Children’s Meta-adaptation

This chapter concludes the book by identifying a subset of film adaptations of children’s metafictions that function as meta-adaptations. Although scholarly work on meta-adaptation is still emergent, it is clear that children’s genres already engage this mode. The chapter argues that while ‘metafilm’ is a problematic ‘equivalence’ for metafiction, meta-adaptation lifts the curtain on the otherwise-hidden processes of adaptation itself. The chapter presents the phrase ‘breaking the fifth wall’ for meta-adaptation. The chapter provides case studies of two book to film adaptations to illustrate two different but prominent types of meta-adaptation: The Invention of Hugo Cabret/Hugo, and the novel series A Series of Unfortunate Events and both the novels’ film adaptation and Netflix series (season 1).

Epilogue

This study ends where it began, with the particularities of the children’s context when it comes to considering metafiction, transmediation of meta-fiction to children’s film, and adaptation itself. The important role of metafiction in children’s reading is central to an understanding of the particular pressures brought to bear on its adaptation, particularly to other (screen) media....

Children’s Metafilm

This chapter shifts attention to examples and techniques of children’s metafilm, to show how the ‘meta’ level works on film and the many techniques such films effectively employ for youth audiences. This chapter describes major types of children’s metafilms and a ‘grammar’ of select self-reflexive devices to generate metalepsis, using examples both from adaptations and otherwise. This chapter discusses metafilm as both medium-specific equivalence of metafiction, and as a paradoxical equivalence as it replaces the medium in the mirror for another. The chapter concludes with a close comparative study of Inkheart and of The Spiderwick Chronicles focusing on both narratives’ character development from reader to author in the source texts and how this is represented in their metafilmic adaptations.

Children’s Metafiction: Texts and Contexts

As ‘children’s metafiction’ is the source text genre for adaptations under consideration, this chapter seeks to analyse it closely in order to suggest how it presents unique challenges to intermedial adaptation. The chapter is organized around the ‘what,’ ‘how,’ and ‘why’ of children’s metafiction to determine what metafiction purports to be and to do for young readers. It presents the theory and criticism of metafiction specifically as they both apply to and are frustrated by the special conditions of children’s metafiction. It presents the paradox of children’s metafiction which requires a sophisticated and complex reading from emerging and young readers. It examines the phenomenon of a recent rise in volume of children’s metafictions and what that confirms about metafiction’s role in fostering literate readers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Introduction

Two important questions dominate adaptation studies: ‘How has a given adaptation rewritten its sourcetext? Why has it chosen to select and rewrite the sourcetext as it has?’ (Leitch 2007: 332). Examining those questions with respect to screen adaptations of children’s metafictions reveals a highly charged and unique intersection of three fields: children’s literature, specifically metafiction (self-reflexive fiction); children’s film; and transmedial adaptation of meta-referential works....

Through the Looking Glass: Children’s Books on Screen

This chapter focuses on children’s films that depict ‘bookishness,’ both in adaptation and otherwise, to develop a ‘grammar’ of film techniques for doing so (as shown in mise en scène, editing, cinematography). This chapter uses many examples to illustrate that children’s film effectively employs a wide range of techniques for showing ‘bookish’ plots, characters, setting, themes, and symbols. These techniques are fruitfully employed in film adaptations of metafictions at the story level. Techniques discussed include title cards, intertitles, and subtitles; opening (with) the book; voicing the narrator; thematised readers and writers; embedding the book’s story; the lap dissolve; shifts from still to moving image; and metaphors for metalepsis (windows and mirrors). The chapter further discusses ekphrasis and shows how the interpretant functions. The chapter presents a case study on Harry Potter books 2 and 6, and their film adaptations: The Chamber of Secrets, and The Half-Blood Prince.

Issues in Adapting Children’s Metafiction to Film

This chapter defines and discusses the genre of children’s film, situating the genre within its plural contexts, many of which are shared with children’s literature (dual audience, paradoxes between actual children and the child constructed by the work, anxiety about what youth view, visual literacy and ‘new’ media, and for adaptations, their pedagogical value in teaching literary source texts). The remainder of the chapter focuses on adaptation issues specific to children’s metafiction in screen adaptation, such as fidelity expectations, the paradox of medium-specific equivalence in this case, and the issue of intermedial tensions. The chapter introduces the idea of an ‘interpretant’ (from Michael Riffaterre) for reading the particular stance of these films as adaptations with respect to their source text and to the medium of literature. The ‘interpretant’ is an expression of the adaptation’s ideology – its governing principles and priorities in adapting the metafictional source.