Book is God

Recently some friends and I got in a heated debate over the necessity, quality and ethics of turning books into films. The trigger for the conversation was the trailer for the upcoming film adaptation for the children's picture book Where the Wild Things Are which I had seen in the theater with these friends before our viewing of Ponyo. At the time, I was immediately struck by the natural beauty of the trailer, the realistic yet fantastic look of the creatures, and the overall earthy feel to the production. What I didn't know until last night was that the friends I was with had an overall negative view of production.

These friends are of the "Book is God" school of thought - any adaptation of an author's work taints the story unless it's 100 percent faithful. Movie adaptations are a scheme to make money on the coattails of an author's well-known or beloved book unless they're a direct translation of the book to the screen. Authorial intent is the alpha and the omega.

Another friend of mine who was present for this debate is somewhere on the opposite end of the spectrum. She was an English and Cultural Studies major and has an avid interest in things like fan fiction and vidding, activities which, by their nature, use an original work as a jumping-off point to explore other aspects of the text. Authorial intent isn't important in this school of thought, because it's more about what the reader gets out of the text.

I'm somewhere in the middle.

Truth be told, I was originally on the more conservative side of the argument. When I first learned about fanfiction, my gut reaction was to make statements like "why don't fanfiction authors put their talent towards creating their own characters and worlds instead of just using someone else's?" That, of course, is a statement that ignores the human tendency to see something and be inspired and to connect on some level with fictional characters, which, spoken from personal experience, can be a very strong desire if the characters are developed well. I have since embraced the fannish side of things a little bit more, and while I'm not big on reading fanfiction, I've done my share of fan art and daydreaming and feel like I understand the desire to want to expand on an existing fiction, to "read between the lines" as my friend put it.

As an extension of that, I don't see any inherent problems in translation a text from one medium to another. A good book might be competently translated into a good movie, or graphic novel, or even a game. Each medium has its own strengths and weaknesses, and a knowledgeable creative mind who is sensitive to those strengths and weaknesses can formulate the story into something that will shine. That doesn't mean that every attempt will be good - I'm sure we all have examples of a favorite book turned into a mediocre movie, or perhaps a TV show from our childhood incompetently reversioned to try and reap a few dollars from nostalgia, while losing the spirit of what made the original entertaining. In my opinion, though, the very act of wanting to bring a favorite story to a new audience isn't in itself a crime, or even a misguided action.

Of course, the question that my friends repeatedly asked of us was "why?" Why even bother "reading between the lines," finding alternate meanings in an author's work? Why not just explore those meanings in a completely original context?

Before I get into attempting to answer that question (which is a very difficult one), I should probably mention why I'm even bringing this up here, on my anime blog, rather than on my personal journal. The reason is that all of us, including these skeptical friends of ours, are anime fans. We're fans of a medium that draws probably 95% of its output from other sources, be it manga, light novels, tabletop games, visual novels, eroge... heck, there's even a currently-running anime based on a popular line of pachinko games. And not all series that are based on other media are good just because of their source material - there are some anime that, for whatever reasons, outshine the manga on which they are based. Nodame Cantabile, while based on a manga that's very good, really feels complete once music is added (and in addtion to that, there's an also-great live-action version - there's a slightly different focus but it's still wonderful and worth seeing as a companion to the manga and anime). Revolutionary Girl Utena is an anime with so much more depth and richness that the manga pales in comparison. I've heard anectdotally that the anime versions of Ouran Host Club and S-cry-ed are much better than their respective mangas (I've only seen the anime versions of these two series). And we don't speak of the Le Chevalier d'Eon manga (even though the anime and manga are actually both based on a book).

In any case, anime is a medium populated almost entirely by "ripped-off" ideas, and yet amongst the cheaply-produced crud that's created solely to make money off of established properties, there are still creators who can take from those established properties the elements that work. In turn producing wonderful, enthralling examples of animation based on those elements, retaining the spirit of the originals while working with the strengths of an alternate medium and perhaps drawing out alternate interpretations of the source text that might engage a new audience.

Again, though, the million-dollar question is "why bother?" That's extremely difficult to answer, because when I think about it, it's something that I just know. I feel like I just innately understand the urge to reinterpret an author's work and why there's value in that act, but it's not easy to put into words. Sometimes it's honestly just to make money, and in those cases I'm really not interested. But that's not always the case. For example, why keep making Batman movies? Sure, if no one had bothered to "rip off" the Batman comic book franchise, there never would have been a tragedy like Batman and Robin (which obviously was trying to cash in on name recognition without trying to be sensitive to the things that make Batman entertaining). But we also would never have had triumphs like Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, arguably two of the best comic-book translations to film ever made. I think the existence of the latter two answer that tough question by their very existence.

An example that we actually discussed were the Lord of the Rings films, entities that our friends openly admitted to picking apart after viewing. Having read the books in middle school first and gotten a good feel for them, I also loved the movies. Why? To put it bluntly, Tolkien was an incredible world-builder, but his writing wasn't very good. The novels are difficult to understand, are rife with minutiae (that, while awesome in the context of a history book or encyclopedia, are TMI when sprinkled liberally into a story), aren't written in a way that clearly represents the passage of time and what things are happening when, and they end with an anti-climactic confrontation (when the hobbits return to the shire and Saruman has busted it up) that stands as just one example of how the pacing is weird and unnatural. And yet the film adaptation takes all these things and streamlines them, keeping the important details, leaving references to others for those who are looking, and creating a motion picture trilogy that feels like the best parts of the original while still being accessible to people who would never in their lives pick up and read a 1200 page tome. Leaving out Tom Bombadil or any number of the countless songs and poems Tolkien included in his original text are nitpicky complaints that represent a keen misunderstanding of what the most inspiring and beautiful parts of that story are - the multiple tales of people overcoming nearly impossible odds to accomplish great deeds of heroism. Or, at least, that's what I love about it - if you're into memorizing small details, piecing together chronology and poring over poems and songs, I apologize for your loss.

Finally, to put it simply, I would ask my own question. Assuming book-to-film and other adaptations are going to happen either way, why bother making the film a direct copy of the book? I've already read the book, so then why waste my time with the movie? The first two Harry Potter films were slavishly faithful to the books, whereas the most recent film left out a lot of items - yet the most recent film is probably what I would consider the best, or at least my favorite in the franchise. It had a lot of humor that, unexpectedly, just worked, and yet retained the gravity of the important scenes. As long as both versions work, why sweat the small things? How about just enjoying each version for what it is, and not immediately assuming the worst .

When I see the trailer for the film version of Where the Wild Things Are, I don't get that vibe of someone trying to cash in by making a cheap and quick version of a story beloved by so many people. I see an artist who probably read the book as a youngster and kept that with him through these years, his imagination running wild and expanding that world into a more complex narrative. Even if that scenario isn't quite true (and I may very well be applying some wishful-thinking to the situation), the trailer looks gorgeous and blends a sense of earthiness with that of childlike wonder, and, at least at this moment, I'm anticipating seeing more.