Abstract
The long tradition of the re-versioning of picture books as animated movies continues as a significant dimension of contemporary popular culture. While school students frequently experience both book and movie versions, classroom work does not appear to give emphasis to the ways in which the affordances of the different media are deployed to construct different interpretive possibilities, even when the story versions are ostensibly very similar, and there is a tendency for younger students to elide such interpretive differences. This paper extends recent work using systemic functional linguistics and inter-image analyses of children’s picture books (Painter, Martin, & Unsworth, 2013) to compare two short segments of The Lost Thing (ruhemann & tan, 2010; tan, 2000) in the book and movie versions of the story. The comparative analysis is intended to indicate the accessibility of a metalanguage of multimodality derived from systemic functional semiotics as a pedagogic tool for multimodal literacy pedagogy.
Highlights
For many decades well-regarded literary picture books in English have been reproduced as animated films
More recent years have seen the frequent appearance of movie versions of established literary picture books as box office successes, highly celebrated within broad popular culture, as was the case, for example, with the recent movie of Where the Wild Things Are (Jonze, 2009), the movie of Fantastic Mr Fox (Anderson, 2009) from the picture book by Roald Dahl (1974), the movie of The Polar Express (Zemeckis, 2004)from the well-known picture book by Chris Van Allsburg (1985) and the movie Hugo (Scorsese, 2011) from the Caldecott medal-winning, illustrated story, The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (2007)
While literary studies of picture books have long celebrated the joint role of images and language in forming the interpretive possibilities of these works (Meek, 1988; Nodelman & Reimer, 2002), it is only within the last two decades, with the increasing inclusion of images in a range of different types of texts, and the relative ease of this with recent means of digital media production, that the necessity of re-thinking past monomodal views of literacy and literacy curriculum and pedagogy has brought new emphasis to the image/language interface in multimodal text comprehension and composition (Andrews, 2004; Dresang, 1999; Kamil, Intrator, & Kim, 2000; Kress, 2000; Luke, 2003; Russell, 2000)
Summary
For many decades well-regarded literary picture books in English have been reproduced as animated films. Research project (Macken-Horarik, Unsworth, & Love, 2011-2013), a girl in the fourth year of school was recently interviewed about work in English in her classroom She talked about the story of The Lost Thing, which involved the original picture book by Australian author Shaun Tan (Tan, 2000) and the animated movie (Ruhemann & Tan, 2010), which won an Oscar at the Academy Awards in the United States in 2011 for the best animated short film. The original picture book version of The Lost Thing (Tan, 2000) and the animated movie (Ruhemann & Tan, 2010) tell a humorous, and, notwithstanding assertions in the narration to the contrary, a profound story about a boy who discovers a bizarre-looking creature while out collecting bottle-tops at a beach. While there are many aspects of the two versions of The Lost Thing story that invite comparison and close analysis, in this paper space will permit discussion of only two short story segments: the first of these is where the boy has temporarily hidden the lost thing in the family shed and feeds it something that it likes to eat; the second is towards the end of the story when the boy and the lost thing part company as the lost thing enters a kind of sanctuary for similar bizarre creatures
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