fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2925 ]

[ SECRET POST #2925 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2925 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Yesterday's thread had me wondering...

When adapting a book/comic/game to a movie, there have to be some changes to accommodate the different media but how much is too much? Basically, if you're a fan, when can you "legitimately" complain without having the "different media" argument thrown back at you?

What adaptions did you think did a good job and why? What are your favorite adaptions and were they "faithful"?

Mary Poppins was notably not faithful to the book, but I love both book and movie. Not sure if that counts. I'm normally leery of adaptations; this is one of the exceptions.

The best adaptation in the world will forever be The Princess Bride.

For me, the cutoff is usually quality. If there are changes made, but the end product is very good, I am far more forgiving than any other time.

Oscar and Lucinda is one of the best adaptations I've ever encountered. I did see the movie before reading the book, but every time I compare them now, I'm impressed.

They did change some things, but for the most part it's in the interests of making it a more engaging movie experience-- one dropped subplot (and tbh, they picked exactly the right one to jettison for time/pacing), a couple composite characters, etc. As a book reader, you do get significantly more backstory for a few supporting characters, but it really makes a difference in the case of one of them (Miriam Chadwick).

And then there's the issue of the ending, which is slightly different. The book ending makes more sense with regards to the Victorian setting, but I love the movie ending for being more emotionally satisfying and can rationalize it in the Victorian context because Lucinda is a firebrand and doesn't care about social convention. It's really only Miriam's place in it all that gets a little fuzzy (and then, by extension, the narrator's).

Naoki Urasawa's Monster

The anime is basically a shot by shot recreation of the manga. Like seriously 99.99% of it is lifted straight from the original source.

I love the OST too so I consider it basically a perfect adaption.

Some people say it's too long or drags, but I don't agree. I binge watched it three times happily.

Enh, it's a tough call for me. Really, for me it comes down to the very personal taste of, are they keeping to the SPIRIT of the work?

I'm going to use as an example two different adaptions of Alice in Wonderland, both of which used similar inspirations and design aesthetic: Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland movie, and American McGee's Alice computer game. In my opinion, McGee's succeeded as an adaptation; Burton's did not. (Even though McGee outright admitted he was inspired by Burton's sense of design!)

In both of them, you have a darker, creepier Wonderland where Alice has grown up. They even have similar stories where Alice has to overthrow the Red Queen/Queen of Hearts, slay the Jabberwock, and get involved in a Wonderland resistance against the Queen's rule!

The thing was, for me anyway, was that Tim Burton didn't really keep with the core WEIRDNESS and nonsense that is part of the original story. His movie has some weird visuals, but it mostly becomes this kind of weird fantasy story that's trying to be epic but doesn't quite succeed. Strange as it sounds, the movie makes too much sense! People are trying to organize military strategy and rulers, and it just doesn't fit the zaniness.

McGee, on the other hand, takes the nonsense and non sequiturs of Wonderland and makes it into a metaphor for trauma and mental illness. It makes sense on a deeper emotional level, but on the surface logic level is total bullshit.

...wow, I never thought I'd find myself arguing that a story making too much sense was a bad thing.

*are they keeping to the SPIRIT of the work*

This is my criteria as well. Currently my favorite adapatation is Maeda's anime Gankutsuou (Count of Monte Cristo).

My favorite literal interpretation is Silence of the Lambs.

Yup. One of my favorite adaptations is Coraline; I liked the movie way better than the book!

Burton's suffered in that, IIRC, originally, it was meant to be an adaptation of McGee's, but they never secured the rights and thus had to change shit when it came down to the wire.

Oh my god, that makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE.

On the plus side, American McGee himself is now working to get the rights, and successfully Kickstarted a campaign to make a bunch of animated short films about Alice after the events of the two games.

What little has been put up looks really cool. My kid sister (a massive Alice fan) is over the moon about it, even though it probably won't be coming out for years.

My Sister's Keeper is a much better movie because they changed the ending. I also preferred the ending to The Watchmen movie.

The book ending to My Sister's Keeper sucked so hard. Like, what was even the point of the book?

I agree about the ending to the Watchmen film as well. I know a lot of people bitched about it, but lbr the comic ending just wouldn't have worked well on-screen

I know! It was like a shocking twist just to be shocking.

I just thought the giant squid ending was silly.

My favorite adaptation of something is probably the least faithful one ever. STALKER, the film by Andrei Tarkovsky, is based on the novel Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.

The film only resembles the actual events from the novel in passing, but remains the most thematically consistent adaptation of anything I have ever seen. It's plain to see that the mood and sentiment of the novel stuck home, but it is as if the director went on to tell a different story in the same world.

It's artsy as all get out, which isn't something I usually enjoy overmuch, but this is still one of my top 10 films of all time.

So, I don't know anything about STALKER or its book. But, from your comment, the movie is loosely based on the book. Would you then be sympathetic/understand if a fan of the book was disappointed in the adaption? If they wanted to see their book made into a movie and were given something else?

Like, I guess the heart of what I'm getting at is when a very loose adaption is made, doesn't it seem reasonable for book fans to be disappointed? (Might not be the case in your particular example.)

I understand when people are disappointed in an adaptation that shits all over the source material. Whether it's faithful to events and characters or not, I feel like often the most important thing for an adaptation to get right is the feeling that the original work gives you.

For that reason I think GoT is a good adaptation, even though it skips over a lot of material and adds its own stuff. I think STALKER is even better because it captures the emotional content of the novel so flawlessly.

My favorite adaptation is probably the Coen Brothers version of True Grit, which is exceptionally faithful to the book both in spirit and in details. But I also like adaptations that are a lot looser, like things that completely transpose genres for a work - like Repo Man and Big Lebowski as weird-ass adaptations of classic noir. Or John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars as a remake of Rio Bravo. God I love e John Carpenter.

I guess what's important to me is that you understand the spirit of the thing you're adapting and you do something interesting with it. Doesn't matter much whether or not you're faithful, to me. Of course it's ultimately probably better to be a good movie than a good adaptation.

I thought the Watchmen movie, although incomplete feeling, was a pretty damn good adaption of something that should have been impossible to put to film.

The Asterix movies are usually really good, even if they change things. Usually, it's just to add time. Also, the translations are really well done, given that half the jokes are puns that only work in French.

I think there are a couple things that are important to me: understanding the world of the thing you are adapting, and understanding the basic things the author was trying to get across.

And this is where I like the Hobbit adaptions for the most part and hate basically all Wizard of Oz adaptions. All of these change a whole lot. But I feel like the Hobbit understands Middle Earth and for the most part understands what Tolkien was about (even making it more action-oriented didn't bug me because I think it fits within the larger world). On the other hand, making it all a dream or making the witch the hero and bringing the new author's own pet messages like animal rights into things misses everything about the Oz books and just ruin things in my perspective.

Ugh don't get me started on Wizard of Oz adaptations. I think the only "faithful" one was the 1980s/90s Japanese television show that aired on HBO when I was kid. I think there was also a Japanese musical animated movie that was dubbed in English that was also more accurate to the book, but ugh Oz the Great and Powerful and Wicked are not my cup of tea since I love the books so much.

I like the MGM movie but only because it's a classic movie but I take the book and movie to be very separate things.

...But the animal rights thing wasn't literally about animals, but a huge metaphor for racism. We saw it with Elphaba and the munchkins, too. If you weren't like Glinda, you were discriminated against.

As well, Wicked wasn't about literally making the witch the hero, it was about how perspectives alter things and that behind every villain there's a story in itself. how she became the wicked witch was a story in itself, and I found Wicked interesting in that sense. It showed Dorothy as a little girl caught up in something she didn't understand fully. you know, like she actually was.

Okay, but the point still remains. Taking someone else's world and completely changing it in order to get your pet message across still makes for a bad adaption. In the Oz book, there was no hint of that racism against animals. It was added into Wicked.

I'm all for giving villains a background and making them more complex, but not if you change the setting and the way things work in that world in the process. It is totally possible to give a villain a backstory without doing that. And I personally have a big problem with published authors taking that much liberty with someone else's world and characters.

I love Ella Enchanted. The movie had huge differences from the book, but I think it worked out better in the end (it was certainly more entertaining).

Takes all sorts, I HATED the movie! I felt like it completely missed the spirit of the book, Ella wasn't half as clever or spunky, I didn't buy the romance at all where it convinced me completely in the book. I realize it's a little tricky to convey several chapters of correspondence by letter in a movie, or a climax entirely in the heroine's mind, but I felt like they could have done it better.

I guess it mostly gave me the impression that they'd adapted the book purely as a gimmick--the obedience thing--but didn't much care about the actual book.

I like adaptations that are extremely faithful, but I also like adaptations that that undercut the original in some way (like Taymor's Titus Andronichus adaptation or Baz Luhrman's Romeo and Juliet or Clueless's adaptation of Emma). I find changing the setting or time period realllllly interesting sometimes. I desperately want to see the Helen Mirren version of The Tempest where she's Prospero instead of Prospero being a dude.

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[ SECRET POST #2925 ]

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