: can books do something that movies can’t? and its equal and opposite query: can movies do something that books cannot?

The answer, put simply, is “yes.” Movies cannot recreate the experience of reading a book; how long a person spends on a paragraph or page is a matter of personal choice; how they imagine a character, and whether this is accurate to the way the author is trying to portray said character is again, a matter of personal choice. Movies have the opposite problem: the pacing is at the discretion of the director, and every detail is set and immortalized on film. How a character looks and acts, what he or she sounds like, all of these are decisions made by the director and the audience is powerless to change this.

So we’ve established that certain things are unique to books and movies; what other things are not (perhaps) as clear cut? You can tell the audience in a book over the course of several pages what a character looks like, and still fall short on details. A director can spend a two second shot establishing the same physical characteristics.
The flipside of this is the inner monologue; a writer can spend a few minutes setting up an internal conflict, and a film director may need more than half the movie to set up the same conflict, or do it with a cheesy overdub of the internal thought process (thereby potentially breaking the illusion that we are watching true events as they happen).

This difference in medium is not a question of limitation; both films and movies can describe events and characters, setting and plot, as well as establish tone. Neither is particularly limited.

The difference comes down to what a book or a movie can do well, and what it can do quickly. A book can describe the emotions of a character quite well and clearly, quickly drawing analogs and unequivocally distinct images to portray the mental state of a character. Movies can establish a look, a scene, and a body language within seconds of the opening of a movie.

Both Jones and Myazaki play on the strengths of their medium, and the adaptation of the book to film comes with certain changes. Myazaki has reorganized plot, melded and molded characters together, drastically changed the ending, and yet has ended up with a successful adaptation.

The reorganization of the plot (including the editing down of certain passages) is evident from the very opening of the film. Instead of a long explanation of the kind of world we’re looking at, Myazaki establishes the moving castle (its mechanics and visual appearance), Sophie’s hardworking attitude, and her somewhat shy demeanor.

Jones’ method (spending a good chunk of the beginning of the book describing the magical land, the role of witches and wizards in it, and Sophie’s complicated relationship with her TWO sisters and her STEPmother) gives us a different feel for the place. The kingdom of Ingary is described well enough that the reader is comfortable in it; it seems like home. Jones spends her time wisely bringing us up to speed, using Sophie as the vehicle of our instruction.

Myazaki throws us in headfirst, not quite in medias res but never bothering to explain things. The visuals do the talking, and Myazaki walks us through a peaceful little European-style town, complete with trains and flower shops and quaint trolleys…and for some reason flying machines, soldiers, black blobmonsters and young men that can fly.

The time each artist spends establishing the world (and how they do it) makes for a quite different interpretation on the audience’s part. In the movie, we’re not given the background of Sophie’s sisters, and therefore cannot see her character from their eyes with quite the same detail that the book gives us. Our vision of cartoon-Sophie isn’t defined by other characters, we just watch what she does to get a sense of her character.

Speaking of character, the character set between the two pieces is fairly consistent, with some important differences. “Suliman” in the movie is a combination of two characters (Pentsemmon and Suliman) and ends up becoming the main antagonist. Ironically, Suliman and Prince Justin are also combined in the character of Turniphead, and the dog character is repurposed as a spy (in the book, Percival is an amalgam of leftover Suliman and Justin bits, transformed into a dog). Michael (renamed “Markl” for some obscene and obscure reason no doubt related to translation-decay) is now more like a child than a teenager, and certainly not pubescent enough to go romping through a bakery with Sophie’s sister like he was in the book.

All of these character changes also have a profound effect on the ending; the witch’s character is deflated by the end of the movie (in keeping with the book) but the main antagonist is not the demon that corrupted her. Instead it’s the character of Suliman (now a woman, though still Howl’s mentor) that provides the reason for Howl to change.

These changes are important, but the adaptation is both good and faithful. Bear with me; it gets better. Yes, a movie that drastically reworks the source material, leaving out giant plot points (did we forget to mention that Howl is really named Howell, and he comes from a mysterious place called “Wales”? Myazaki did) and smushing characters together like the Witch of the Waste’s blob men can still be faithful to the source material.

Myazaki achieves this by looking at the central theme of the book (or perhaps ONE central theme; there are sure to be as many “central” themes as there are readers), that of responsibility and honesty in love. Both pieces look at the character of Howl, and how he changes from a cowardly, reluctant miscreant into a heroic, honest and lovable person (well…at least he and Sophie realize they’re perfect for each other. The other stuff about heroic and honest and such may be wishful thinking). In any case, it tracks the evolution of two characters, Sophie and Howl, as they emerge into their true selves. Whether the main antagonist is Suliman and her machinations or the demon of the Witch of the Wastes, Howl still has to face his inner demons (both figurative and literal) in order to be truly free.

Despite the similarity of theme between the works, there are enough differences that it’s interesting to track them. Sometimes their effect of the work is small, and other times it completely changes the context and course of the plot.

Howl, for example, is really named “Howell Jenkins” in the book, and he is from Wales. Jones loves to play with tropes, and the subversion of tropes, and she pulls a fairly big one with this revelation. By describing things in her “fantasy” world as real and familiar to Sophie, Jones sets up an inverse reaction to what we’d expect: the “real” world of wales is now strange and unfamiliar, from Howl’s clothing to the dialect and “horseless carriage.” It is clear that we’re meant to feel at home in Ingary instead of Wales.

This makes the book a portal story in a classic sense, in that the portal actually leads to another world, our world. In the movie, the “black” door leads to somewhere else, though it’s certainly not our world or Wales. Myazaki made the decision to keep the portal confined to Ingary, removing quite a large subplot.

Another subplot that the book describes is the search for Prince Justin. His absence is sorely felt as the King prepares for war; in the book, the king is not quite the enthusiastic buffoon he is in the movie, but he still needs his brother for the impending military invasion. The friendship of Justin and Suliman (Suliman is also form Wales, by the way) sets up a domino effect that is treated like a loose end in the movie; turnip-head is suddenly Justin/Suliman when his curse is lifted, left to go do…something.

These changes are significant, even if they don’t affect the core theme the book and movie shares. The respective differences give a certain emphasis to the actions of characters in the pieces, and change the particulars of the relationships. Jones chose to make sure that most, if not all, of her characters found some sort of true love and togetherness as a family. Myazaki emphasizes the motley crew perspective on family, that you find people and stick with them, even if you’re not related.

Subplots aside, the book and the film fit in well with the other books and movies we’ve read in 312. The main character (or characters) are unsatisfied with their lives (Howl leaves Wales, Sophie leaves the hat shop) and find a portal to another kind of life. Magic, and things out of the ordinary, live beyond the portal. The main character is young, and grows as a result of the journey. The biggest contrast to the other films and books is that Sophie is already in the world, and once she crosses the threshold into Howl’s house she wants to stay.

The big difficulty with this adaptation is the sheer number of details and differences present. It is possible to write a book, if not many books, on the subject. It is always exciting to see a master of one craft interpret the work of another master; though it may not happen often, I look forward to the next time a Myazaki adapts a book by a Jones.

Team Awesome: ASSEMBLE!

I wish I could take credit for the idea of breaking the class into discussion groups for our presentation, but in reality it was a joint effort. Early on, we decided that the game-show format of presentations was a nice way to engage the class, but that we wanted to do something different. As the class progressed it became clear that at least part of the problem was the inability to ensure our classmates had watched the film; our group wanted to create an environment where our classmates could be comfortable answering questions and participating, even if only a few of them had watched the film. We debated for a long time how to do this.

All in all, my role in the group was pretty much limited to “organizer.” I e-mailed my group regularly to make sure everyone’s ideas were being shared, and we came up with our “areas of expertise” fairly quickly. This list changed after we decided on our group discussion format, and everyone’s topic was discussed beforehand to make sure we were comfortable with it.

The concrete things I did contribute to the group were the structure of the presentation and the role of Shinto in Spirited Away. The structure was actually the result of a collaborative brainstorm, but I do like to think writing it down for later study and e-mailing it to the group helped a bit. The role of Shinto in Spirited Away was my special contribution; if you don’t know what Shinto is, the movie makes less sense, and I like to think that the little tidbits I revealed helped the class understand the cultural background.

The Emperor's New...Emerald City?

There are a multitude of differences between the Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum, 1900) and The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939). What is kept and what is changed is interesting because it modifies the meaning and philosophy of the story. This is most evident in the differing resolutions between the two mediums.

The three most intriguing changes from the book to the movie are the climax/denouement, Dorothy’s reason for wanting to go home and the Wizard’s speech when he gives the cast their rewards. These changes make the movie significantly different from its source text.

If you look at the structure of the book, there is a series of events loosely connected by Dorothy’s quest to get home; for the most part, the adventures are short, self-contained and never mentioned again. For example, the stork carrying the Scarecrow across the river is incidental to the main quest to get to the Wizard of Oz, as is the incident with the Kalidahs. For all intents and purposes, there is no main villain, no great evil to fight against for the vast majority of the book. There is only the quest (and sub-quests) to get home.

Not so in the The Wizard of Oz; from the very start of the film we are introduced to the green-skinned harpy of the east, a screeching, cackling maniac hell-bent of sabotaging the ensemble before they ever get close to the Wizard. Unlike The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’s short, fat and eyepatch’d witch, the witch of the movie is immediately introduced and Dorothy set opposite her.

What does this do for the movie? Perhaps most clearly it gives the audience a concrete central conflict early on. Instead of a series of meandering, adventurettes, the movie can now flow smoothly from beginning to end without being constantly distracted by its own quirkiness. The resolution is also more satisfying, for the dual reasons that the tension has been building against the witch throughout the movie and the denouement does not go on for hours as it does in the book. In the end, the more coherent and cohesive movie (in the words of Salman Rushdie) actually improves on the book from a narrative point of view.

Taking another leaf from Salman Rushdie’s book, the premise that there is “no place like home” may seem odd at first glance. Rushdie’s logic is that the conservative homily at the end of a radically enabling piece is disingenuous, a definite contradiction to earlier explorations of self-reliance and solidarity. The Dorothy of the book says something that would have fit much better in the movie: “Take me home to Aunt Em!” In light of the crystal ball scene where Professor Marvell invents a tale of Aunt Em crying and the mirror scene in the Wicked Witch’s crystal ball, Dorothy’s need to see Aunt Em again has much more credence than some vague maxim on the value of home.

The wizard’s character has a slightly different problem; in the movie they call the white-haired old man a “humbug” and leave it at that. “Humbug” means a hoax or a jest; the famous line from Ebenezer Scrooge is his opinion of the Christmas season in general.

But in the book, the wizard takes it one step farther, and explicitly states to the audience that he has no power to give the companions anything they do not already possess. The distinction between the movie and the book is the Wizard’s reflection on this strange phenomena; in the movie he is quick to point out that professors have no more brains than the scarecrow, the lion has no less courage than a soldier, and the tin man has no less heart than a philanthropist. His gift-giving seems to satisfy some deep-seated need for recognition in all of them.

The book takes this one step farther. When the wizard is about to give the gifts, he reflects on this strange bit of magic, the only kind he really possesses: the Wizard has the ability to unlock people’s true potential. It is with a strange kind of wonder that he watches himself give them what they have always had, and what he says he himself is incapable of giving.

The more explicitly stated philosophy works slightly better in the book (though your mileage may vary), especially when one considers the strange and not entirely necessary strings of sub-plots. In the movie it takes a bit of a leap for the audience to come to the same conclusion, though that in itself isn’t an entirely terrible thing; it might actually be that the movie’s reveal of the inherent qualities of the 3 companions has a much stronger resonance because it’s subtle delivery.

Adaptations seem to do better when they’re not taken word-for-word from the text. The editing decisions for the Wizard of Oz were solid, rational ones. However, it’s important to consider how they change the nature of the characters, the philosophy and the plot when the transition from text to screen is made.

If I had one wish though, I’d use the ruby slippers to vanish Toto. I still can’t stand that furry pile of yap.