Children’s Books on the Big Screen by Meghann Meeusen (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Children’s Books on the Big Screen by Meghann Meeusen Melissa Lenos (bio) Meghann Meeusen. Children’s Books on the Big Screen. UP of Mississippi, 2020. Meeusen’s ambitious book explores the possibility of a nonevaluative theory of children’s and young adults’ adaptations, urging scholars and students away from comparing/contrasting adaptive texts, and more specifically against attempting to evaluate which text is “better” or “worse.” Instead, Meeusen considers the contextually necessary shifts made in adaptations, and where those modifications succeed and fail. Of those shifts, Meeusen is particularly interested in the increased polarization of binary imagery in adaptations of children’s and YA fiction. Literature may present subtle character growth, multilayered plot devices, and complex relationships that shift in dynamics and power—distinctions deployed through narrative tropes such as direct address, internal monologue, or point-of-view shift. These methods are more difficult to deploy in children’s and YA film. In light of this, we see a frequent dependency upon increased polarization; in lieu of the complexity and subtlety, filmmakers may instead default to distinct thematic binaries easily recognizable to young audiences. After dividing her chapters into useful, comprehensive sections, Meeusen finishes with a pedagogical guide for introducing her approaches at the undergraduate level. Meeusen’s book certainly contributes to the existing scholarship on children’s and young adult adaptations—especially since newer texts in the field generally focus only on a single juggernaut franchise (Harry Potter or Hunger Games), or only touch upon adaptation within broader explorations of children’s media. The Disney-focused The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (Henry A. Giroux and Grace Pollock) and From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture (Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells) remain influential and useful, and more recent analyses and critiques frequently riff on those cornerstones: Amy M. Davis’s Good Girls and Wicked Witches: Women in Disney’s Feature Animation, for example, as well as Johnson Cheu’s Diversity in Disney Films: Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality, and Disability. Attempting a more wide-ranging project, Meeusen argues for the establishment of a formal discourse around the study of children’s and YA adaptations at large: one that rejects “judgements that suggest a novel is simply better—more enjoyable, more meaningful, more complex, or more profound” (13). Certainly the rejection of reductive “quality” judgment is important—and frequently must be made explicit in an undergraduate classroom setting. [End Page 331] However, although the book’s wide range frequently adds to its worth, it also establishes some structural weakness in the text as a whole, as twenty-first-century subsets of children’s film and literature—in terms of age range and genre—vary so dramatically in content. Meeusen begins with a clarification of her use of “binary polarization” and gives a proposed rationale for shifts in adaptations, specifically through thematic amplification. Identifying trends in adaptation that may be read as “simplifying” (and thus, as is often argued in popular discourse, involving a reduction in quality), Meeusen demonstrates the necessity of this sort of ideological condensation through texts such as Coraline and The Tale of Despereaux. She cites a popular criticism that Coraline simplified the themes of the original text by over-emphasizing Coraline’s abduction by the “other mother” and the subsequent (physical, external) battles. Meeusen reinterprets this “simplification” as a thematic amplification necessary to the medium: Coraline’s internal struggles are difficult to represent visually in ways discernable and interesting to child audiences. By expanding the role of the “other mother” (and extending the visible battles with her), Selick develops a stand-in for the loss of the more introspective Coraline of Neil Gaiman’s original text. The third chapter explores similar shifts in young adult “female savior” texts. The inner turmoil, mental monologues, and complex machinations and motivations of Katniss, the protagonist of the Hunger Games franchise, are also replaced through amplification. The Katniss of Gary Ross and Francis Lawrence’s film adaptations (2012–15) is decisive, unrelenting, and calculating while Suzanne Collins’ original Katniss frequently struggles with her impossible options, questions herself and her own motivations, ponders the doubts she harbors...