Adaptations

16

‘THOU ART TRANSLATED’

Analysing animated adaptation

Paul Wells

 

Recovering animated adaptations

Since the very beginnings of cinema, literature has provided an extraordinary range of source materials for film texts. Writing about this relationship has been fundamentally preoccupied with the ways in which ‘the word’ — something you read — becomes ‘the image’ — something you see — raising issues about the very nature and effect of ‘adaptation’ itself, as a narrative moves from the primacy of the literary text into the realms of the visual (see Aycock and Schoenecke 1988; Klein and Parker 1981; Peary and Shatzkin 1978; Sinyard 1986). Generally, many writers on adaptation either suggest that nothing can usurp the literary source, or merely evaluate ...