Children's Books on the Big Screen by Meghann Meeusen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Children's Books on the Big Screen by Meghann Meeusen Dina Schiff Massachi (bio) Children's Books on the Big Screen. By Meghann Meeusen. University Press of Mississippi, 2020. It is natural for critics, scholars, and the general public to compare a film adaptation to its source text. Previous adaptation studies scholarship tends toward a hierarchical or fidelity-based approach, leading to the conclusion that an adaptation is bad "because it misses the main point, the most important meaning … or the essence of the original text" (7). In Children's Books on the Big Screen, Meghann Meeusen offers a new way to examine adaptations. She notes that many of the changes from book to film relate to how filmmakers polarize binaries in a way that affects the ideologies within the text. Through the trend of binary polarization, Meeusen's readers are able to move beyond a fidelity-based approach and explore the belief sys tems affected by the amplified polarizing of binaries. The first of Meeusen's six chapters provides readers with the necessary background to understand adaptation studies and binaries. The author mentions Perry Nodelman, George Bluestone, Linda Costanzo Cahir, Jacques Derrida, Ian Wojcik-Andrews, Thomas Leitch, and many others to make her point. This chapter also introduces Meeusen's thesis on binary polarization in films that adapt pieces of children's literature and how this affects the message within the adaptation. The second chapter expands upon many of the first chapter points. Meeusen explains that one reason readers find a lack of fidelity within adaptations is because films tend to apply one theme or message while books often have several, causing some readers to feel that the filmmaker amplified the wrong message. To illustrate her point, Meeusen applies her theory to Coraline and the heightened binaries of adult/child, real/other, and good/evil; The Tale of Despereaux and the amplification of good/evil, dark/light, and forgiveness/betrayal; and How to Train Your Dragon, which Meeusen suggests amplifies not only good/evil and autonomy/dependance, but also self/other, which has some problematic implications. Each example demonstrates how the medium of film loses the middle-ground that readers can find in the book counterparts. Meeusen's third chapter follows a trend with films adapted from young adult literature: polarized male/female binaries that recreate unequal power [End Page 102] structures. Meeusen uses Warm Bodies, The 5th Wave, The Hunger Games, Paper Towns, and The Spectacular Now to explore female characters as the emotional and spiritual saviors of their male counterparts within their film adaptations. Meeusen adds to her thesis by layering in Mike Cadden's discussion of single- and double-voiced discourse and Laura Mulvey's theory of male gaze to show how problematic this amplification can be for a teen viewer. Chapter four continues this examination of problematic power structures when Meeusen explores how shifting from children's literature to a family film creates unequal power structures. The author uses The Lorax, Jumanji, and Where the Wild Things Are to demonstrate how the amplification of the adult/child binary leads to adults being more central to the story and leads to the child characters teaching lessons to adults. Like the female saviors in chapter three, children in the film versions of these stories bear the responsibility to enact social change. The fifth chapter takes Meeusen's thesis in a slightly different direction. Meeusen uses Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the films The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Wiz (1978), The Muppets' Wizard of Oz (2005), Disney's Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), the musical Wicked (2003), and the television remake The Wiz Live! (2015) to explore what happens when an adaptation is adapted. Meeusen posits that, "each time a new movie is made from a source text that is repeatedly adapted, there is more tension between ideas in the film itself—more conflict between the ideologies within the new movie" (113). She terms this phenomenon "adaptive dissonance." Meeusen illustrates adaptive dissonance within the various Oz adaptations by highlighting the tension in the 1939 film between the concept of longing (found within "Somewhere Over the Rainbow") and the concept of home, in...