The Dream Child and the Wild Child: Adapting the Carnivalesque

Abstract

Historically, film adaptations of children’s texts have been heavily influenced by the dominant ‘Hollywood aesthetic’ of cinema. Chapter 3 focusses on four film adaptations that interrogate and/or offer alternatives to that aesthetic, through their adaptations of two ‘classic’ carnivalesque children’s texts: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Carroll, 1865 and 1872) and Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are, 1963). Both texts implicitly interrogate official culture in ways comparable to the traits of carnival identified by Mikhail Bakhtin. Both have been interpreted from a diverse range of critical perspectives and shaped ways of thinking about childhood as a relative state of disempowerment and empowerment. The focus film adaptations envisage the carnivalesque spaces of Wonderland and the Wild Thing’s island as dystopian heterocosms, and by drawing analogies between discourses of childhood and contemporary global politics these films raise questions about the possibility of alternative world orders. Further, their mixing of film styles and genres results in films that offer a cultural alternative to the hegemony of mainstream children’s film.