The Wonder in Adaptations of Little Known Works
If someone were to mention the words “adaptation of books to film” your mind might automatically go to thinking of things like Harry Potter, Twilight, or The Hunger Games. All well known books that have been adapted into extremely popular movie series. But what if I were to tell you that a lot of other books and works were adapted into films too. Take the Shrek movie series. Not many people would be aware of this but Shrek is actually based on a book of the same name written in 1990 by the author William Steig. Now, Shrek, the book and Shrek, the movie, have some minor similarities to each other, but, are vastly different. Yet the movies have garnered overwhelming fame and attention. Something similar happened with the How to Train Your Dragon franchise. The original How To Train Your Dragon book series was written by a woman named Cressids Cowell but didn’t have anywhere near the kind of cult following of more classic works until being adapted into films with a new story line.
Now, both the How To Train Your Dragon and Shrek films have plots that are extremely different from the books they were spawned from but that actually lends to their favor. Instead of trying to faithfully stick to the plots of their books these two movies put a fresh and interesting twist into the plots of the materials they were based on. While some people would scoff at the idea of a film adapted from a book trying to make its own original story instead of staying faithful to the text, the films actually manage to be more popular because they don’t try to bind themselves too closely to the text they were based on.
While looking up information on adapting books to film one of the tips that I found was to not try to just show the book onscreen or not to stick too much to the plot of the book because at the end of the day books and movies are two completely different formats and because of things like time limits and budgets, movies can’t properly adapt the works of books to the silver screen. Works like Shrek manage to go beyond even that. They take bits and pieces of the books they’re adapted from and use them to craft plots and ideas far beyond what their creators might have. The adaptations are their own stories that manage to be interesting, compelling, and able to capture people’s attention.
When trying to adapt a piece of media to another format, it sometimes seems like only a few fully understand the opportunities. Just recreating a story for a visual medium is fine but by being creative and not allowing themselves to be bound by sticking to the previously told story, the makers of the new adaptation can create something uniquely theirs. I hope that as Hollywood continues to churn out adaptations the idea of creating original takes on unknown works becomes more prevalent.
