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- Fall Movies
- Sep 10:
- Fall Movie Preview: Dancers, a frog, werewolves and the Apocalypse
It's common for the fall movie season, loaded as it is with prestige pictures seeking Oscar glory, to hit the bookshelves -- and this fall gives us adaptations of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Walter Kirn's Up in the Air, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight sequel New Moon and Darren Shan's Cirque du Freak series.
| Movie Cricket blog
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"They're timeless," said Robyn Green, children's-book selector for the Salt Lake City Public Library system. "They'll attract the parents, who want to share these experiences with their children."
Between now and Thanksgiving, four major adaptations of much-beloved children's books are hitting theaters:
"Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" » Judi and Ron Barnett's 1982 picture book about an imaginary land of Chewandswallow, where food rains down on the population -- being turned into
"Where the Wild Things Are" » Maurice Sendak's 1963 classic picture story of Max, a naughty boy who magically travels to a land of wild things, adapted into live action by director Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich"). (Oct. 16)
"A Christmas Carol" » The oft-filmed Charles Dickens tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, this time computer-animated by Robert Zemeckis ("The Polar Express," "Beowulf") with Jim Carrey donning a motion-capture suit to portray Scrooge and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. (Nov. 6)
"Fantastic Mr. Fox" » Roald Dahl's 1970 chapter book about a resourceful fox outsmarting three nearby farmers, adapted in stop-motion animation by director Wes Anderson ("The Royal Tenenbaums"), with a voice cast led by George Clooney and Meryl Streep as Mr. and Mrs. Fox. (Nov. 13)
Adapting these books presents a different challenge than most book-to-movie adaptations. "It's the big stretch," said Margaret Brennan Neville, children's-book buyer for The King's English bookstore.
Most book-to-movie adaptations are all about paring away pages to keep the running time around two hours (think about how much gets cut in a "Harry Potter" movie). Two of the children's books listed above -- Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and Where the Wild Things Are -- are more picture than text, with only a few dozen pages.
On the one hand, that means writers have had to come up with additional material. On the other hand, the books become instant storyboards, providing visuals that the filmmakers have to get right. "We're curious how they're going to flesh them out," Green said.
And whether the movies work artistically or not, Brennan Neville said readers can always go back to the source material.
"The movies are so different," Brennan Neville said, "that the book continues to live on its own."
