Filming the Children's Book: Adapting Metafiction 9781474413572

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Filming the Children’s Book

Filming the Children’s Book Adapting Metafiction

Casie E. Hermansson

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Casie E. Hermansson, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun—Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Ehrhardt MT Pro by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 1356 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1357 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1358 9 (epub) The right of Casie E. Hermansson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

List of Figuresvi Glossary of Termsix Acknowledgmentsxiii Introduction1 1. Children’s Metafiction: Texts and Contexts 16 2. Issues in Adapting Children’s Metafiction to Film 50 3. Through the Looking Glass: Children’s Books on Screen 76 4. Children’s Metafilm 124 5. Children’s Meta-adaptation 152 Epilogue178 Works Cited182 Index200

Figures

  3.1

Filmic title cards (Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events)79   3.2 Typed dedication (Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events)79   3.3 Literary chapter divisions in film (Hunt for the Wilderpeople)80   3.4 Sunny’s speech in subtitles (Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events)81   3.5 The book (Fantastic Mr. Fox)82   3.6 and 3.7 Two shots as Meggie reads The Wizard of Oz (Inkheart)85   3.8 and 3.9 Two shots as the writer types the story (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events)86 3.10 and 3.11 Two shots as the reader reacts (The Spiderwick Chronicles)86 3.12 Bastian cries at Artax’s death (The Neverending Story)87 3.13 Bastian shouts at the revelation of Morla (The Neverending Story)87 3.14 Bastian is exhausted by Atreyu’s adventures (The Neverending Story)87 3.15 Light from Tom Riddle’s diary (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets)88 3.16 Lap dissolve from reader to book (The Princess Bride)90 3.17 Lap dissolve from reader to book (Inkheart)  90 3.18 Lap dissolve from reader to book (The Spiderwick Chronicles)91 3.19 Pan right to ‘meet’ the author (The Spiderwick Chronicles)91 3.20 Mo’s metaleptic magic as ‘double vision’ (Inkheart)92 3.21 and 3.22 Two shots from film still . . . to film (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events)93

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3.23 and 3.24 Two shots from film still . . . to book (The Secret of Moonacre)93 3.25 Gaston can’t make books work (Beauty and the Beast)95 3.26 The Beast remembers how to read (Beauty and the Beast)96 3.27 Bookstore behaviors in Flourish and Blotts (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets)97 3.28 Jonas meets The Giver, and books (The Giver)100 3.29 Attack on Beast’s books (Beauty and the Beast)101 3.30 The book pyre (Inkheart)101 3.31 Ella’s book (Ella Enchanted)102 3.32 Framing the family idyll (Inkheart)104 3.33 Harry’s point of view (POV) (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets)  108 3.34 Reading as Harry (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets)  108 3.35 The second book in Ginny’s cauldron (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets)112 3.36 Harry’s POV—with prescription lenses (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)  116 3.37 Sectum[p]sempra, ‘For Enemies’ (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)117 3.38 Ginny removes the book (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)118   4.1 The mic boom in the shot from ‘Bolt’ in Bolt (Bolt)129   4.2 The clapper board from ‘Bolt’ in Bolt (Bolt)129   4.3 The Jackalope overleaps the ‘camera’ (Boundin’)133   4.4 Sunlight hits the ‘lens’ (Bolt)133   4.5 An interior ‘bird’s-eye view’ inside the Hall of Records (Ella Enchanted)134   4.6 Simultaneous close-up and long shot (Tale of Despereaux)134   4.7 The nursery ceiling transforms (Peter Pan)135  4.8 Hunt for the Wilderpeople references The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) as Ricky and Hec hide from Special Forces (Hunt for the Wilderpeople)136   4.9 Bastian and Atreyu see each other through the ‘mirror’ (The Neverending Story)138

viii 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13   5.1   5.2   5.3   5.4   5.5

filming t he chil dr e n ’s b o o k Meggie writes on her arm (Inkheart)145 Jared can read but can’t see (The Spiderwick Chronicles)148 Jared gets the sight with the Seeing Stone (The Spiderwick Chronicles)149 End credits through the lens (The Spiderwick Chronicles)150 Metafiction (also about film) becomes metafilm (also about literature) 155 Isabelle and books (Hugo)160 ‘This is Not the Film We are Watching’ (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events)168 Klaus angles the lens (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events)170 The narrator teaches film (Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events)173

Glossary of Terms

Diegesis  Story, or of the story. A ‘diegetic’ narrator would be one visible on the screen, while a non-diegetic narrator would not share the screen space with characters but may speak to the viewer in voiceover for example. Extra-diegetic is ‘outside the story,’ such as the real viewer of a film. Discourse The distinction between story (what is told) and discourse (how it is told) is germane to the discussion of transmediation of a story from one medium to another. While the story is more easily ‘translated,’ the discourse of one medium (such as literature) is not as easily translated to another medium. That feature is significant in the context of media that reflect or refer to their own discourse, or discursive practices. Ekphrasis  The practice of including one artwork within another, such as describing a painting in poem. As ekphrasis has traditionally been applied to an art work described in literature, ‘reverse’ ekphrasis is the term sometimes used when literature appears in another art form, such as showing a book on a film screen. Ekphrasis may occur within an adaptation but is not necessarily present even when one medium is adapted to another. Ekphrasis presupposes that the medium of the quoted form is held up to view in some way. (See Clüver 2017 and Király 2013.) Equivalence  The ability of one work to arrive at a similar outcome as another but using other means. In adapting a work from one medium to another, equivalence would refer to the way in which a specific literary symbol in a novel, for example, may be translated by different means in a film adaptation based on that novel. Equivalence is necessary for adaptation to function, but cases such as when one medium references itself pose a challenge to adapt. (See also medium-specificity.) Fidelity (faithfulness)  A critical approach that takes as its starting point a comparison between an adaptation and its source(s). This starting point is comparative stylistics and fidelity criticism is thus intertextual in nature. Historically, the results of that comparison were then used to evaluate the success or failure of an adaptation: if the adaptation remained close (faithful) to the source, it succeeded more so than if it did not. Fidelity has incurred decades of scrutiny, questioning how

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any work in one medium can be faithful to any work in another; how anyone can decide what elements of the source work an adaptation should adhere to in order to be faithful to it (‘faithful to the spirit’), and why the prior and often literary work should be the standard by which the adaptation (made secondary by the source-adaptation model) is measured. ‘Creative infidelity’ is one of many alternative approaches posited (see Kranz and Mellerski 2008). Contemporary fidelity studies aim to transcend these pitfalls by being aware of them, and critics who use fidelity approaches in this way often include a brief position statement in their work to situate their rationale and use of the fidelity approach. Fidelity persists as one necessary element to all adaptation discussions (comparative stylistics); and as a useful pedagogical tool. Fidelity is common in reception studies (looking at reader response, spectatorship, fan studies) where it ‘matters to the viewer’ (Geraghty 2008: 2), and in discussions around how to evaluate adaptations. (See Hermansson 2015.) Intermedial  Between media. (See also intramedial, and transmedial). Interpretant  A term from semiotics referring to the relationship between the sign and the referent, or here between an adaptation and a source work. Here, the interpretant is the means by which we can establish the adaptation’s stance or position on aspects of the source which guides the filmmakers’ choices. (See Riffaterre 1979, 1985.) Intertextuality  The study of any two or more ‘texts’ and the relationships between them. ‘Texts’ is defined very broadly. A text can be a work in any medium (a radio show, a film), and may not refer to artifacts at all—but ­historical events, for example. Adaptation is inherently intertextual. Intramedial  Within the medium. (See also intermedial, and transmedial.) Kunstlerroman This German word refers to a novel (roman) depicting the development of an artist (kunstler). It is a specific type of the more general bildungsroman, or novel of a character’s development. Medium-specificity  Each medium (literature, film, videogame, radio) has features unique to it, even when they can be used to similar effect. Medium-specificity tacitly requires a critic to be familiar with the unique features of a medium, its strengths and weaknesses (or its ‘affordances’), and how to begin to interpret choices made in and for that medium, in order to avoid criticizing an apple for its failure to approximate an orange (to use Desmond and Hawkes’ analogy, 2006) or a ballet for its failure to be architecture (to use George Bluestone’s, [1957], 2003). Metafiction  Self-reflexive fiction. There are a range of ways in which narrative can show its self-awareness. Called ‘the mirror in the text’

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by Lucien Dällenbach ([1977], 1989), metafiction holds the usuallytransparent devices of narrative up for the viewer to see. Narrators who call attention to the fact they are telling a story, texts which refer to themselves as constructs with chapters and characters who are not real people, direct address to the reader, all are examples of metafiction. Gérard Genette ([1972], 1980) developed an extensive taxonomy of possibilities. Metafiction is one form of meta-reference. (See also Hutcheon [1980] 1984.) Metafilm This shares the same umbrella notion with metafiction—it refers to self-reflexive film or other screen media. Common examples include breaking the fourth wall (speaking directly to the viewer through the camera), showing a character making or watching a film, or drawing attention to the construction of a shot. Metafilm is one form of meta-reference. Metalepsis  The crossing of thresholds between hierarchical levels in a literary or filmic work. Levels are created with frames and embedding devices. Metalepsis refers to movement in either direction, ‘ascending’ or ‘descending.’ (See also mise en abyme.) Mise en abyme  The literal translation of this French phrase is: ‘placed in the abyss,’ but it refers to ‘embedding.’ A story within a story can be said to be en abyme. Embedding creates different layers or hierarchical levels of story. Mise en scène  The literal translation of this French phrase is ‘placed in the scene.’ It refers to anything in front of the camera while the camera is filming (lighting, actors, sets, props, and sound that would be picked up by the camera in that scene—diegetic sound). Paratext  Contexts for a given work, including material provided within a book (peritexts), such as front matter, covers, editorial information, and so on, and material outside the work (epitexts) such as reviews, or film trailers, or interviews. (See also peritext.) Peritext A subset of paratexts: these include features within the published work only, and do not include material outside the work (epitexts). In literary works peritexts may include covers, end papers, and so on, while a film’s peritexts would include opening and closing credits for example. (See also paratext.) Sourcetext  The source for an adaptation. As with ‘text’ in the definition of ‘intertextuality,’ so too ‘text’ here is broadly defined and may refer to non-textual works (such as films). A ‘sourcetext’ may be more than one work, such as a series, or a body of work. Thematized  Made a thematic element of the story (shown in the story, shown on screen). In this book, a main conclusion is that some film

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adaptations show the adaptation process on screen in some way, making it visible to the viewer and thus thematizing adaptation itself. Transmedial Across media; so, ‘transmedial adaptation’ is adaptation across different media (see also intermedial and intramedial).

Acknowledgments

This book has been some years percolating, and therefore I have many parties to thank. Early research was accomplished while on sabbatical leave granted by Pittsburg State University and as a Visiting Fellow at Massey University (New Zealand), where colleagues in the School of English and Media Studies generously offered feedback on first steps. I have also benefitted greatly from two Eichhorn Fellowships awarded by my department. I am grateful for a Fulbright-University of Turku Scholar award in 2014, and subsequent repeat visits to my host universities in Finland in 2015 and 2017. My Finnish friends and colleagues at both the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi have had a great deal of input into this work and I am grateful for their academic interest and genuine friendship. Various parts of this research were tested at several Association of Adaptation Studies annual conferences, and at a plenary on adaptation organized by Brigham Young University. Thanks to my many adaptation studies colleagues for their valuable suggestions and feedback. Thanks to Glenn Storey, Janet Zepernick, and Allison Colson for serving as first readers and making this book better in the process, and Jamie McDaniel for many pertinent conversations. I thank Rich Samford and the PSU interlibrary loan staff at Axe Library for taking a personal interest in addition to their usual excellent service. I very much appreciate the great enthusiasm and good humor Dr. Chris Jacquinot, O.D. showed in performing an expert eye examination on Harry Potter for me. Thanks are due to Elisabeth Rees whose conference presentation at NEMLA in Toronto in 2015 led me to Jeff Kinney on the subject of his own metafiction; and to Jeff Kinney and his ‘Wimpy Kid Team’ for generously supplying permission to quote from his email to Rees. Many thanks to Lori Hartness. As with earlier books, I am indebted to her close, attentive reading, and fearsome copyediting skills. Thanks to Gillian Leslie at Edinburgh University Press for her enthusiasm, support, and patience in bringing this project to fruition. I offer enormous gratitude to my husband, Gil Cooper, who couldn’t be more supportive of my work.

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A portion of this work appears in Where is Adaptation? Mapping Cultures, Texts, and Contexts, co-edited by myself and Janet Zepernick (John Benjamins, 2018). **** This book is dedicated to my children Griffin and Corin, for the many books and movies we’ve shared.

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. One challenge of adapting metafiction to film is that, by definition, self-reflexive fiction is specific to its medium. While all texts can be transmediated, subject to the usual affordances of the new medium, contexts of production, and the matrix of choices governing the adaptation, nevertheless metafiction poses a particular challenge to the process. Where medium-specific equivalences can generally be found when they are sought—a way to express the same or similar idea in a different medium— the closest medium-specific equivalent of metafiction is self-reflexive film (metafilm). Transmediating this particular genre of ‘sourcetext’ thus problematizes the role that medium-specific equivalence plays in creating ­fidelity by focusing on a ‘rival’ medium in the mirror. Additionally, children’s genres feature a number of inherent tensions and paradoxes—not least that they are for children, and are frequently about children and childhood, but are neither produced nor typically procured by children themselves. Children’s literature, irrespective of genre, is already at least double by virtue of this dual audience (the child readership and the adult gatekeepers) and also by the ‘hidden adult(s)’1 in the work (not least, the adult author). Children’s literature furthermore has strong historical ties to didacticism, particularly of foundational literacy education, as well as to play. Children are often delighted in order to be taught, so metafiction’s ludic nature is inextricably linked with its inherently didactic nature. At the very least, all metafiction reveals its own construction. Metafiction is always at least double, making the dual natures of

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story and discourse visible to the reader. As the reader reads the story, so too the metafictional gestures of the text in some way render the discourse opaque and visible. Children’s metafiction is a historically understudied (and often undervalued) genre. Further, while much of the existing theory of metafiction applies equally to children’s metafiction—for instance, the devices and strategies employed are the same, in both adult-oriented and children’s metafictions—still the child reader presupposed by children’s metafiction impacts every aspect of the fictional mode. Of note, this context reveals a strong paradox that such double reading presupposed of metafiction must be performed by developing readers. Children’s metafictions are the ‘sourcetext’ of the adaptation processes studied here, and a close understanding of them is needed in order to contextualize the adaptation contexts they assert and speak to Leitch’s two questions above, guiding this analysis. Accordingly, Chapter 1 presents the theory and criticism of metafiction specifically as it applies to children’s metafiction, illustrating the children’s contexts that require points of renegotiation and providing examples of different types and how they work, as well as what family resemblances they have in common. While children’s metafictions are as old as children’s literature, still they are on the rise in recent years. Chapter 1 includes discussion of that phenomenon and what it confirms about metafiction’s role in fostering literate readers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Children’s literature—including children’s metafiction—also generates special conditions influencing its adaptation. In adaptation to the screen, children’s metafiction more often than not becomes children’s film (or children’s television). Chapter 2 defines and discusses the genre of children’s film. As with other children’s genres, children’s film and filmic media have been historically understudied and typically also undervalued. This chapter situates the genre within its plural contexts, many of which are shared with c­ hildren’s literature: the dual audience, and the paradoxes created by the disjunction between constructed and presupposed child audience and adult producers; anxieties around what young viewers watch; visual literacy, and ‘new media’; and, in the case of transmediated literature, the pedagogical use of film to teach and promote books. The chapter then examines the special issues factoring into adaptations of children’s ­literature and ­children’s metafiction in particular. Notably, fidelity e­ xpectations—and  their connections to pedagogical anxieties around children’s literacy and literateness, and around ‘new’ media—and the paradox of medium-specific equivalence in transmediating meta-referential works are established. Additionally, this section discusses the intermedial tensions (if not actual

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rivalries) between literary and filmic media as they often arise in children’s genres, particularly metafiction. Thomas Leitch offered the two questions quoted in the first paragraph (How has a given adaptation rewritten its sourcetext? Why has it chosen to select and rewrite the sourcetext as it has?) in the hopes of broadening adaptation studies beyond a preoccupation with ‘fidelity,’ an approach based on how closely an adaptation followed its source. Yet fidelity remains a dominant yard stick measuring expectations when it comes to adaptations of children’s works to screen. Adaptations of children’s works share a privileged status with adaptations of classic works (and sometimes the two categories overlap). That is, the viewer of a screen adaptation of a classic literary work and/or a children’s work have greater expectations of fidelity in the adaptation. Fidelity in its strictest sense describes the expectation of a degree of closeness in the adaptation to the ‘source’ text it adapts. Fidelity has a problematic history as an adaptation approach because it presumes an evaluative stance and, further, it evaluates an adaptation based on an impossible and even undesirable standard: ‘faithfulness’ to an ‘original.’ And in fact, that is exactly the sense in play here. Audiences of classic and/or children’s adaptations exhibit a greater likelihood of evaluating the adaptation positively or negatively based on its proximity to the original or, in fact, to the reader’s own imagined text. As an adaptation approach beyond this limited scope, however, the fidelity approach encompasses the type of comparative stylistics (what is the same, what is different, and how to interpret those choices) that continues to serve a useful backbone function of adaptation studies. In that sense, it exists in the DNA of Leitch’s first question: ‘How has a given adaptation rewritten its sourcetext?’ And if ‘Faithfulness matters if it matters to the viewer,’2 then it certainly matters in the context of this study. Further, it underpins the question of medium-specific equivalence which poses such a unique complication with respect to meta-referential media and thus forms an important consideration here. Chapter 2 then introduces the three ways, often employed in combinations, that film adapts metafiction. (These three ways then form the basis for Chapters 3–5.) The first is to film ‘story only’—effectively the metafiction becomes filmed fiction. Typically, children’s metafictions ­thematize books and ‘bookishness’ in addition to being discursively selfreflexive; the plots, characters, settings, and other mise en scène of such films simply transmediate books and bookishness. This section introduces the concept of the ‘interpretant’ as an umbrella for the position or stance of the adaptation with respect to the medium it adapts. In other words, the ‘interpretant’ is an expression of the adaptation’s ideology—its governing

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principles and priorities in adapting the (metafictional) source. The term and definition is derived from Michael Riffaterre’s use of it in intertextuality studies (and derived originally from the semiotics of Charles Peirce). The second, additional strategy outlined here is also to transmediate the ‘meta’ nature of the source text. In that case, and usually in conjunction with ‘filmed story,’ transmediated metafiction becomes self-reflexive as well: metafilm. The paradox of such equivalence, and the way in which it can form an important aspect of the film’s interpretant with regards to its position in the intermedial conversation, are also introduced. And the third option, pertaining to a subset of these adaptations, is to perform ‘meta-adaptation.’ This last, I will argue, is a quintessential expression of the purpose and aims of metafiction for a child audience. Chapter 3, ‘Books on Screen,’ more closely examines the first of these three options, the strategies and devices for depicting ‘books and bookishness’ in children’s film, using a variety of examples from film adaptations of children’s books. ‘Bookishness’ is a deliberately broad notion used in this study as a descriptive umbrella for character types, settings, thematic preoccupations, attitudes towards literacy and literateness, and so on.3 This chapter also discusses a broadening definition and application for ekphrasis—here an artwork in one medium ‘quoted’ by another. Such ekphrasis goes beyond what occurs inherently in the course of all transmedial adaptation and may also transcend the mere presence of an artwork. For example, not every film adaptation of a literary work is ekphrastic, and a painting on the wall of a house in a work of fiction, or a book on a shelf of a house in a film, do not inherently comprise ekphrasis either. Instead, the ‘other’ medium or medial aspects of the artwork must be foregrounded or pointed to in some way. Nevertheless, by virtue of the particular metafictions under consideration, that feature is frequently actualized in the adaptations studied here. Books are not mere props; libraries, bookstores, and studies are not incidental settings; and characters are often and significantly readers—whether reluctant or masterful—in adaptations of Inkheart, The Neverending Story, The Tale of Despereaux, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Ella Enchanted, and so on. Further, this chapter introduces a ‘grammar’ for transmediating books and bookishness. This includes strategies such as voiceover in adapting intrusive narrators, for example, or shot sequences for depicting readers and what they are reading or writers and what they are writing, as well as ways to show readers’ reactions to what they have read. As metafictions create a layering of story levels (at minimum, there are two: the story and the extra-diegetic world containing the reader of whom the metafiction is aware), they function by virtue of metalepsis—crossings of the thresholds

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int r o duc t io n 5 between levels. Chapter 3 illustrates with examples ways in which such metalepsis is transmediated to the screen by editing. Also, this chapter presents ways in which films use books and bookishness consistent with the ways they are used in metafictional sources: to denote wisdom and learning, and to distinguish good characters from bad ones by how they treat books and reading. Finally, this chapter then offers a detailed case study of two of the film adaptations from the Harry Potter series of novels by J. K. Rowling. Both the second novel of the seven, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and the sixth, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, feature significant plot-driving embedded books. In addition to the general bookishness of the series overall, these two novels metafictively reflect the series’ stance on Harry’s education around books. The two novels within the series are overtly in dialogue with one another over this particular issue of dangerous books and how to use them as well. Examining the two film adaptations and how they dialogue both with the novels and with one another—their matrix of adaptation choices with respect to this focal point in particular— clearly renders the ‘interpretant’ of these films with respect to books and their importance at key points in Harry’s developing education. Chapter 4 in turn shifts attention to children’s metafilm—self reflexive film that in one way or another breaks the ‘fourth’ wall that maintains the mimetic illusion of the film’s reality and reveals it as a filmic construct. Although as the previous chapter shows it is possible to adapt children’s metafiction to film without metafilm, many adaptations do indeed adapt the ‘meta’ layer by using self-reflexive filmic strategies as well. Accordingly, this chapter describes major types of children’s metafilms, and a ‘grammar’ of select self-reflexive devices using examples both from adaptations and from children’s films which are not themselves adaptations from a literary source. In order to illustrate the potential for intermedial tension around metafilm as an ‘equivalence’ for metafiction, I present a close reading of the film The Spiderwick Chronicles with specific focus on its adaptation of the kunstlerroman trajectory of Jared from reader to author-artist in The Spiderwick Chronicles series by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black. This reading is prefaced by an analysis of the kunstler trajectory in Cornelia Funke’s novel Inkheart and in the film adaptation Inkheart, which provides a clear foil against which the more complex intermedial dialogue of The Spiderwick Chronicles film stands out. Chapter 5 concludes the study by identifying the subset of film adaptations of children’s metafictions that function as meta-adaptations. Although scholarly work on meta-adaptation is still in an emergent phase, it is clear that children’s genres already perform it. This chapter argues

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that while ‘metafilm’ is a problematic medium-specific correlative to ‘metafiction’ in adaptation, instead ‘meta-adaptation’ is a transcendent one. In lieu of setting one medium or another in the reflexive lens of the adaptation, instead the self-reflexivity of the work focuses on its nature as an adaptation. Just as metafiction (or metafilm) lifts the curtain on the otherwise-hidden processes of artistic production, so meta-adaptations lift the curtain on the otherwise-hidden processes of adaptation—in these cases, from one medium to another. I term this ‘breaking the “fifth” wall.’ The chapter provides case studies of two book-film adaptation pairings to illustrate two different but prominent types of meta-adaptation: implicit and explicit. The award-winning novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, is an homage to cinema, employs cinematic techniques, and ekphrastically includes not only references to and illustrations of specific films but even film stills from them. At the same time, the novel is metafictional lauding of books and reading. The novel itself, in other words, is already a meta-adaptation. In adaptation to the film Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese, the now intramedial cinematic reflexivity is prominent, but it includes (ekphrastically) an homage to books—and to Selznick’s book as well. This novel-film pairing illustrates an implicit meta-adaptation: it performs the transmedial adaptation for the reader/ viewer, but it doesn’t specifically thematize adaptation. The novel series A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Daniel Handler, has been partially adapted twice to the screen to date. While the Nickelodeon film Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events also functions as an implicit meta-adaptation in similar ways to Hugo, the Netflix streaming adaptation A Series of Unfortunate Events instead thematizes adaptation and media in ways which make it an explicit meta-adaptation. Returning to the notion of fidelity expectations and pressures for children’s adaptations, there is an inherent risk of inference of hierarchies of value from the sequential nature of these chapters: that filming ‘story’ is less faithful and thus less valuable than filming ‘story and meta-reference,’ and that in turn is less faithful and thus less valuable than performing meta-adaptation. Instead, as I have noted, these strategies rarely work in isolation. It is rather that the interpretant of each film is different. Inkheart, which is predominantly an example of an adaptation of ‘filmed (meta)fiction,’ and is not in any sustained way metafilmic, is a close adaptation of the novel Inkheart, one which privileges and foregrounds the various textualities of the source. Hugo, on the other hand, is an example of a film which, while it also privileges and foregrounds the various textualities of its source, is also a meta-adaptation. My focus is on the interpretant around adaptations of metafiction, and what is gained by analyzing a

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int r o duc t io n 7 film adaptation with that foremost consideration. Nevertheless, by shifting the object in the mirror from one specific medium to intermediality itself, meta-adaptations offer an alternative and apt ‘equivalence’ for the metafictional sources they adapt and the various literacies they foster.

Notes and Caveats Not all children’s literature represents reading and writing the same way, either historically over time or within any specific period. The wonderful collection, Children as Readers in Children’s Literature: The Power of Texts and the Importance of Reading (Arizpe and Smith 2016), illustrates that point well by using an enormous variety of historical and contemporary illustrative texts. Peter Hunt’s chapter, for example, points out that historically depictions of readers in books with ‘intertextual reference’ (16) functioned as a form of endorsement and that ‘generally, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, books were approved of in books’ (19), but notes that post-Second-World-War fiction ‘more ­generally . . . turned away’ from the theme. Yet in Hunt’s reading, the long-term prevalence of readers and writers in children’s literature—the stuff of children’s metafiction—is assured by definition: ‘as long as books are written, they will be written by book people—people with faith in the book as book’ (2016: 26) and thus ‘self-endorsement of the reader and writer by building themselves into their own fictions is inevitable’ (Ibid.). Positive images of readers and reading are ‘necessary flattery’ as Vivienne Smith writes, because without readers the author is dead (2016: 61–62). That said, select chapters in the same collection argue perhaps more surprising findings. Maria Nikolajeva discusses the ‘significant absence’ (2016: 7) of books and reading from much of the contemporary literature for children. A ‘typical adolescent character’ she writes, ‘is a nonreader’ (6) and ‘the most exciting fictional characters don’t read books’ (8). Even in situations where ‘reading is superficially presented as beneficial,’ Nikolajeva argues that ‘on closer consideration it is highly ambiguous’ (9). In some cases, reading is presented as a dangerous escape from reality (The Neverending Story), and in others as a cause for emotional instability. While elsewhere in the collection, Kimberley Reynolds uses Young Adult (YA) romances to argue that ‘there is much to be said for finding a lover who is also a reader’ (2016: 36), Evelyn Arizpe writes that ‘knowing how to read only seems to make matters worse for characters who are already struggling to survive’ (2016: 51) in the selection of novels she examines. In dystopian literature, Vivienne Smith writes, the twin messages are that texts can be used to restrict freedom and exert authoritarian control, but

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they also ‘sustain’ the beleaguered protagonists (2016: 69). Within the single novel, The Book Thief, Jean Webb notes that books are ‘a liberation for some whilst being a threat to others’ (2016: 77). Beyond analyzing positive and negative depictions, Julia Eccleshare points out in her chapter that depictions of reading and writing in children’s literature have changed over time from a solitary experience to a ‘social and collective’ one, reflecting the ‘trends of shared responses that are at the core of twenty-first century media’ (2016: 83). Readers want to read the same book as other readers, and authors are no longer remote but accessible. The reader that metafiction reflects is constantly evolving. Clearly, attempting to draw conclusions from children’s metafictions of different genres, from different times, for different ages and levels of reader is already a task fraught with risks of generalization. Brian Selznick’s novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret is ‘not exactly a novel, . . . not quite a picture book, . . . not really a graphic novel, or a flip book, or a movie, but a combination of all these things.’4 How, then, to extrapolate useful precepts about metafiction from such a book? Even in more narrow selections, such as metafictions that feature a significant embedded book, enormous variety is evident. In the second Harry Potter novel and film, the embedded book is a (cursed) diary; in the sixth novel and film it is an annotated Potions textbook. In The Princess Bride it is a fairy tale love story, in The Neverending Story it is a fantasy action and adventure story, and in The Spiderwick Chronicles series it is a Field Guide. The selection I have used from which to draw and with which to illustrate my conclusions is thus both necessarily incomplete and impossibly varied. To some extent, the direction of this study—looking at film adaptations from literary metafictions—has dictated some of my selections. I have further restricted my selections to narrative fiction rather than, for example, metafictional graphic novels and their adaptations. As Paul Atkinson writes in ‘The Graphic Novel as Metafiction,’ ‘it is built on a different foundation that must take into account the structure of the page and a much more diffuse notion of authorial voice’ (n.p.). Much finer distinctions can and perhaps should be made, but for the purposes of this study these differences from book to book do not, I believe, undermine my global argument. I incorporate scholarship widely from various relevant fields—­ metafiction and particularly children’s metafiction, meta-referentiality, children’s film and related media, adaptation studies, filmed text, and so on. Charles Eidsvik noted in 1975 that ‘The job of a critic of filmliterature relationships is . . . to discover on whose shoulders a film rests, that is, to ask which traditions illuminate a particular film’ (Ibid.: 313).

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Select authors are accordingly referenced more than others, particularly those working in children’s scholarship. One key work, however, requires special discussion here. Amie Doughty’s Throw the Book Away: Reading Versus Experience in Children’s Fantasy is rare as a book-length study of children’s metafictions, including some of their film adaptations in a dedicated chapter as well. My selection of novels and films necessarily and significantly overlaps her selections, although as her primary focus is literary fantasy she also includes a number of texts not considered here. Her study is an important contribution to the field and I agree with many of her points regarding individual novels, select films, and their depiction of books and bookishness. Doughty comments for example about the role of books in the film adaptation of Ella Enchanted: ‘Books’ role, relatively small in the novel, has been diminished further in the film’ (2013: 82), which is an aspect I also discuss here. When Arthur Spiderwick tells Jared in the film adaptation of The Spiderwick Chronicles ‘You are the book now,’ Doughty concludes, as I do, that the comment underscores Jared’s ‘internalization of knowledge from reading’ (84). And Doughty similarly notes of the film The Pagemaster that while it thematizes ‘the importance of reading books,’ yet its main character ‘is never shown reading any books’ (94). Where I diverge, however, is from her dominant thesis that the arc of protagonists who read in children’s metafictions illustrates a graduation from readership to living life without the book. In Doughty’s argument, the metafictions she examines portray experience as the proper outcome of a reading education, after which the reader has transcended the need for books. While it is certainly the case that metafictions reveal the wizard behind the curtain, as it were, I disagree with the either/or binary— denoted by the ‘versus’ in Doughty’s title; few metafictions appear to endorse their own obsolescence.5 Another pertinent point of contrast is that in the discussion of the films just quoted, Doughty argues that these adaptations ‘parallel’ the novels they adapt, while my focus on adaptation and the matrix of choices around metafiction on screen further distinguishes a spectrum of treatments of books and bookish sources such as these. Yet, in fact, Doughty’s analysis belies in many places her overall thrust, perhaps suggesting that some of her more forceful conclusions require a more nuanced reading than she has room to provide, and in that respect our positions align more than would at first appear. While much of Doughty’s study argues that books (and even literacy) are discarded in favor of action and experience, she just as often suggests that ‘balance’ between book knowledge and experience is necessary. There is

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‘a need for young c­ haracters to establish a balance between knowledge and action,’ Doughty writes (92). I agree more with that interpretation of what ­children’s ­metafictions model to young readers. I will trace Doughty’s analysis more fully here, especially given that we discuss many of the same works with a similar focus (their role as metafictions for young readers), yet we often arrive at different conclusions. Doughty states that ‘Books represent adult authority in children’s literature’ (2013: 1), and they are used most commonly ‘as artifacts of power’ (Ibid.: 3) and thus ‘books are often left behind as the youthful main characters begin to learn self-sufficiency’ (3). She later rephrases: If indeed subversion in children’s literature is, in part, a rejection of adult authority, then it stands to reason that books and reading may be rejected in children’s literature, and indeed this seems to be the case in many pieces of children’s literature. (14)

Although Doughty later cites the qualified nature of such subversion (it is a ‘muddled form of subversion’ as Joe Sutliff Sanders writes [2009: 349]) and notes that didacticism and subversion are not incompatible in children’s literature, still the thread from subversion to rejection of books and reading is rather tenuous. Doughty points out that Sanders selects texts that foreground a positive relationship between books and readers, in order to counter that image: [Sanders’] argument . . . is problematic. While his choice of children’s texts does indeed show a positive relationship between books and readers, even if that relationship is occasionally fraught with problems, in fact most children’s novels do not present a positive relationship between readers and books—and certainly not an ‘ennobling’ and ‘sacrosanct’ relationship. In particular . . . children’s fantasy in which books and reading play a prominent role often rejects books, leaving them behind in favor of action, thereby subverting adult authority—at least as it relates to books. (26)

Accordingly, Doughty’s assessment of the prominent book in the novel series The Spiderwick Chronicles (Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide) is that ‘The book causes the trouble; it does not fix it’ (38). In a chapter on author-characters, she focuses on the control exercized by authorial narrators over the reader and the reading experience, even when the reader is invited to authorship, as in The Name of this Book is Secret, by Pseudonymous Bosch, and on examples from fantasy-action-adventure novels, such as the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series (5 books published 2005-2009 beginning with The Lightning Thief) and the Kane Chronicles (a trilogy published between 2010 and 2012, launched with The Red Pyramid), by Rick Riordan. The issue then is that while the e­ xemplars should properly

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int r o duc t io n 11 direct the inferences Doughty draws from them, they strongly color them just as Sanders’ selection colored his. Doughty concludes: ‘more than any type of children’s fantasy book discussed thus far, these series focus on action rather than books and reading, with the exception of the books being created by the characters [in the Captain Underpants series]’ (80). Yet the conclusion belongs more properly to the subset of Rick Riordan’s formulaic action-adventure novels than more generally to (all) works with author-characters. I diverge from Doughty perhaps most with respect to Cornelia Funke’s novel Inkheart. Doughty focuses on all three novels of the Inkworld trilogy in order to argue that they comprise a ‘rejection of literacy,’ which is Doughty’s chapter title: the characters leave the ‘real’ world after Inkheart and enter Inkworld, a world that features a ‘lack of books’ (154). My focus remains on the first novel, Inkheart, which is the novel adapted to the film Inkheart, and that in turn shapes my reading. Far from a rejection of literacy, my reading of the novel (and film) is of a reading education—coupled with experience—that comprises a writer’s apprenticeship. Meggie ends Inkheart as a writer, both in novel and film. Yet in discussion of that first novel, Inkheart, Doughty indicates that Meggie’s aunt Elinor is portrayed negatively for being an obsessive reader, for example, and that gives ‘a negative impression of reading’ (143). If anything, however, Elinor is a book collector and her reaction to Meggie (an avid reader) is to tell Meggie to keep her distance from the precious books, and to tell her how priceless and valuable her collection is. Elinor is portrayed negatively less for being an obsessive reader than for not being enough of a reader—like Meggie and her father Mo. At the end of the novel, Elinor rebuilds her incinerated collection again. Doughty points to the negative trend from the first book, Inkheart, to the end of the third, Inkdeath, in her conclusion: There is an argument to be made that the Folchart family and Fenoglio are lost in a book, in the beauty of a story, and that this experience is positive because early in the series being lost in a book was the goal of a positive reading experience. However, given the increasingly negative portrayal of characters . . . who are voracious readers, as well as the knowledge that the Folcharts have no interest in returning to their world, getting lost in a book is not a positive thing but a refusal to cope with reality . . . the Inkheart series has the most negative message about books, readers, and reading. (154)

With a different lens—on the relationship between metafictional books and the ways they are adapted to the screen—my discussion of Inkheart and its film adaptation in Chapter 4 arrives at very different conclusions. Although there is ambivalence in even the first novel’s depiction of books

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and reading—and another critic, Maureen A. Farrell, concurs by citing Meggie’s growing ambivalence with her father—still I argue that the novel is a bibliophile’s book. As Farrell similarly notes again, the novel ‘is a book about books and the love of reading’ (2016: 47) and ‘For books like this to “work” readers have to be already thoroughly “book-identified.”’6 Yet my arguments and Doughty’s share the same foundations, and her frequent reiteration of balance is something I also infer from these books: ‘books, no matter how comforting, dangerous, or powerful, cannot replace experience and action’ (49). I would argue that they are not trying to. Possibly, the arc Doughty describes, from reader to worldly experience, is simply an incomplete one. After all, Bilbo Baggins (hero of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit) didn’t write ‘The Hobbit’ until after he’d been ‘there and back again.’ But my argument is rather that while books do impart knowledge and child characters do act on that knowledge, and display their eventual mastery through action, the character trajectory rarely rejects books altogether and (just as) often depicts authorship as an outcome of a reader’s apprenticeship.

Limitations of Scope Despite the largely understudied nature of these closely related children’s fields, nevertheless the contexts for this study are wide-ranging and selections and limitations are necessary. Aside from select references to fairy tales (such as the original one that Despereaux reads in The Tale of Despereaux, the parodic intertextuality with the fairy tale canon of Shrek, and Hoodwinked!), I have excluded fairy tales and transmediated fairy tales from this study. Fairy tales may prove the exception to the rule that children’s genres are historically understudied, and their transmediations as much or more so. Works such as Jack Zipes’ The Enchanted Screen (2011), or Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity (2010), edited by Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix, are representative but indicate the field has enough discrete features to comprise a separate-if-related field of study to this one. Similarly, studies like Cristina Bacchilega’s on ‘Reading (in) Fairy-Tale Films’ obviously share overlapping considerations with this study, but as Bacchilega’s own argument makes clear, the fairy tale contexts are specific and distinctive enough to treat on their own. Although I discuss ekphrasis in its broader sense, I do not engage with its historical basis in rhetoric, or the robust and quite extensive preexisting scholarship on textuality on screen, and the word/image relationships there. Works such as the admirable Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate by

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Kamilla Elliott engage much more extensively with the visual-verbal relationships in adaptation. It is hoped that this study can be situated within that wider context without attempting to relitigate it here. Related to ekphrasis is the tradition in visual art of depicting readers reading. In The Look of Reading, 1514–1990, Garrett Stewart notes that such paintings ‘have drawn upon shared conventions, to an extent that permits the identification of this group of paintings as a genre.’ Stewart observes that one of these conventions is to depict readers ‘with a window, a mirror, and a series of horizontal stripes suggestive of the written text.’7 While these suggestions, such as the presence of a mirror and its introspective symbolism, posit interesting extensions of the way the metaphorical ‘mirror in the text’ functions in self-referential works, analysis of such symbolic patterns in film adaptations of child readers and their bookish activities falls outside the scope of this study. Similarly, I restrict depictions of readers rather literally to readers reading, of whom there are a considerable number in children’s metafictions and in their adaptations to screen. In ‘Readership and Spectatorship,’ Judith Mayne discusses film spectatorship as a parallel to reading, and the way in which ‘frequently spectators within the film are identified as readers’ ([1985] 2011: 255).8 While I agree with Mayne’s overarching argument that film viewing can be an equivalence for book reading—this book presupposes as much—I have retained the narrower, more literal distinctions between depictions of readership on screen and self-referential depictions of spectatorship there. Exciting work is being published in the field of the neuroscience of reading and although, as Maria Nikolajeva says of this work, ‘there is still very little research focused on young readers’ (2016: 3), the insights she offers about young readers of metafiction points to another dimension of work to be done. Nikolajeva discusses the necessary role of books and reading in children’s literature to provide a point of engagement for this type of response: ‘Through mirror neurons our brains engage with fictional characters’ emotions as if they were our own. Reading about reading is just as valuable as reading itself ’ (2016: 4). The stimulation of empathy through this process—and the possible differences between printed text and digital as stimulus for it—suggest fascinating pathways for further research, but they are not pursued here. I have written elsewhere on the importance of fidelity’s continued relevance and value as one type of adaptation approach, citing a growing chorus of voices arguing the same (Hermansson 2015). I take a pragmatic approach here as well. This study asserts that fidelity is a central preoccupation of children’s adaptations and their reception, and illustrates how

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and why, as well as the crucial pressures that preoccupation exerts on the adaptation processes for these works in particular. This study does not further rehearse the troubled history of fidelity in scholarly criticism, although it is informed by it, and that history is nevertheless another important context for it. I have also limited this study to literature and film, with some television. While other new media are entirely relevant to the study, and while some in adaptation studies are hoping to further distinguish adaptation studies from lit-film studies, both children’s metafiction and the children’s film are, as I said at opening, understudied individually and more so in combination. Further, and as has already been said, both genres contain a number of complicating features and pressures in their own right. Introducing other media (videogames and web media for example, or participatory media such as fan reaction videos on YouTube) without any consideration of their own medium-specific pressures in the context of children’s adaptation would dilute the focuses—and conclusions—of this study. Needless to say, that remains for further study. I hope that, in spite of these and no doubt other limitations, this study contributes something useful and worthwhile to the study of children’s adaptations from literature to screen. While the two interrelated questions posed by Thomas Leitch provided the main navigation points for what follows, I hope that this study also speaks to the range of questions asked by Morris Beja in 1976, and which, to varying degrees, still preoccupy adaptation stdies now: How should a film-maker go about the process of adapting a work of written literature? Are there guiding principles that we can discover or devise? What relationship should a film have to the original source? Should it be faithful? Can it be? To what? Which should be uppermost in a film-maker’s mind: the integrity of the original work, or the integrity of the film to be based on that work? Is there a necessary conflict? What types of changes are permissible? Desirable? Inevitable? Are some types of work more adaptable than others?9

All of these questions take on a fascinating cast in consideration of children’s metafictions as sourcetexts, and their adaptation to the screen.

Notes 1. This is the book title by Perry Nodelman (2008) on the subject. 2. Christine Geraghty (2008: 2). 3. The term is also used by at least two authors in the Arizpe and Smith collection Children as Readers in Children’s Literature: Peter Hunt (2016: 25), and

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Vivienne Smith (2016: 61), so the neologism appears to be in practical use in studies of this nature. 4. Brian Selznick, ‘A Letter from Brian Selznick,’ , quoted in North (2015: 101), and (unsourced) in HopeJones (2011: 54) (last accessed 19 July 2018). 5. Shirley Brice Heath also notes in her study of books for emerging readers the importance of depicting characters ‘at work in roles and performances in which they apply what they have learned from reading and from life experience’ (2016: 126–27), and doing their ‘own creative “hand and head work” of referring to the books, maps and drawings created by others or through their own sketching, designing and building within adult-like roles’ (127). Heath uses recent neuroscience research to support her argument. The distinction between books and experience is thus not a clear or unambiguous one to make. 6. Farrell supports her comment by stating that ‘young people who read intrusion fantasies consume a model of slippages between fiction and reality that exemplifies a particularly engaged form of reading’; that books such as these ‘depend on intertextuality recognised by the readers’; and they feature ‘both passionate and reluctant readers in their cast of characters’ (2016: 48). 7. Claudia Nelson (2006: 223). 8. Mayne focuses on films of the 1940s in particular for her examples. 9. Morris Beja, Film and Literature (1976), quoted in Giddings et al. (1990: 23).

C HA PT E R 1

Children’s Metafiction: Texts and Contexts

Children’s literature is somewhat unique in literary subgenres in that it is defined by its audience.1 Children’s literature is not inherently different from ‘literature’ (which, notably, is not called ‘adult literature’) in terms of lexicon, complexity of plot, choice of themes, subgenres (like fantasy or sci-fi) or stylistic devices. The genre is neither limited to nor alone in employing fantasy, anthropomorphic animals, coming of age themes, or quest structures, for instance. But there may be a greater preponderance or concentration of such elements in children’s literature than in its adult counterpart. It is rather, as Claudia Nelson writes, ‘a matter of degree rather than one of kind’ (2006: 226). And yet the presupposed child reader radically alters every aspect of what that literature is and does. The audience the genre is named after proves crucial to any understanding of what makes children’s literature unique. So, too, children’s metafiction does not appear appreciably different than metafiction that presupposes an adult reader. The same devices are used, and for similar reasons. Yet, here as well, the same fundamental revision is key to understanding the particularities of the subgenre: the child reader presupposed by children’s metafiction radically changes the picture. For that reason, Nelson even suggests that by sharing the same implied reader, children’s metafictions have more in common with one another through ‘family resemblance’ than they do with their adult counterparts (229). Given that the focus of this book is the particular challenges to and stakes for transmediating children’s metafictions to the screen, a careful understanding of what children’s metafiction purports to be and do for the child reader is essential groundwork. This necessity is compounded by the comparative scarcity of scholarship on the genre.2 Children’s metafictions then become the ‘sourcetext’ for their adaptations into (typically) children’s film and television—and along with the rise of children’s metafiction, instances of these adaptations are increasing as well. This chapter will discuss the what, how, and why of children’s metafiction, focusing in

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particular on how it manifests in the same ways as adult metafiction but activates a very different set of contexts. The chapter follows three main sections. The first, ‘What is Children’s Metafiction?’ examines definition issues and paradoxes specific to the children’s subgenre. The second, ‘How Does Children’s Metafiction Work?’ provides a detailed discussion of metafictional devices, plots, and character devices, which may appear in greater concentrations here than elsewhere. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, ‘The “Why” of Children’s Metafiction’ focuses on the various purposes ascribed to children’s metafiction for which the child audience is key through two related further questions: ‘what work do authors and critics ascribe to metafictional mode for children?’ and ‘why is children’s metafiction on the rise now?’

What is Children’s Metafiction? Just as definitions of ‘children’s literature’ typically begin by distinguishing it from ‘literature’ more generally, any discussion of ‘children’s metafiction’ must still begin by considering the ‘adult’ version against whose ground its particularities can be rendered more visible. Metafiction is fiction about fiction. Using any number and variety of devices, metafiction makes the reader aware that the fiction is a construct she is reading. Coined by William Gass in 1970, the term metafiction was famously defined by Patricia Waugh as follows: Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of ­narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text. (1984: 2, original italics)

It is important to note that even Waugh’s brief definition inextricably links the manifestation of metafiction (‘fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact’) with its purpose (‘in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality’). Metafiction is a mode used purposefully. Claudia Nelson points out that Waugh, while she discusses the playful nature of metafiction, does not discuss reader pleasure.3 For Nelson, Waugh’s omission is a significant oversight in the context of children’s metafiction, and the preferred definition is instead Linda Hutcheon’s landmark book on metafiction, Narcissistic Narrative: ‘narcissistic narrative [metafiction] transforms the authorial process of shaping, of making, into

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part of the pleasure and challenge of reading as a co-operative, interpretive experience’ ([1980] 1984: 154). These two crucial aspects, metafiction’s didactic and ludic impulses, will be discussed further in this chapter, but it is important to note here that both are inextricable from the subgenre, and that they complement one another. Inasmuch as all language is a construct, all literature is inherently metafictional and all literature is by definition intertextual.4 Additionally, children’s literature that has its origins in literacy building blocks—such as abecedaria or illustrated alphabet books like A Was an Archer, or the illustrated encylopedia Orbis Pictus [Pictured World] of 1658, by John Amos Comenius—has always been overtly metafictional. Literacy education is tasked, however implicitly, with teaching children the sign system at the core of all narratives. However, that theoretical end of the wedge is only relevant here in that some fictional works choose to make that fact apparent to the reader rather than maintaining the ‘fourth wall,’ which enables a suspension of disbelief in favor of sustaining the narrative illusion of the reality of the fictional world. As will be discussed below, the metafictional mode in fact describes a spectrum from lesser self-reflexivity to greater. In A Rhetoric of Metafiction, Beth Ann Boehm points out that ‘the use of selfconscious technique does not necessarily mean that the entire work is antirealistic or anti-mimetic or even belongs exclusively in that class of texts we call “metafiction”’ (1987: 19). Boehm calls these latter ‘radical’ metafictions, noting that ‘the more radical the innovations . . . the more the reader must struggle to understand the text’ (Ibid. 17). Similarly, Linda Hutcheon distinguishes between ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ metafictions throughout. This study is concerned with the more ‘overt’ metafictions—while they occupy different places on a spectrum, these children’s metafictions nevertheless draw attention to their self-reflexive and intertextual aspects. Critical work on metafiction identifies two major and ostensibly paradoxical elements. One is the intra-textual object on which the ‘mirror in the text’ focuses, be it linguistic, novelistic, or narrative. This is the inward turning ‘narcissistic’ aspect of metafiction, reflecting (on) itself. By contrast, in Linda Hutcheon’s terms in Narcissistic Narrative, the ‘metafictional paradox’ is that simultaneous with this inward turning is an outward, extra-textual reaching—toward the reader, and the world beyond the textual artifact. Such duality is the ‘fundamental and sustained opposition’ that Patricia Waugh identifies between ‘the construction of a fictional illusion (as in traditional realism) and the laying bare of that illusion’—held together by ‘formal tension’ (1984: 6). Another way of describing the paradox is through the apparent tension between the ‘realism’ of ­traditional fiction and the ‘anti-realism’ of metafiction which

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te x t s a nd c o nte x t s 19 deliberately destroys the illusion of such realism and instead reveals the constructs and constructedness of the fiction. Thus, realism and metafictionality are often seen as contrasting fictional modes.5 Yet that too is only superficially a paradox. Linda Hutcheon disputed the distinction by pointing out that ‘auto-representation is still representation’ ([1980] 1984: 7, 39); in other words, metafiction is still mimetic, but it is mimetic of process rather than product. A few aspects of metafiction become crucial in later discussion of its transmediation and so need further clarification here. One is the distinction between the story and discourse of a text. Self-reflexivity of either or both is possible in metafiction but, as discussed in Chapter 2, ‘story’ is more easily ‘transposable’ to another medium (Wicks 1980: 25) using the affordances of the new medium.6 By definition, discourse is medium-specific. What is least transferable is its discursive level, along with the narrativity demanded of the reader by the metafictional coding: intrusion of the narrator; allusion (intertextuality); the story being invented as it is being told and yet not told; and other self-reflexive devices such as the spiral of fictions. (Ibid.: 26)

In broad terms, it proves more straightforward to film an embedded narrative about a reader with an enchanted book as in Ella Enchanted, than a narrative replete with puns, riddles, pictorial poems, and so on as in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Both are metafictional, but the former is metafictional by virtue of its story, while the other is more discursively metafictional. The other important aspects of metafiction are the interconnected concepts of mise en abyme (embedding) and metalepsis. Mise en abyme requires at least two diegetic levels, whether interior to the work or including the exterior (extra-diegetic) world as well. A story inside a story is an example of mise en abyme. At least in theory, mise en abyme is ‘interminable’—what Dorrit Cohn calls ‘pure’ mise en abyme—and bi-directional, both into and out of the work of art. Such is the premise of The Neverending Story, for example. The story never ends because we are the new readers outside the text, just as Bastian is the reader inside it. The existence of these plural layers of narrative is the precondition for metalepsis, or the movement across and through a hierarchy of layers in either direction (ascending or descending) and which makes the mise en abyme visible. Gérard Genette defined narrative metalepsis—a term borrowed from rhetoric—as ‘any intrusion by the extra-diegetic ­narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by the diegetic characters into

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a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse’ ([1972] 1980: 234–35), and notes that it is ‘always transgressive’ (234). Doritt Cohn builds on Genette’s discussion7 by noting that interior mise en abyme (and thus interior metalepsis) remains contained within the fictional world, and so only ‘pure’ mise en abyme (and exterior metalepsis), which encompasses the extra-diegetic world as well, produces ‘a troubling state in the reader’ which she describes as ‘a feeling of disarray, a kind of anxiety or vertigo’ ([2006] 2012: 110). This latter ‘pure’ and exterior variety she terms metalepsis proper. I will use the broader definitions for mise en abyme and metalepsis here and am less concerned with classifying by type than by giving descriptive examples of them in action in children’s metafictions and film.8 However, distinctions between interior and exterior remain useful and enable a more careful understanding of the following metafictions discussed in this chapter, and what is at stake in filmic moments such as the final voiceover of The Neverending Story in which an omniscient narrator speaks about the events of the film, thereby creating another narrative layer and an extra-diegetic metalepsis, or the concluding image of The Secret of Moonacre when the main protagonist turns to face the camera over her shoulder, demonstrating an awareness of the external viewership for the first time. Mise en abyme—the layering of narrative levels, of story or discourse or both—and metalepsis—the movement across these levels—are features inherent to metafiction. They manifest in varying degrees in any individual work. But just as a door that is ajar or fully open is in either case still open (not closed), so too even the mildest metafictional moments have radical implications. When Jane Eyre, the protagonist of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847), says ‘Reader, I married him,’ the metafictional door is shockingly revealed to have been open all along.9 Such brief examples have been termed a ‘metaleptic pop.’10 In that moment, the narrator of Jane Eyre reveals that the fourth wall has been an illusion; her first-person narrative has been directed at an extra-diegetic entity, the ‘Reader.’ The brevity of the metafictional moments—or metaleptic pops—of C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (‘everyone suddenly realized the same thought Edmund had whispered to Peter at the end of the last chapter’ (72); ‘all the children thought—and I agree with them’ [Ibid.: 82]), may contrast with the sustained, thorough, and intrusive metafictionality of Daniel Handler’s novels comprising A Series of Unfortunate Events. But again, it remains a matter of degree that separates them on the spectrum not one of kind; they too share a ‘family resemblance.’ As a sub-type of children’s literature, children’s metafiction is also subject and heir to all of its generic paradoxes. Children’s literature has

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been described as ‘impossible.’11 Its impossibility is owing to the conditions of its generation: children’s literature is written and produced for children, and it may in some cases be about children, but it is rarely if ever written or produced by children. Children’s literature is written and produced by adults. Adults (writers, publishers, parents, teachers, and librarians, for instance) transmit and enculturate a vision of what childhood is supposed to be at any given time. Children are not very active in these processes. In many cases, they only access this literature via a series of adult gatekeepers who purchase and procure this literature on their behalf, and in a great number of cases must even read it to the child.12 The phenomenon of the lurking adult in this power dynamic is described by Perry Nodelman in the title of his book as ‘the hidden adult’ and the resulting doubleness is one of the defining hallmarks of children’s literature. This fundamental impossibility of children’s literature—inextricably connected with the genre’s definition-by-audience—is the paradox at its heart. As a sub type of children’s literature, children’s metafiction is also subject to all of its generic paradoxes. As Claudia Nelson asserts, ‘while children’s metafiction shares some of the preoccupations identified by theorists of adult metafiction, it also reveals a specific set of authorial assumptions about child-adult as well as child-book relationships’ (2006: 223). The same can be said of all children’s literature. These ‘assumptions’ form part of the transmission and enculturation process about childhood inherent to children’s literature generally but, in the case of metafiction, with an additional special focus on literacy and literateness, for example. But there is also another paradox created specifically by the ‘meta’ aspect of ‘metafiction,’ namely that metafiction is a sophisticated literary mode which implies a sophisticated and literate (and literary) reader. Yet, by definition, children’s metafiction intends a developing reader—one who is less sophisticated and less literate than an adult reader.

Twin Paradoxes of Children’s Metafiction: Knowing the Child Reader, and the Knowing Child Reader Claudia Nelson again succinctly draws the connection between the ‘impossibility’ of children’s literature and how that context further impacts upon children’s metafiction: Thus children’s literature, a term tinged with irony by the elided gap between producer and consumer, is both mimetic and prescriptive. It traces a history of ­childhood that is simultaneously a history of adult wishes about childhood—or, in this case, about childhood reading . . . In its exploration of reader-text interaction as the warp and woof of the marvelous, children’s metafiction contemplates

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the ­psychology of reading while simultaneously functioning to define what reading should be. (2006: 223)

In other words, the prescriptive nature of children’s metafiction, as of all children’s literature, essentially scripts for child readers not only what reading is and should be, but also what childhood is and should be. This prescriptive function—inherent to the ‘impossibility of children’s ­literature’ paradox—thus has important ramifications for metafiction’s didacticism as well as for its much-touted subversive potential. For the most part I will use textual cues to identify the intended or implied child reader (the term ‘presupposed’ relies on these textual cues) and the text’s relationship to that subject position, but in order to discuss the second paradox (the knowing child reader) it is necessary to rely on further research of inherently unknowable child readers of metafiction. In Linda Hutcheon’s formulation, the metafictional paradox is two-fold. The reader’s paradox is that while distanced emotionally from the text by virtue of its rhetorical flauntings, the reader is nevertheless required to be more involved than ever through co-creativity. And the textual paradox is, as has been said, that it is ‘both narcissistically self-reflexive and yet focused outward, oriented toward the reader’ ([1980] 1984: 7). But additionally, there are paradoxes inherent in the notion of metafiction for children, not least that metafiction imagines a sophisticated reader. It is inherently double rather than singular and relies for effect on a knowledge of codes and conventions about literature and its illustrations. If these are not already known prior to reading the work, metafiction presupposes that they can be learned simultaneous with (and by) reading. In A Rhetoric of Metafiction, Beth Ann Boehm notes that critics and readers often react negatively to metafiction ‘arguing that the reader must “dig too hard” to make sense of the works’ (1987: 1). She writes that metafictional texts ‘demand different readerly responses’ from traditionally mimetic texts and also require that the authorial reader ‘ask different questions about the literary transaction’ (Ibid.: 4, 15). The duality of the reader’s task is always emphasized: The experience of reading metafiction is different from the experience of reading mimetic fiction, in part because we are never allowed to forget that the text before us is a fictional construct, but also because our roles as readers and our attitudes toward literature are redefined by these texts . . . our involvement is never only in the ­narrative world of the text but always also in the process by which that text is constructed. (Ibid.: 4)

Boehm relies on the distinction between narrative reader (immersed in the narrative world of the text) and authorial reader (receptive to the

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te x t s a nd c o nte x t s 23 s­elf-reflexive focus on the artifact) in her discussion of how different metafictions achieve their effects. This doubleness in the experience of reading is inseparable from metafiction; the medium is responsible for the ­experience of the message as well. Such metafictional paradoxes are evident when we shift consideration to a young, or emergent, reader tasked with reading simultaneously the  product and processes of the text. Metafictions both presuppose and require readers with experience and sophistication yet, as has been said, children’s metafictions are intended for readers who ostensibly lack both. There is a certain chicken-and-egg circularity about this problem, but the stakes are high in reading education. Educators deem that, for readers, developing competencies in metafiction is essential for developing competence in traditional genres. In their exhortation for more pedagogical scaffolding for teen readers of YA metafiction, Joan Knickerbocker and Martha Brueggeman argue that teachers have ‘responsibility for modeling a literate life’ (2008: 66), and also that ‘[t]eachers may need to adapt some familiar approaches in order to guide students’ reading’ of metafiction (Ibid.: 72). Metafiction shows students ‘how the fiction they typically read works’ (70). Reading ‘challenging postmodern books’ (71) with metafictive devices helps to develop readers in all respects. Most especially, the imagined ideal twenty-first-century post-internet reader is best served by postmodern texts with their metafictive devices in that they foster ‘flexibility’ and the ability to read texts requiring ‘multiple literacies’ (Knickerbocker and Brueggeman 2008: 71). Some critics point to the difficulty for the young reader of rising to the challenge. Don Philpot, for instance, writes that ‘Metafictional novels [. . .] can be intimidating for readers who have no specific tools with which to approach them’ (2005: 142). Yet the majority of applied research confirms that metafiction can be understood—to variable degrees—by even the earliest readers. Despite the need for pedagogical scaffolding in the adolescent classroom described by Knickerbocker and Brueggeman, however, research of actual readers shows that metafiction is broadly comprehended even by the very young. Sylvia Pantaleo’s body of recent field research demonstrates that metafictional picturebooks, including parodic picturebooks, can be understood at a sophisticated level by readers at both verbal and visual levels; that children are capable of developing a metalanguage with which to talk about it; and, furthermore, that they are able to replicate metafictive devices (see Pantaleo’s list of such devices later in this chapter) in their own writing as well. In a number of articles, she presents her research in classrooms of a range of school-aged children under

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o­ bservation and during follow-up writing exercises. Her research supports Bette Goldstone’s statement that ‘children can handle quite sophisticated and visual and narrative devices’ (1998: 51). Finally, children’s literature has always borne a didactic expectation— more so than literature for adults. Many works defy this expectation and do not purport to teach children anything. But literacy and literateness are nevertheless goals of getting children to read; reading education has primacy in all aspects of K–12 education, even beyond literacy primers. To sweeten the pill, children’s literature has of course historically aimed to combine instruction with delight. Fiction in particular must delight and thereby seduce its child reader before any didacticism will be successful. These generic, intertwined didactic and ludic impulses of children’s literature are perfect matches for children’s metafiction. There is a point to inviting the reader behind the curtain and showing them the mirror in the text. The point varies, but always exists. Revisiting and extending the quotation of Patricia Waugh’s seminal definition of metafiction would be useful here: Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text. (1984: 2, emphasis added)

Critics of children’s metafictions focus heavily on the purposefulness of metafiction—the why of children’s metafiction is inherently didactic, even if the end result of the didacticism is an attempt to liberate and empower the child reader. Yet the playfulness of children’s metafiction is also emphasized; it is perhaps in counterbalance to the greater didactic freighting of children’s metafiction that the greater element of playfulness engendered by such self-reflexivity is employed.13 As this section has hopefully indicated, defining ‘children’s metafiction’ is not simply a case of taking theories of (adult) metafiction and adding the juvenile qualifier. The audience for children’s metafiction shifts, frustrates, and complicates all of its contexts, including even the most basic question of definition.

How Does Children’s Metafiction Work? No two metafictional texts look or work exactly the same. In Frindle (1996), Andrew Clements’ protagonist Nick realizes that he can invent

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a word that means ‘pen’ and that word ultimately ends up in Webster’s College Dictionary as a result. This upper-elementary novel focuses, like the Cheshire cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, on the tenuous and communicative nature of the semiotic system at the heart of all language. In J. M. Barrie’s novel Peter and Wendy (1911), the intrusive authorial narrator comments conversationally on the action rather more often than not. In Beyond the Great Wall, a Choose Your Own Adventure novel by Jay Leibold (1987), the novel is written in second person as a series of narrative options the reader can choose to follow, more than one of which quite literally dead end. And Rump: The True Story of Rumpelstiltskin, by Liesl Shurtliff (2013), functions by rewriting a dominant, familiar intertext: the Grimm’s tale of ‘Rumpelstiltskin.’ All of these works are children’s metafictions. The variety of topic, approach, and reading level sampled here is indicative of the wide scope of metafictional manifestations in children’s literature. A list of the devices employed by children’s metafiction risks being reductive, although necessary. It is important to note, however, that while the devices themselves may be similar to those used in ‘adult’ metafiction, other generic features of children’s literature may ­ throw them into ­different  or greater relief. Mike Cadden notes that ‘some aspects of ­narrative take on greater (or at least different) significance when we consider the special  connection of children’s literature’ (2010: xii), and Margaret Higonnet notes along these lines that the brevity of much ­children’s literature ­foregrounds their peritexts (1990:  n.p.). However, select ­prominent themes evident in many children’s m ­ etafictions ­(bookworms and ­reluctant readers,  bibliophilia, the authority of books  and  authors, agency  in ­readership and authorship) are outlined below and then noted with regard to specific texts by way of example. Lists of devices of children’s metafiction, specifically, tend to appear in educator resources in order to define markers for studying what young readers process in their reading. Sylvia Pantaleo uses an 18-point ‘List of Metafictive Devices’ which she provides as Appendix or Figure in more than one of her articles. In each instance she indicates the list is by no means absolute or prescriptive.14 a. ‘overly obtrusive narrators who directly address readers and comment on their own narrations’ b. polyphonic narratives or multiple narrators or character focalisers c. manifold or multiple narratives, or multistranded narratives (i.e. ‘two or more interconnected narrative strands differentiated by shifts in temporal and spatial relationships, and/or shifts in narrative point of view’)

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d. narrative framing devices (e.g., stories within stories, ‘characters reading about their own fictional lives . . . self-consuming worlds or mutually contradictory situations . . . a nesting of narrators’) e. disruptions of traditional time and space relationships in the narrative(s) f. nonlinear and nonsequential plots including narrative continuities g. intertextuality h. ‘parodic appropriations of other texts, genres and discourses’ i. typographic experimentation j. ‘mixing of genres, discourse styles, modes of narration and speech representation,’ including ‘people prose’ k. ‘situations where characters and narrators change places, or shift from one plane of being to another’ l. ‘a pastiche of illustrative styles’ m. ‘new and unusual design and layout, which challenge the reader’s perception of how to read a book’ n.  excess (i.e. ‘testing limits—linguistic, literary, social, conceptual, ethical, narrative’) o. illustrative framing, including mise-en-abyme (i.e. ‘a text—visual or verbal— embedded within another text as its miniature replica’) p. description of the creative process making readers ‘conscious of the literary and artistic devices used in the story’s creation’ q. ‘indeterminacy in written or illustrative text, plot, character or setting’ r. ‘availability of multiple readings and meanings for a variety of audiences’ (2004b: 35–36)

As the sources Pantaleo provides for her list underscore, the literary devices of children’s metafiction are not inherently different from those of adult metafiction. The list also makes clear that metafiction (in the case of picturebooks, or graphic novels for example)15 is not only a verbal matter but also a visual one, and that visual competencies are called into play along with textual competencies, as well as the interplay between them. Finally, the list hints at the reader’s role in reading metafiction. While some devices are textual (or visual) properties, the role of indeterminacy is, as Pantaleo and the critics she cites make clear, to call the reader in to co-create the text. The result of ambiguity or polyvalent meanings is to call the enterprise of making meaning (hermeneutics) to the foreground. Thus, children’s metafiction is not simply the metafictional artifact, but also what that mode means for the reader. While largely similar in manifestation to adult fiction, then, and to reprise Claudia Nelson’s phrasing again, children’s metafictions share more of a family resemblance with each other than with their adult counterparts (2006: 226).

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Examples of Children’s Metafictions by Readership Metafictional children’s books are not limited by subgenre within children’s literature. From picturebooks for both pre-literate children and more developed readers, to primers and chapter books for emerging readers, to Middle Grade (MG) and Young Adult (YA) novels and series, the metafictional mode manifests across the range. The following provide some concrete examples in three categories: Picturebooks, Early Readers (Literacy Primers), and MG/YA Series Novels, including the fictional diary and the—often related—DIY (do it yourself) book. A specific subsection of children’s metafictions, those featuring a ‘book within the book’ also follows. Picturebooks David Lewis writes representatively of the multi-codedness of children’s picture books: ‘Picture books of all kinds are inescapably plural . . . Meaning is always generated in at least two different ways’ (1990: 141). As many studies of metafictional picture books demonstrate, the very juxtaposition of two dominant sign systems (text and image) invites the reader to actively make meaning in a number of ways, while simultaneously demonstrating that sign systems construct meaning differently. Three examples will serve to show how sophisticated metafictional picturebooks can be and are increasingly becoming.16 In The Monster at the End of This Book (Sesame Street, 1971), the fuzzy, blue muppet Grover, discovering there is a monster at the end of this book, exhorts the reader not to read any further. To arrive at the end of the book is to arrive at the monster. Grover pleads and puts up obstacles (like a net, and then a brick wall) which are no match for the reader who has only to turn the page to frustrate his plans: ‘Do you know that you are very strong?’ The monster at the end of the book turns out to be Grover, himself, whereupon he is ‘so embarrassed.’ The fonts vary in size as he shouts or whispers, and even the front matter is foregrounded: the title page is illustrated with a corner folded up. ‘This is a very dull page. What is on the next page?’ Grover says, setting the page-turning reader in motion. Simon’s Book by Henrik Drescher (1983) depicts a nighttime adventure as Simon illustrates before going to bed. He is working ‘to draw a story’ about himself and a scary monster. Through the night, his picture self is chased by the monster. The ink pens try to help him, drawing a hole to escape the page, for example, but ultimately the monster turns out to be friendly. When Simon wakes, he finds a completed book where his

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­ nfinished drawing was, and the book is circular: the reader is told it is the u very book we just finished reading. The front and back matter of the book are equally self-referential, featuring ink blots and the monster trying to eat the dedication. Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Book? by Lauren Child (2002) uses a similar conceit to Simon’s Book, with Child’s signature collage style of illustration. Herb is a voracious reader and one night, with his friend Ezzie staying over, he falls asleep with his head in a book of fairy tales. Being scolded by Goldilocks for being on her page, Herb realizes ‘he had fallen into the book.’ He is chased through the woods into a palace where he discovers the results of his own handiwork on his books: all the characters have mustache doodles and Prince Charming has disappeared as Herb cut him out on another occasion to use on a birthday card. Pages have actual holes in them, akin to Eric Carle’s classic toybook The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969), pages are upside down after Herb crawls through them, and fonts vary wildly. Ultimately Herb puts most things to rights, leaving a wig on Goldilocks, and presumably keeps better care of his books in future. The inside front and back covers draw attention to themselves as pages with a ‘tear’ and a fold down corner, and the front matter page is scrawled on in the way Herb doctored his own books, foregrounding the device the reader is about to experience. The line between fantasy and reality is blurred (although in Child’s book, as with Simon’s Book, much of the fantasy happens while the main character is sleeping and dreaming). Early Readers (Literacy Primers) From the self-reflexive abecedaria illustrated to make the alphabet letters resemble some object that begins with that letter, learning to read has always been a self-reflexive exercise. The enormously popular author Mo Willems, in addition to a number of metafictional picturebooks such as Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus (2003), and Don’t Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late (2006), also has a successful early reader series, the Elephant and Piggie books. All of them feature metafictional conventions of both text and illustration. On the front cover of We Are in a Book! (2010), Elephant is gazing up at the title while Piggie—whose body is blocking the author’s name—pulls up a corner. They see they are being read by a reader who is reading aloud from speech bubbles. Elephant and Piggie determine to make the reader say a funny word, ‘banana.’ But as the story progresses Gerald (the elephant) learns that all books end, including his, and he experiences angst. The solution is to ask the reader to read them again. The book in fact begins with Piggie saying ‘Thank you,’ which only makes sense upon such a (presupposed) second reading. Typographical features

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te x t s a nd c o nte x t s 29 provide nuance from the very limited and basic text. Elephant’s comments are rendered in gray while Piggie’s are always in pink. Whispering and shouting are shown by lower and upper case, and the font size and degree of boldness also contribute to this range. In illustration, movement lines are used in a variety of ways, facial expressions are rendered with a variety of cartoon wrinkles, epiphany lines are drawn overhead, and there is a drawn trajectory for Piggie when he is blown backwards by Gerald’s enthusiasm. Perspective is foregrounded as they approach closer to the ‘fourth wall’ to peer out at the reader or recede into the background of the page. The book functions not simply as a self-reflexive elementary reader, then, but as a self-reflexive elementary visual aid as well. Middle Grade and Young Adult Series Novels As can be seen in the select case studies later in this book, the manifestations of children’s metafiction exhibit an enormous range. But it is worth noting here as well that in the expected collection of libraries, riddles, diaries, and letters and different fonts, the genre exhibits a prominent focus on the very aspect that distinguishes it from its adult counterpart: the child reader. While all metafictions take reading into account, it might be useful to recall here Hutcheon’s distinction between inwardly- and outwardly-focused metafictions. By installing the child reader as a central protagonist in many of these metafictions for child readers, and by frequent use of devices to break the ‘fourth wall’ of fiction, it may be possible to argue that children’s metafictions feature the (child) reader more often and more systematically than adult metafictions do. Many feature the youthful bookworm, affirming the reader by being an ideal reflection of them. Meggie in Cornelia Funke’s Inkworld trilogy, Hermione Granger in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Klaus in Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events series, Despereaux the mouse in Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux, siblings Jack and Annie in the Magic Treehouse series by Mary Pope Osborne (launched in 1992 with Dinosaurs before Dark, and now numbering more than fifty books), and Liesel in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief are widely disparate examples of readers who use books to make, navigate, and reflect upon the lived experience. But while they share this dominant characteristic, their motivations and characterizations are highly individualized. Some metafictions are instead bildungsroman for the youthful bookworm. They feature reluctant, challenged, or emerging readers, like the boy and girl in the Cracked Classics series by Tony Abbott (like Trapped in Transylvania: The Adventures of Dracula) who are perpetually acting out and faking their book reports until they find themselves inside a

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(classic) book and have to use their interpretive powers to escape: ‘Hey, wait. Frankie, are you actually . . . you know, reading?’ (2002: 26). This is also the case for Jared in The Spiderwick Chronicles who is mocked by both siblings for being a non-reader until he obtains the book of his greatgrandfather and masters it through obsessive reading. His siblings ultimately defer to his direction and wisdom as he guides them through their adventures by virtue of his knowledge of the book. Similarly, the education of Bod in Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2008) begins with ghosts teaching him his alphabet using letters on tombstones in the graveyard they inhabit, but Bod becomes a skilled researcher whose ability to read and research results in unlocking the secrets of his family’s past and his own identity. While many—like Hermione Granger in the later books of the Harry Potter series—may discover the limits of relying on reading and on bookish authority, no protagonist who undergoes this bildung trajectory ultimately rejects reading. All are shown to benefit greatly from the ability and experience of reading, which often has lifesaving ramifications. However, becoming a master reader in children’s metafictions is often equated with critical reading and critical thinking, and an unquestioning acceptance of bookish authority is therefore transcended. A master reader is a questioning reader.

The Fictional Diary, and DIY Spinoffs Two dominant subsets within children’s metafiction that perhaps manifest more often in the children’s genres of metafiction than in adult counterparts are the fictional diary (often with autography and other textual replications such as lines, doodles, hole ‘punch’ marks, and so on) and DIY (do it yourself) spinoff book. Older versions of these metafictions can be seen in books like Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ (1982), an early example of a contemporary MG/YA crossover novel due to its enormous popularity with adult readers as well. More recent phenomena include the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, and others in the genre (The Ellie McDoodle Diaries series by Ruth McNally Barshaw, beginning with Have Pen, Will Travel, and the Dork Diaries series by Rachel Renée Russell that began with Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life in 2009). The conceit of a diary which is already self-aware being also self-illustrated, books thus lined, ‘hole punched,’ and filled with crude illustrations and doodles, creates an accessible format that is both metafictional and, like metafictional picturebooks, meta-visual. But, crucially for the metafictional (and meta-visual) arc that invites the reader to co-author the text, the spinoffs to these series make the obvious

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te x t s a nd c o nte x t s 31 transition and draw attention to themselves as ‘meta.’ The Wimpy Kid Do-It-Yourself Book (revised and expanded in 2011) and other assorted products like school planners provide a loose framework for interaction from the reader (turned writer-illustrator). Dork Diaries 3½: How to Dork Your Diary (2011), and OMG! All About Me Diary (2013) follow the same format and serve as prompts for life writing and list making. While the series are fictional diaries, what they prompt in this interactivity may well be non-fiction life writing, but the aspirational arc is underscored: you have read, so now you can write. In her study of these fictional diaries and their ilk, Elisabeth Rees notes the seemingly anachronistic nature of the form: If kids are so high-tech and plugged in these days, why is there such an overwhelming response to ersatz diaries, journals, letters, notebooks, and even casebooks that appear to have been written by hand? Why are middle grade fiction authors ­ reproducing such seemingly antiquated forms and getting, at least for now, such an enthusiastic reception? (2015: 4)

In her discussion of a number of such books and series,17 Rees draws from Derrida’s ‘Signature Event Context’ to posit that such forms selfauthenticate, providing the illusion of presence, and adds that handwriting is associated with creativity and subversion (‘not meant for the surveying, disapproving eye of teachers and parents,’ Ibid.: 7). Rees cites a personal communication from Jeff Kinney, Wimpy Kid series author, who writes that the handwritten font ‘makes a book more accessible to kids.’ He notes that the book ‘feel[s] less like work and more like fun,’ and that it ‘gives the reader a feel for the personality of the writer which, especially in diary format, is a good mechanism to draw the reader in and make the writer feel believable.’18 But also importantly, Kinney suggests a purpose for this: ‘It’s nice for a reader to be able to immerse themselves in a writer’s life in something more than a 140-character burst.’ Although that doesn’t sound like a didactic purpose for fictional handwritten forms, in fact it is. As will be seen, the trajectory of many children’s metafictions (in a variety of formats) is from reader to writer. Immersion in a writer’s life is in fact one possible and significant ‘why’ of children’s metafictions.

The Book(s) Within the Book Another distinct subset of middle grade and young adult metafictions in particular are those which embed significant books within the books themselves. Children’s metafictions often feature libraries, readers—both adept and struggling—bookstores, and significant and even magical books; these

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are quite possibly examples of tropes that appear in greater frequency in children’s metafictions than elsewhere, but as this chapter has argued they certainly take on a different cast by virtue of the children’s contexts in which they are situated. For numerous reasons, some of which are explored in the next section, it can be construed as purposeful that wise characters like the wizard Dumbledore (in the Harry Potter series) is no stranger to a book-filled study. As Laurie Ousley titles her article, adapting a quotation from A Series of Unfortunate Events, ‘well-read people are less likely to be evil’ (2007). As will also be seen in children’s film examples, attitudes towards books and reading typically help to distinguish between positive and negative characters. As libraries and their books (and scrolls) are symbols of enlightenment, so their destruction (as it was for the library of Alexandria by Romans, beginning in ad 48, or the Viking raid on the monastery and library of Lindisfarne in ad 793) is symbolic of the actions of philistines. As Vivienne Smith notes, when Jane Eyre is discovered reading on a window seat by John Reed, the latter demonstrates his ‘boorish disregard of books and readerliness in general’ by throwing a book (2016: 61). Libraries are ubiquitous and purposeful settings in novels as varied in subgenre, plot, and level as So You Want to be a Wizard (Diane Duane 1983), The Giver (Lois Lowry 1993), Tale of Despereaux (Kate DiCamillo 2003), Alphabet of Thorn (Patricia A. McKillip 2004), Libyrinth (Pearl North 2009), The Dragon in the Library (Kate Klimo 2010), and Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library (Chris Grabenstein 2013).19 Surrogates for libraries—studies and bookstores—feature in some of these same novels as well as others, such as Inkheart (Cornelia Funke 2003) and The Neverending Story (Michael Ende 1979). In more than one of these fictions, a child enters a library or bookstore in order to escape bullies (The Neverending Story, Libyrinth). Purveyors of books—be they booksellers, librarians, or wizards—assume the role of important helper figures. In A Series of Unfortunate Events, friendly adults are the ones with libraries. While the adults themselves may not be as helpful as they could be—a deliberate motif of the series—the access to books they provide is always key. The librarians and their young trainees in Jen Swann Downey’s Ninja Librarians series (2014–) time travel to protect writers and thinkers in peril. In both The Pagemaster (1993; the book is based on the film) and the Cracked Classics series by Tony Abbott (2002–), thematized readers get trapped in adventures framed by known books—and initiated by knowing librarians.20 In a further subset of children’s metafictions, many feature a significant, embedded book that functions as a major plot driver for the story.

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te x t s a nd c o nte x t s 33 In Edward Eager’s Seven-Day Magic (1962), a group of friends find a magical book in the fairy tale section of the library. Over the course of the fiction, their wish to have great adventures is granted by the book and their experiences ‘write’ the book into a work of adventure. In Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted, for example, Ella (a version of Cinderella, cursed with the gift of obedience) is given a ‘magic book’ (1997: 114) that shows her different things each time she opens it and which broadens her scope of knowledge to include events she otherwise would not have access to.21 Many such books are eponymous: the novel title is that of the embedded book. In So You Want to be a Wizard (1982), the eponymous embedded book (‘So You Want to be a Wizard’) is an instruction manual and an ode to the power of words (‘Wizards love words . . . Words skillfully used, the persuasive voice, the persuading mind, are the wizard’s most basic tools’ [13]). The confluence of magical ‘spelling’ and orthographic ‘spelling’ is at the heart of most children’s books featuring the former. The importance of getting the wording of spells right is emphasized in books like Igraine the Brave, by Cornelia Funke (1998), in which Igraine and her brother must rescue their parents and the Books of Magic after her parents had a ‘slip of the tongue’ (27), and every one of the Harry Potter novels where students of magic learn the importance of precise language in making spells. As Jane Yolen writes in Wizard’s Hall: ‘magic is tough and sometimes dangerous, and the words you use are always important’ ([1991] 1999: 18–19). In Malice and its sequel Havoc (Chris Wooding 2009, 2010), a group of friends are trapped inside a horror comic called Malice; the books themselves are hybrid novel and graphic comic book. In The Princess Bride, by William Goldman, the eponymous book is a swashbuckling fantasyadventure story. In the novel, the author reveals that the magic of the story was his father reading it aloud and transforming the author into ‘a different child’ ([1973] 1987: 10). As an adult, the author discovers the father’s labor of love in reading only the ‘good bits’ of the story, and in inventing a happy ending for it. The ‘real’ book, by S. Morgenstern, is a dry history. The author, tasked with writing a screenplay, in turn reprises ‘the good bits’ in an effort to reach his own son—resulting in the novel The Princess Bride. Other significant, plot-driver embedded books can be found in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Tom Riddle’s diary); Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (the annotated Potions textbook); Inkheart (‘Inkheart’); The Spiderwick Chronicles (‘Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You’). Each of these novels has been adapted for the screen and will be discussed in Chapters 3 and 4

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s­ pecifically in the context of transmediating these embedded, self-reflexive books-within-books.

The ‘Why’ of Children’s Metafiction In its methods, children’s metafiction is largely indistinguishable from the adult-oriented variety. However, the crucial difference is of course the implied reader. The differentiation of the child reader is at the heart of children’s metafiction just as it is of children’s literature in general. The work of children’s metafiction that results from the same set of devices can be hypothesized to be essentially the same as that for adults. But it works on and with a different reader. The intended and implied purpose of children’s metafiction is where these differences must be taken into account. And the differences are evident in three main areas of children’s metafiction: its inherent paradoxes of readership; its main modes (didactic and ludic); and its purported goals of subversion, empowerment, and transcendence. Metafiction is, in Beth Ann Boehm’s words, ‘anchored in the “art of the didactic”’ (1987: 20); metafictions both teach and delight readers (Ibid.: 7). Pantaleo concurs with M. Meek (How Texts Teach what Readers Learn, 1988) that metafictional picturebooks ‘provide reading lessons for readers about the construction of narratives by authors, and about their roles as readers’ (quoted in 2005: 30–31), and that ‘the most important single lesson that children learn from texts is the nature and variety of written discourse’ (quoted in 2009: 205, original emphasis). Reading metafiction creates agency for the reader (Pantaleo 2005: 31, and 2008: 31); readers are more ‘interactive and interpretive’ (2004b: 212); they ‘actively engage’ in making meaning and thus learn ‘critical literacy’ (McCallum 2008: 191); and they ‘mobilise a child-reader subjectivity that is intertextually more aware and literarily competent’ (Wilkie-Stibbs 2005: 177). Critical literacy seems to be of paramount importance, especially in the transmedial world of the information age. As Mackey writes in ‘Postmodern Picturebooks and the Material Conditions of Reading,’ ‘Learning the importance of inspecting, criticizing, and augmenting one’s understanding is as crucial an element in learning to read as mastering the skill of decoding’ (2008: 106). In ‘“It’s not all black and white,”’ Michèle Antsey further advocates the use of metafictional picturebooks in secondary and tertiary classrooms as well, reinforcing the pedagogical aspects of such picturebooks purportedly for young children (2002: 445). Children’s metafiction is a useful or even necessary precursor to mature reading whose competencies must include tolerance for ambiguity and the ability

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to understand ‘irregularities and complexities’ (Pantaleo 2014: 329).22 Pantaleo links her observations to Mackey’s argument that an awareness of ‘some sort of distance between reader and story’ is ‘essential to full adult reading’ (2014: 329, citing Mackey 1990: 180). The active, engaged reader of metafiction has already much in common with the ‘wreader’—the writerly, co-productive reader of new media.23 One interesting implication of Pantaleo’s research is the idea that children are introduced, in many cases, to narrative patterns that breach the ‘European North American linear narrative structure of beginning, middle and end,’ and that they thus learn such linear narrative structure to be only one among many, which ‘can augment their schemata of narrative structures’ (2004b: 212). Thus, as Michèle Antsey also writes, children develop competencies with ‘a range of linguistic, discursive, and semiotic systems’ through reading metafiction (Pantaleo, 2004a: 11, Antsey 2002: 448). Discussing the need for web literacy, Wendy Sutherland-Smith warned that readers who lack competence in it may ‘suffer exclusion from global literacy’ (2002: 662). Metafiction, then, like web literacy, includes strategies for learning a form of ‘global literacy’ that is not dependent on the narrative structures of a single dominant culture. Michèle Antsey similarly connects metafiction with ‘new literacies’ and even provides a figure that cross-references characteristics of metafiction with those of multiliteracies (2002: 448), which she summarizes in the following way: Multiliteracies focus on the many modes of representation and forms of text that have been made available through multimedia and technological change. Therefore, being multiliterate requires not only the mastery of communication, but an ability to critically analyse, deconstruct, and reconstruct a range of texts and other representational forms. It also requires the ability to engage in the social responsibilities and interactions associated with these texts. (Ibid.: 446)

Furthermore, Pantaleo links her research with that in Eliza Dresang’s work Radical Change (1999), where many characteristics of metafictional children’s books represent ‘Radical Change’ phenomena. Dresang’s formulation for books for youth are threefold: Type One Radical Change is books with changing forms and formats; Type Two is changing perspectives, and Type Three is changing boundaries. All three versions of Radical Change are associated with various metafictional devices. Before proceeding further with other important things that metafiction may ‘teach,’ such as subversion, it is necessary to discuss the other feature ascribed to metafiction: its ludic nature. In the context of a discussion of the peritexts of children’s literature, Margaret Higonnet refers to its ‘initiatory function’ (1990: n.p.). And it is in the initiatory function of child

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readers/book lovers that the role of metafiction (and other metanarrative elements, such as peritexts) can come to significance. Higonnet makes the connection clear: metanarrative features can bridge the gap between the book-as-toy and narrative experience. Further, as Higonnet also makes clear, both play a role in creating a ‘ludic’ environment with an aspirational arc: from reader to creator. Contemporary interest in the dynamic between text and ‘peritext,’ as a means of organizing literary experience and stimulating the active reader, has particularly significant applications to children’s literature. The interplay of various textual elements tends at once towards two extremes: towards the materialization of the reading process as physical play, and towards the abstraction of narrative into a metanarrative projection. Motivating ludic experiments with the peritext is a faith that the child who makes and remakes the story will become a better reader and maker of stories. (Higonnet: n.p., emphasis added).

Therefore, the inherently ludic nature of metanarrative is play with purpose. Metanarrative features (and metafiction, by extension) operate as a threshold of initiation of the child reader. Therefore, in children’s literature, more so than in adult metafiction, the interconnected aims appear to be ‘to teach and delight.’ The ludic nature of metafiction is put in (disguised) service to the pedagogical function: to teach literacy skills, even multi-literacies; to engage readers to read; to convey to readers how writing and authorship are possible. While children’s metafictions participate in the same process and with similar results, the schism between author and reader (adult and child, respectively), impacts the metafictional context as well. The inherently didactic nature of metafiction takes on a greater importance. The adult writer by granting privileged access to (by de-privileging, in many cases) the writing process through metafiction can be seen as a pedagogue teaching the child reader how stories are constructed. The conventions of fiction are taught simultaneous with the story being told. The ‘message’ may be that ‘reading is fun!’ but that particular argument doesn’t generally suffice for adult metafiction. Further, metafiction may even have connotations of difficulty, which would work against the idea that ‘reading is fun.’ When the intended and implied reader is a child, even the outcome of the ludic appeal—that reading is fun—has didactic overtones. The hidden hook in the lure of the ludic (‘reading is fun!’) then, is in what follows: ‘so read more!’ A second identifiable aspect of the ludic nature of metafiction is another manifestation of the historic toy-book. The link between books and play was made as early as John Newbery in his marketing of the Little Pretty

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Pocket Book Intended for the Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly (1744) with a ball or pincushion (for boys and girls, respectively). The book was an abecedarium, a teaching primer, marketed for ‘amusement.’ Even earlier, edible alphabets—hornbooks made out of gingerbread, for example—could be called manipulatable text, where reading garners tangible rewards (Norton Anthology 2005: 3).24 In Margaret Higonnet’s words: ‘already evident in these physical features of children’s literature is the deliberate seduction through play of the reader’ (1990: 2). Yet, again, the seduction through play has didactic purpose. Such books ‘stimulat[e] the active reader’ (Ibid.: 4) and serve as ‘initiatory.’ The contemporary ‘toy book’ Captain Underpants series, by Dave Pilkey, is thus metafiction with purpose also. The role of play and that of reader involvement in or with the text appear inextricable, and that connection is key. Play is work, and vice versa. Readers of metafiction must, as was seen in the discussion of adult metafiction above, work to a greater degree. Reading is double. Readers read both the novel and literary criticism, through metafiction. And often readers work to co-create the fiction they are reading to a heightened degree. A common refrain in criticism is that the element of play ‘activates’ the reader (Tosi 2006: 74–78). Play cannot be passive; it encourages and requires an active reader. Metafiction also encourages, requires, and teaches active reading. So, the ludic and didactic impulses are fundamentally intertwined in metafiction. The element of play is accredited with activating the reader, engaging them in the work of the text. But this is not usually seen as an end unto itself. Instead, and as is common in the history of children’s literature more generally, the play of metafiction serves its didacticism. The links between devices (what), activating the reader (how), and producing results (why) can clearly be seen in Laura Tosi’s argument for metafictional fairy tales. She first argues that the techniques of metafiction activate the reader’s competency and encourages collaboration (what and how): ‘Similarly foregrounding and boundary-breaking techniques . . . are employed in metafictional fairy tales for children, which activate the reader’s intertextual competency . . . and his/her active collaboration in the production of meaning’ (74). Tosi then argues that the end result of this can be didactic without appearing to be so (78, and citing Mackey 1990). This then is a common chain of connection that credits metafiction and metafictional reading with significant potential for subversion, empowerment, and transformation. While, as will be seen, there is some question about just how much subversion is possible with metafiction, and how much freedom and empowerment the reader actually has as a reader, these

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are important touchstones of metafiction in the fiction itself as well as the criticism, and any interpretation of the purposes of children’s metafictions must take them into account. The ‘lessons’ of metafiction for children and adults are consistently described as lessons in language, in readership of all texts, and of the world.25

Subversion, Empowerment, Transformation As with metafiction for adult readers, an important goal of children’s metafiction is—ostensibly—subversion. By exposing conventions and norms, metafictions encourage the reader to question them and, by extrapolation, the world that created them. As Patricia Waugh writes: ‘In showing us how literary fiction creates its imaginary worlds, metafiction helps us to understand how the reality we live day by day is similarly constructed, similarly written’ (1984: 18). And as Waugh goes on to note, the end point of that understanding is ‘how’ the ‘meanings and values’ of that reality ‘can be challenged or changed’ (Ibid.: 34). Again, this extension of metafiction’s subversive and empowering ‘lessons’ to the real world of the reader comprises its outward—­ transformative—reach and application. Knowledge is power; ‘To claim that reading empowers is unexceptional,’ write Evelyn Arizpe and Vivienne Smith in their collection on children as readers in literature (2016: xiv). The literature is transformative, and the reader has the power to transform themselves and the world beyond books. Don Philpot concludes his article on children’s metafictions by positing its real-world applications: ‘When readers understand how meaning is made, they themselves become conscious meaning-makers capable of transforming not only their views of the world but the world itself ’ (2005: 156–57). Mary Jeanette Moran writes similarly: The metatextual elements of the Judy Bolton series thus reinforce one of the realities illuminated by the increasing sophistication of children’s culture: the ability of juvenile texts—and young people themselves—to participate in a dialectical and empowering relationship with other texts and types of media. (2011: 240)

Expectations and stakes are thus high. By exposing the constructedness and ideological encodings of language, of story, and of genre, metafiction takes ‘this relatively stable interpersonal system’ of realism, ‘the illusion of a real world that we share with the characters,’ and ‘disturb[s] and subvert[s]’ it (Lewis 1990: 138). As Joe Sutliff Sanders notes in ‘The Critical Reader in Children’s Metafiction,’ this is

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te x t s a nd c o nte x t s 39 the dominant refrain of children’s metafiction: ‘the mode is read as liberating, anti-didactic, and consistently subversive’ (2009: 350). Patricia Waugh writes that metafictions may ‘undermine the authority of the omniscient author’ (1984: 13), empowering the reader. Beth Ann Boehm similarly argues that by exposing the ‘man-madeness’ of fictional constructs, writers ‘reject the metaphor that equates author and god, thus denying the author’s role as a prophet who teaches absolute truths’ (1987: 5). Metafiction for children thus must walk a fine line: between the didactic authority of the text to teach valuable and transformative lessons, and the empowerment of the reader to question such authority; to be prescriptive of what childhood is and should be from an adult perspective, and at the same time to expose the constructedness of that very prescription. Metafiction’s inward- and outward-reaching duality—its metaleptic function—is the mechanism by which readers are invited to identify with the interior characters, settings, and themes of the fiction. And although no two metafictions are identical, so too other ‘purposes’ for children’s metafictions can be inferred from these more global directives to subversion, empowerment, and transformation—such as consolation of grief, recreating family bonds, the acquisition of courage and self-mastery, and the proper use of power, as will be seen in Chapter 3. A significant theme in children’s metafiction is lining a path to authorship. By effectively demystifying authorship, authors democratize the role and empower the (child) reader to accept an invitation to author. Claudia Nelson refers to Meggie in Inkheart who aspires to authorship at the end of that novel: ‘Meggie determines at the end of the novel to become an author, thus achieving what all these metafictions identify, implicitly or explicitly, as the ultimate form of agency’ (2006: 233). Nelson goes on to say that children’s metafiction therefore exhibits ‘a kind of double ­didacticism’—both furthering the ‘same moral values’ of convention children’s literature and at the same time harnessing metafiction’s subversive potential to encourage young readers to question that same authority. This subversion, she writes ‘may be reading’s most important lesson’ (Ibid.: 233).

Apotheosis to Authorship But this celebration of readerly enfranchisement invokes another of metafiction’s paradoxes. The empowerment of the reader is not at the expense of the ‘author’ or the rhetorically created subject position such an author occupies in the text. The subversive nature of metafiction is problematic. As Waugh writes, ‘the defamiliarization [of select metafictions] proceeds from an extremely familiar base’ (1984: 13). In other words, the laying

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bare of illusion that metafiction does, subversively, is merely another illusion. If the author is dead, in Barthesian terms, Linda Hutcheon notes that ‘his position—one of discursive authority—remains’ ([1980] 1984: xv). The much-touted freedoms of the co-productive reader are manipulated within a set framework: ‘This is a freedom which operates inside, of course, the bounds of that internalized grammar or code that genre expectations establish’ (Ibid.: 30), among other bounds as well. And by affirming that authorship is the ultimate form of agency, metafictional authors still by definition retain this authority over the child reader. In the context of c­hildren’s metafictions, Joe Sutliff Sanders notes that metafiction’s subversion is ‘at best a muddled form of subversion’ (2009: 349). Children’s metafiction promotes a more ‘sustainable’ relationship based on ‘camaraderie’ between readers and books (Ibid.: 354). And in her article on postmodern picturebooks, Karen Coats also notes that ‘[w]hat postmodern picturebooks do not do . . . is present the postmodern critique in its nihilistic or even its angst-y guise’ (2008: 79), but rather ‘the face of postmodernism that gets presented to children in picturebooks is its hopeful, ludic one,’ aimed at ‘empowerment for the reader’ (Ibid.: 80). However, Sanders identifies children’s metafictions about books and their readers, specifically, as the type of metafiction that complicates this subversive potentiality most, and that ‘wraps its subversive tendencies in a velvet glove’ (2009: 351). He comments that ‘In this mode, the relationship between reader and text is generally ennobling for the imagined reader; it is an uncomplicated, benign relationship that implicitly argues that whatever else might need subverting, the reader-book bond is sacrosanct’ (Ibid.: 351). Sanders points out that stories that tell readers to ‘trust the authority of books’ are ‘at least didactic,’ if not ‘propagandistic,’ an argument that counters the anti-didactic claim for children’s metafictions (Ibid.: 352, original emphasis). They have ‘their conservative aspects’ (Nelson 2006: 234), a notion which undermines the subversive reputation and potential of children’s metafictions. In a final twist, if the subversive nature of metafiction is an empowerment of the reader that is in fact illusory, however, it is also the case that metafiction has the potential to lay even that illusion bare. In some parodic metafictions there is a deliberate foregrounding and thus deconstructing of the same author-reader, adult-child power dynamic that Jaqueline Rose describes in The Case of Peter Pan: The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Roberta Seelinger Trites similarly argues that while ‘the autonomy that the text’s ambiguity gives to its reader’ may in fact be only ‘the illusion of the reader’s autonomy,’ some metafictions are ‘at least attempting to make readers conscious of the suturing process so that they are less vulnerable

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te x t s a nd c o nte x t s 41 to the pressures of ideological manipulation’ (1994: 240). Ultimately the ‘manifold narratives’ as Trites calls ruptured, metafictive picturebooks (and films, 236) have a liberating function then. They can ‘communicate to children that they are capable of formulating both their own stories and their own ideology’ (238). And that communication may be metafiction’s most subversive potential. The end purpose of metafiction—in so much as an end purpose can be identified at all—becomes once again of paramount importance. I identify a trajectory in many children’s metafictions from reader to writer, even after the tricks of the trade including authorial authority over the reader have been exposed. In the present context, this trajectory may posit a response to the catch-22 of metafiction: the offer and promise of authorial autonomy is illusory as it cannot be taken up by the reader. Metafiction deconstructs from within, which is the only possible place from which to deconstruct the power differential built into children’s media (author/ reader, adult/child, creator/consumer). At the same time, the reader cannot, within the confines of any text, no matter how open, escape the reader position subject to the text’s and author’s authority. Revealing the limitations and the otherwise hidden power dynamic as the first step to inviting genuine authorship suggests that the didacticism of these metafictions may be oriented toward the real-world application of this message. Linda Hutcheon places great emphasis on metafiction’s revelation of the mirroring role of the reader with that of the writer. Masked even by terms for the reader such as ‘co-producer’ of the work, the ‘writerly’ act of reading is one that metafiction is uniquely positioned to make tangible: As the novelist actualizes the world of his imagination through words, so the reader—from those same words—manufactures in reverse a literary universe that is as much his creation as the novelist’s. This near equation of the acts of reading and writing is one of the concerns that sets modern metafiction apart from previous novelistic self-consciousness. ([1980] 1984: 27)

By making it visible to the implied child reader, the ‘real’ empowerment of children’s metafictions may be in the invitation to transcend the readerly position in order to become author beyond the text at hand. In The Book of Lost Things, John Connolly’s protagonist David delves into the world of his books as a form of escape after the death of his mother. Discussing his novel, Connolly writes that David’s escape is actually a form of coming to terms with his fears and loss: ‘He finds a way to externalize his fears and his demons through stories, and in that way he can begin to deal with them’ ([2006] 2007: 345). Connolly continues that David’s apparent ‘solitary, internalizing act that . . . appears to represent a

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disengagement from day-to-day life’ is in fact engagement and empathy: ‘I have always believed that fiction acts as a prism, taking the reality of our existence and breaking it down into its constituent parts’ (Ibid.: 345). At the end of the novel, David completes the apotheosis from reader to become an author of a book: ‘He called it The Book of Lost Things, and the book that you are holding is the book that he wrote’ (Ibid.: 335). In this, I depart from the book-length argument Doughty makes in Throw the Book Away, which is otherwise admirable for being a rare booklength work on children’s metafictions and their adaptations, by definition sharing a lot of common primary texts with my study. Doughty argues that children’s metafictions featuring books, many of which are also discussed here, ultimately teach transcendence; the end goal is to be able to dispense with the book in favor of direct, lived experience. It may be the case that this trajectory is adopted in some cases—not all metafictions have the same role and purpose. Joe Sutliff Sanders’ comments about the essentially friendly relationship between books and readers provide a useful caveat to Doughty’s argument: In the kind of metafiction I am studying, the friendly relationship between books and readers is a setting unsuited to such an antagonistic stance. Any sustainable critical approach in such a sentimental story will have to allow for a camaraderie between book and reader that also permits—or, ideally, encourages—interrogation. (Sanders 2009: 354)

I would argue that in cases where there is a trajectory away from the book it moves beyond direct experience to authorship. There is transcendence, often linked with the exposure of the limitations of the book and of the reader’s autonomy in the reading transaction. Nevertheless, in many children’s metafictions, the trajectory is in fact from reader to writer. Robyn McCallum suggests this trajectory in her remarks on metafictional fairy tale retellings: ‘Such engagement may potentially expand an audience’s knowledge of what stories are like, how they work, and how they might be played with, changed, and retold, and potentially how new stories might be written’ (2008: 191). Renowned author Margaret Atwood writes about this trajectory with regard to her (adult-oriented) metafictional novel The Handmaid’s Tale, on its most recent adaptation to streaming ­television in 2017: There are two reading audiences for Offred’s account: the one at the end of the book, at an academic conference in the future, who are free to read but who are not always as empathetic as one might wish; and the individual reader of the book at any given time. That is the ‘real’ reader, the Dear Reader for whom every writer writes. And

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te x t s a nd c o nte x t s 43 many Dear Readers will become writers in their turn. That is how we writers all started: by reading. (Atwood 2017: n.p.)

In my formulation, then, the emphasis is on apotheosis: from reader to creator, rather than from reliance on books to transcendence beyond them. Even when this apotheosis is qualified (authorship is adult power and agency used to manipulate and proscribe; experience remains bounded by the book) it is posited as a rite of passage.

The Contemporary Explosion of Children’s Metafiction: Why Now? Perhaps it is to these ‘multiple literacies’ expected of an ideal post-digital reader that metafiction owes its contemporary explosion in children’s literature. Despite the fact that literary metafiction is as old as literature, and children’s metafiction is as old as literature for children, a number of critics cite a growing contemporary trend. In part, it may be that with the advent of scholarship on the topic the latent metafictiveness of children’s literature is simply more obvious. But also, post- post-modernism, children’s literature has exploited the more highly developed end of the metafictional spectrum as well. In a New York Times book review titled ‘Metafiction for Beginners,’ Roger Sutton noted that in the decade prior to his writing in 2004: ‘[t]here has been an increasingly wide swath of self-reflexive stories about stories in children’s books’ (22). Prolific children’s literature critic and theorist Maria Nikolajeva also writes that the trend is burgeoning: ‘an ever-growing segment of contemporary children’s literature is transgressing its own boundaries . . . and exhibiting the most prominent features of postmodernism, such as genre eclecticism, disintegration of traditional narrative structures, polyphony, intersubjectivity and metafiction’ (1998: n.p.).26 In one study on the ludic and participatory nature of contemporary picturebooks, she suggests one reason for this: the many indeterminacies of metafiction ‘are in perfect correspondence with postmodern views of the world’ (2008: 73). In this context, articles such as Knickerbocker and Brueggeman’s on the quandary of ‘how to deal with’ this rise in metafiction in the classroom also proves the point. In perfect hindsight, Geoff Moss’ observation in 1990 that ‘there are so few metafictional texts for children’ (50) and his consequent question ‘“Do metafictional texts have any place in children’s literature?”’ seems a touching frontrunner to the slew of research that followed on its heels. However, his conclusion that ‘children’s literature, like any form of literature, will inevitably build on, toy with and perhaps even destroy conventional forms as it develops’

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(Ibid.: 52) remains well-suited to the argument. If metafiction is a means to subversion of conventional forms from within, then its self-conscious adaptation to film may carry that subversive impulse with(in) it. It is not, then, that children’s metafiction has changed in nature over the life of the novel. The devices that Anita Moss identified in Charles Dickens’ A Holiday Romance (1868) and E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) are the same as those used now. In these two works, Moss writes, ‘fictional child authors must struggle with difficult narrative and rhetorical choices as they create their stories’ (1985: n.p.). But these classic novels were ‘rare examples’ at the time, while contemporary children’s metafiction is a replete subgenre. And while they write back to the traditional structures of children’s literature, and develop readers better able to read traditional literature as well, by deviating from it, metafictional children’s works alter the canonical definitions of what constitutes children’s literature. In ‘Exit Children’s Literature?’ Maria Nikolajeva systematically dismantles Perry Nodelman’s earlier taxonomy of the features of children’s literature in The Pleasures of Children’s Literature. In this context, Nikolajeva indicates that the trajectory of ‘children’s’ literature is toward its own disappearance ‘within the broader literary discourse,’ where it will ultimately be subsumed into the mainstream (1998: n.p.). Yet, ‘simplicity’ is not the defining hallmark of children’s genres, so the increasing sophistication of children’s metafiction contributes nothing to a fundamental dissolution of the children’s genre. Eliza Dresang’s theory in her book Radical Change (1999) ties the rise of metafiction in young adult novels in particular to ‘connectivity, interactivity and access in the digital world’ (14). By the turn of the millennium, Bette Goldstone writes ‘The question then is not, “Is postmodernism appropriate for children’s literature?” but rather “How can these books be used successfully in classrooms?”’ (2001–2002: 367). Closely related to Goldstone’s question is the issue of teaching web literacy. The reading education article by Wendy Sutherland-Smith, ‘Weaving the Literacy Web: Changes in Reading from Page to Screen’ discusses how and why to teach ‘web literacy’ in the classroom. Interestingly, in the light of Dresang’s argument for the rise of metafiction having a digital catalyst, Sutherland-Smith’s list of strategies for reading web-based texts coincides closely with generalized lists of metafictive devices: Reading Web-based text • permits nonlinear strategies of thinking; • allows nonhierarchical strategies; • offers nonsequential strategies;

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te x t s a nd c o nte x t s 45 •  requires visual literacy skills to understand multimedia components; •  is interactive, with the reader able to add, change, or move text; and •  enables a blurring of the relationship between reader and writer. (SutherlandSmith 2002: 664–65)

While all metafiction (for all readers) uses various of these devices, it is children’s literature that perhaps most avails itself of the need for visual literacy as a complementary readerly competence. Twenty-first-century reading in fact requires multiliteracy. It is not then that children’s literature has only recently become metafictional. It is rather that, as Maria Nikolajeva writes, ‘None of these features is normally associated with children’s literature’ (1998: 221)27 or, in David Lewis’ article on picturebooks and the metafictive: ‘What we are perhaps less familiar with is the idea of sophisticated writers and illustrators doing precisely the same thing for the least experienced readers—the beginners and the very young’ (1990: 138–39). The nature of the child audience naturally begs the question: how much metafiction do child readers understand? As Mike Cadden writes: While both intertextuality and metafiction have been common features of postmodernism generally, in children’s literature they take on new significance when we consider the degree to which we assume children are supposed to recognize aesthetic features or other tales. (2010: xxi)

In response to this, contemporary analyses of children’s metafiction appear in two strains of academic study. One is applied classroom research, where academics typically take select children’s metafictions into classrooms in small or large groups and document the ways in which they are read or understood by children. This important area documenting as close as is possible the responses of actual child readers is typified by the many studies of Pantaleo, Goldberg, McCallum, Mackey and others, for example. The second area of contemporary study is in works arguing for a more theory-based approach to children’s literature. That research argues, as I do here, that the traditional biases against a ‘simplistic’ literature have persisted in academic study of children’s literature and have therefore failed to respond in any meaningful way to its narrative ­sophistication. Edited collections like Mike Cadden’s Telling Children’s Stories: Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature (2010), and Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford’s Contemporary Children’s Literature and Film: Engaging with Theory (2011) can be seen as correctives to that lack, and they urge that literature scholars include children’s metafictions within their scope.

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As may be evident by this point, metafiction poses some particular challenges to transmediation, and children’s metafiction exerts different pressures and expectations on the process and outcomes of adaptation. Chapter 2 will discuss the forces at work in transmediating children’s metafiction to (children’s) film.

Notes   1. Cadden 2005, 59.   2. As noted by Didicher (1997), and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (2013a).  3. Nelson 2006, 234, citing Waugh 1984, 34–48. However, Waugh’s project argued implicitly for postmodern ludicism to be taken seriously and as such must be taken in its historical academic context.   4. As Winfried Nöth puts it, ‘Metafiction . . . may be described as evincing a higher degree of self-reference than intertextuality’ (2007: 3); ‘Reference and self-reference are thus evidently a matter of degree’ (13). Patricia Waugh notes that while some nineteenth-century novels contain metafictional devices, they are in service of reinforcing traditional mimeticism and ‘it is thus not metafictional’ (1984: 32) in the contemporary sense. Similarly, Linda Hutcheon focuses on degrees and foregrounding so that ‘covert’ metafiction is classed elsewhere on the spectrum from more ‘overt’ forms that characterize twentieth-century metafiction under study. Beth Ann Boehm follows suit in her distinction between ‘radical’ forms of metafiction and ‘those that merely employ metafictional techniques’ (19). In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon notes that in the wake of reader-response theories of the later twentieth century, ‘readers are no longer considered passive recipients of textual meaning but active contributors to the aesthetic process’ ([2006] 2013: 134). She later likens this immersive and participatory factor to new media immersion (136). In this sense, even literature that is not overtly metafictional can be seen to engage the reader in co-productivity. To return to Grenby’s claim for the increasing amount and sophistication of scholarship on children’s literature—it’s not that the literature has manifestly changed, but the critical contexts for it.   5. Robert Stam notes ‘It would be a mistake to regard reflexivity and realism as necessarily antithetical terms’ (1992: 15). Writing about metacinema, William C. Siska (1979) distinguishes between traditional, or orthodox self-reflexivity and ‘modernist’ self-reflexivity, arguing that only the latter is metacinema proper. Traditional self-reflexivity—such as a film set behind the scenes of a film—may in fact be in service of the sustained cinematic illusion, while modernist self-reflexivity ruptures the cinematic illusion. Such self-reference, in the traditional usage, is not incompatible with realism. Dorrit Cohn similarly distinguishes between mise en abyme (embedding) within the work only (interior) and argues that only ‘pure’ mise en abyme extends outward to the extra-

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diegetic world and instills anxiety and unease in the reader. Again, metaleptic crossings that remain safely within the work may not be incompatible with a form of realism either.   6. Notwithstanding the many scholars who have made obvious criticisms about the argument that a story can be transposed from one medium into another, such as by George Bluestone: ‘These standard expletives and judgments assume, among other things, a separable content which may be detached and reproduced, as the snapshot reproduces the kitten’ ([1957] 2003: 5). Transmediality fundamentally presupposes this ability in order to function.   7. As did Genette himself, in Métalepse: de la figure à la fiction (2004).  8. For taxonomies of self-referentiality, and of metalepsis, see Nöth (2007); Kukkonen (2011); Siebert (2007); Withalm (2007); Sarkhosh (2011); Wolf (2009).   9. Dorrit Cohn writes that such examples ‘may take the reader by surprise at any moment’ ([2006] 2012: 107). 10. So called by Magarete Rubik, quoted in Pantaleo (2010: 24): ‘a radical transgression of the narrative hierarchies between the levels of author and reader, narrator, and fictional characters, when the text world suddenly invades the actual world of the reader’ (Rubik 2005: 172). 11. The title of Jacqueline Rose’s book (1984), The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. 12. Amie Doughty summarizes: ‘Children themselves have little say in their reading materials. They are introduced to books by adults who choose them based on any number of criteria: what they enjoyed as children; what they think children should read—often classics and award winners; what fits the curriculum; what other adults recommend’ (2013: 10–11). 13. Margaret Mackey hints at the delicacy of this balance in noting that the ‘reading lesson’ offered by children’s metafiction should be carefully used in the classroom, lest the pedagogical burden rob all pleasure from the reading (1990: 186). Ann Grieve’s article focuses on the play factor of children’s metafiction (1998). 14. Although she cites Linda Hutcheon on parody in at least one article, Pantaleo relies on the critics cited for their work on metafiction and does not cite Hutcheon’s book Narcissistic Narrative. However, the purpose of her use of metafiction is served by this as the body of her research relies on actual classroom studies she has conducted. This list can be found in the Appendix to her article ‘Young Children Engage with the Metafictive in Picture Books’ (2005: 35–36), and ‘Young Children Interpret the Metafictive in Anthony Browne’s Voices in the Park’ (2004b: 230–31). The later, unsourced, version is also used as a Figure in ‘The Metafictive Nature of Postmodern Picturebooks’ (2014: 326). Pantaleo’s list (2005: 35–36) includes the following sources: Antsey (2002); Goldstone (1998); Robyn McCallum, ‘Metafictions and Experimental Work,’ International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, ed. P. Hunt, New York: Routledge, 1996—an earlier publication

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of the essay listed in my works cited; Lewis (1990); [D.] Lodge, The Art of Fiction, London, UK: Penguin Books (1992); Nikolajeva and Scott (2001); [J.] Stephens and [K.] Watson, (eds.) (1994), From Picture Book to Literary Theory, Sydney, Australia: St. Clair Press; Trites (1994); and Waugh (1984). 15. See Paul Atkinson ([2010], 2014), for example. 16. Mary Anne Wolpert and Morag Styles discuss such picturebooks over recent decades and indicate their increasing sophistication and the increasing literacy skills they demand of children: ‘The distance [Jon] Scieszka and [Lane] Smith have travelled in ten years is quite phenomenal . . . That same distance has also had to be scaled by their readers who are expected to be capable of manipulating sophisticated literary skills and draw on knowledge of literature and art history in order to begin to fathom the affordances of these picturebooks’ (2016: 99). 17. Babysitter’s Club, California Diaries, Daddy Long Legs (Jean Webster 2012), Amelia’s Notebook series, Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, The Dork Diaries, My Life as a Book, The 13-Story Treehouse, Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made. 18. Jeff Kinney, email to Elisabeth Rees, 9 April, 2015. Cited with permission of both Kinney and Rees. 19. In end matter to the book, the author writes: ‘I like Mr. Lemoncello’s motto, “Knowledge not shared remains unknown.” A library is, and always has been, a place where we can come together and share what we know—as the whole human race and as individuals’ (Grabenstein 2013: np). 20. While metafictional use of fairy tales requires its own study, it must be noted here that fairy tales are prominent intertextual drivers of such series. In most cases, however, the ‘book’ within these books is that of the fairy tale canon, or one tale in particular. The Sisters Grimm series (Michael Buckley 2007–) features fairy tale detectives Sabrina and Daphne Grimm, and The Land of Stories series (Chris Colfer 2012–2017), has twins Alex and Conner fall into a magical book-portal called The Land of Stories. Both A Curse Dark as Gold (Elizabeth C. Bunce 2008) and Rump: The True Story of Rumpelstiltskin (Liesl Shurtliff 2013) engage readers (YA and MG respectively) in a metafictional, intertextual relationship with the known tale of Rumpelstiltskin with their widely divergent plots and treatments. Children’s films from Shrek (2001), with respect to ogres and princesses, to Hoodwinked! (2005), with respect to the fairy tale ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ function similarly. But while these source novels are certainly metafictional, they form a distinct case for scholarship on fairy tales for which there is already considerable emphasis in the published scholarship on children’s literature. See also Jack Zipes, The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films (2011), and Cristina Bacchilega’s chapter in Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-first Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder (2013: 73–107). 21. Gail Carson Levine stipulates in an author note: ‘I thought of the magic book because I wanted Ella and readers to know a few things they couldn’t find out any other way’ (1997 ‘Extras’: 5).

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te x t s a nd c o nte x t s 49 22. Pantaleo here references Rand J. Spiro, Richard L. Coulson, Paul J. Feltovich and Daniel K. Anderson (2004), ‘Cognitive Flexibility Theory: Advanced Knowledge Acquisition in Ill-Structured Domains,’ in Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, Robert Ruddell and Norman Unrau (eds.), 5th ed. Newark, DE: International Reading Association, pp. 640–53. 23. The concept of the ‘wreader’ (reader-writer) derives from George Landow’s book Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), quoted in Warnecke (2016: 113). 24. The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature quotes the poem of poet Matthew Prior (1664–1721), ‘Alma,’ which describes such a hornbook and the reward: ‘As he can name, he eats the Letter’ (2005: 3). F. J. Harvey Darton identifies the early shift toward ‘amusement’ in marketing games to accompany late eighteenth-century children’s books (Darton [1932] 1999: 150–55). 25. See for example Beth Ann Boehm: ‘What [metafictions] have to teach us about how we read applies not only to metafiction but to mimetic fiction as well, and though we may not be able to come away from a radically metafictional text with a summary truth about the world outside of the fiction, we may come away as better readers—of both texts and the world’ (1987: 20). 26. She and Carole Scott write elsewhere that ‘It is true . . . that the number of picturebooks wholly based on metafictional play is rapidly increasing’ (2001: 221). 27. This is also the premise of Nikolajeva’s article on self-referentiality in ­picturebooks (2008).

C HA PT E R 2

Issues in Adapting Children’s Metafiction to Film

Transmedial adaptation—the transmission of a work from one medium to another—depends upon the idea that a story unit can transfer from one medium to another, new, medium, while still remaining recognizable to the extent that the adapters wish it to be so and the new medium affords. While the finer points of that notion are controversial—the medium being a large if not integral part of the message, as it were—that idea remains the foundation on which adaptation must rest. Any text can be adapted to film, with the usual losses and gains in translation; as Eckart Voigts-Virchow says, ‘There are no unfilmable texts’ (2009: 137).1 That said, some texts pose particular challenges to film adaptation. Arguably, metafictions ­comprise one of the more challenging sets of source texts in terms of adaptation and, as will be shown, children’s metafictions, specifically, compound these generic challenges with additional ones, including greater expectations of fidelity in adaptation from book to screen. As shown in the previous chapter, metafiction is always (at least) double. In addition to the story being told, the text’s self-reflexivity requires a dual reading of its story-ness, holding up a medium-specific mirror to how the story is being told. The first layer, the story, is as adaptable as any other story as a ‘story-only’ transmediation. But the second layer, the discursive ‘meta’ layer, cannot be so easily transmediated. The ‘meta’ of textual metafiction is, by definition, medium-specific to textual fiction. But further, the ‘meta’ layer is the reason for the metafiction’s existence. Without the ‘meta’ layer, metafiction is simply fiction. The ‘problem’ of adapting metafiction to film has, of course, several ‘solutions.’ These solutions are visible in practice and comprise the main discussion of this chapter and dictate the applied examples of the ­remainder of this book. But as with children’s literature—and, as will be seen, with children’s film—the audience-centric contexts inherent to these children’s genres influence their adaptation contexts as well. Additional pressures are brought to bear on children’s adaptations of

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issu es in adap t ing chil dre n’s me ta f i c t i o n t o f i l m 51 books which—while they exist across the adaptation spectrum—are more intensive in these cases. Once more, it is a matter of degree rather than one of kind. The pressures of fidelity on children’s screen adaptations of books will be discussed first below, followed by an analysis of the three dominant options evident—sometimes simultaneously—in filmic ­adaptations of children’s metafictions. This chapter argues that adapting children’s metafictions involves a head-on collision between a textual genre that poses significantly greater challenges to adaptation on the one hand, and a children’s adaptation context where ‘faithfulness’ in adaptation is insisted upon to a much greater degree on the other. The need for adapters to determine and to signal what will make a ‘successful’ adaptation of children’s metafiction to the screen in each instance is thus of enormous interest here.

Children’s Film: Definition and Contexts Metafictional children’s literature is doubly double: it is subject to the inherent duality of children’s literature (the adults that children’s books also presuppose) and additionally to the inherent dualities of metafiction (to teach and delight; to render a fiction and to reveal how that fiction is constructed). At the point where we turn to examine its adaptation to screen we introduce two more contexts that are also inherently double: children’s film, and adaptation. Children’s film is as double as children’s literature and for similar reasons, which will be discussed further in this chapter. Children’s film is for children and frequently about them, but not made by children. Timothy Shary notes that ‘Virtually all feature films ever made about youth have been produced by filmmakers over twenty’ ([2002] 2012: 577). There are ‘hidden adults’ in every aspect of children’s film as well; these are the ‘telling dilemmas of youth films since cinema began’ (Ibid.: 577). And all adaptations are also at least double—‘Screen adaptations have doubleness written into their makeup’ (Geraghty 2008: 11); they are ‘a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary,’ in Linda Hutcheon’s now-famous formulation ([2006] 2013: 9)—they are both the same as, and different from, their sourcetext. The definition of ‘children’s film’ shares many of the same issues as that for ‘children’s literature.’ The qualifier that juvenilizes the genre (children’s) is often used perogatively and the ‘adult’ counterpart is not similarly qualified: it is, or at least was, ‘a label implying . . . inferiority and superficiality’ (Street 1983: xv). However, just as children’s literature increasingly defies its generic ‘limitations’ and shares much with adult

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literature, so children’s film is becoming less distinguishable in form and subject from the wider genre of film as it becomes ‘increasingly similar’ to films primarily for adults.2 If, however, the same audience-centric definition applies as it does for children’s literature (literature for children), then distinctions of form and subject matter here too remain distinctions of degree not of kind. Again, the intended audience still at least partially defines the genre. Within ‘children’s film’ there is considerable boundary overlap and competing terminologies, sharing most border crossings with ‘teen,’ ‘tween,’ and ‘family’ film. The ‘teen film’ is formalized in Daniel Lopez’s Films by Genre (1993, quoted by Timothy Shary [2002] 2012: 579)3—the distinction here is that the ‘youth’ depicted are teenagers: ‘The emphasis in these films is on teenage characters’ (Ibid.: 580).4 Shary distinguishes films depicting younger characters as ‘children’s film’ and older teens in the collegiate environment as ‘college.’ Yet all films depicting teens are not teenage films, just as all films depicting children are not children’s films. At this point, the distinction of ‘teen film’ parts company with the audience-centric definition of children’s film. In children’s film, the intended audience is a child. But the teen film not only presupposes a teen audience but does so by depicting teens on screen; it is a thematic distinction. Not all films rated PG13, therefore, would classify as ‘teen film.’ A related overlapping genre is the ‘family film’ for which children are also an implied audience but not the primary audience.5 Noel Brown, in his book The Hollywood Family Film: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter (2012), borrows a working definition from Andy Bird, ­chairman of Disney International: ‘The Family Film’ is a film that can be enjoyed by the whole family together, as well as a film that can be enjoyed by a broad audience demographic. The true test . . . is if a child and his/her grandparent could go together and equally enjoy a film. (Quoted in Brown 2012: 2)

The internationally exported, blockbuster ‘Hollywood family film’ is perhaps more brand than genre—‘the most commercially-successful and widely-consumed cinematic entertainment in the world’ (Ibid.: 1). It is ‘deliberately constructed to appeal to the broadest audience base’ (Ibid.: 1); it ‘denotes the intersection of broad appeal, inoffensiveness and a potential mass consumer base’ (Ibid.: 3); it implies expectations that it will ‘possess broad moral and thematic suitability, and broad demographic appeal’ (Ibid.: 8). The ‘family film’ defies limitations on what topics and

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narrative structures are used, and further makes definition-by-audience difficult since the ‘family’ it implies is ‘largely symbolic’ (Ibid.: 11). Brown argues forcefully for a distinction between ‘family film’ and ‘children’s film’: ‘many family films are misleadingly referred to critically and popularly as “children’s films,” or even “kids’” films’ (2012: 9), and in The Children’s Film, he notes ‘these two categories overlap considerably’ (2017: 3). This overlap between genres is evident even in scholarship on them, as many films listed in Brown’s family filmography (2012) are also present on those of Ian Wojcik-Andrews (Children’s Films) and Douglas Street (Children’s Novels and the Movies). In spite of the fact that family films, ‘often target the broadest possible demographic crosssection,’ while ‘youth’ films, ‘target one specific demographic,’ Brown notes the overlap in their ‘shared interest in pre-adult consumers’ (14, original emphasis). Perhaps the best working definition of ‘children’s film’ however is provided by Noel Brown, again, in The Children’s Film (2017). This definition takes into account such slippages, evolutions, overlaps, and contexts particular to children’s genres and markets. Children’s film has a ‘negotiated identity’ (5, original italics) in relation to at least five contexts which Brown identifies as: ‘marketing and distribution strategies’; ‘censorship and suitability ratings’; ‘critical reception’; ‘merchandising’; and ‘exhibition strategies’ (Ibid.: 5–11). At the same time, Brown notes five other ‘broad but recurrent features’ of the genre of children’s film: ‘The reaffirmation of family, kinship and community’; ‘The foregrounding of child, adolescent and teenage figures and their experiences’; ‘The exclusion and/or eventual defeat of disruptive social elements’; ‘The minimisation of “adult” representational elements’; and endings that are ‘predominantly upbeat, emotionally uplifting, morally unambiguous and supportive of the social status quo’ (Ibid.: 13–15). Elsewhere, Brown and Babington note that the ‘tension between pedagogy and pleasure’ is ‘implicit in all films for children’ (2015: 4). Brown’s descriptive definition thus points to the various nexuses—contextual and textual—in play in addition to the common presupposition that the primary implied ­audience is ‘children.’ Importantly for this study, children’s film (including teen film) shares many of the same special issues and paradoxes of children’s literature— along with a ‘parallel stigma.’6 And where children’s literature is as old as literature and yet only became viewed as worthy of institutionalized study in the latter half of the twentieth century, so children’s film is as old as film but has only recently become a mainstream area of research.7 Its association with childhood and its consequent ‘juvenilizing’ taint have

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historically contributed to the undervaluing of the genre. Tim Morris’ comment is representative: Juvenilizing children’s books and genre fiction alike serves to repress concerns of great importance, relegating them to a land of children’s literature where nothing is really taken seriously—and therefore where almost anything can be said, the privilege of both child and courtly fool. (2000: 6)

As recently as 2002, Timothy Shary must argue that ‘youth films are a legitimate genre worthy of study on their own terms’ (578), and in 2012, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (2013b) writes a similar exhortation for the study of paratexts in children’s films.8 Similarly, the category ‘children’s film’ struggles with genre classification issues in part due to its enormously broad scope. Just as children’s literature is defined most basically by its intended or implied readership, so children’s film is defined to a large extent by its intended or implied viewership. Children’s literature often but not always features a child protagonist and other child characters; so too children’s film often but not always features a child protagonist and other children as characters. However, while the child-in-the-book is a child imagined and rendered in the text both as character and as overdetermined implied reader by an adult author, the child actor on screen at least embodies the viewership’s demographic within the medium, however circumscribed. That said, the presence of a child protagonist does not guarantee a ‘children’s film’ as many R-rated horror films can attest. Plots and themes are also not limited in any way although, as with ‘children’s literature,’ there may be a greater preponderance of certain topoi, themes, characters and so on in children’s film than elsewhere. Viewers may range from infants to graduating high school seniors and still qualify as ‘child’ viewers, but many children’s films are also popular crossovers with adult audiences. Another point about children’s film is that—irrespective of whether it is an adaptation or not—it shares the ‘didactic’ impetus inherent to much children’s literature as well. Julian Cornell notes that a defining feature of the genre is that it serves some pedagogical imperative: The children’s film is a conscious intervention in the construction of a particular type of spectator, one assumed to be influenced profoundly by the viewing experience. The audience, child and parent, is presumed to get something out of the film in excess of pleasure or entertainment, and that is a lesson, a moral, a sense of identity, a life enhancing pedagogical experience. Thus, in the children’s film, ideological/ pedagogical effects are normally overt rather than sublimated as in many films of other genres. (2015: 10–11)

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Cornell’s point that the audience is presupposed to be ‘influenced profoundly’ by what they view is significant, as it is the precondition for the success of any type of ‘message’—whether positive or negative—a children’s film promotes. Still, therefore, the implied viewership remains a crucial element of definition for the children’s film, and one that reinscribes the same fundamental paradox identified within children’s literature: the creators of the media are not the same as the consumers. Again, adults create the media for the child viewer and in doing so they both imagine and construct the child viewer. In another indication of the broad range of the genre’s scope, the ratings system, not created or imposed by children, is used as one method of identifying children’s films and distinctions between them. Much as libraries use designations for ‘juvenile’ and ‘young adult’ fiction that may depend on content, such as that featuring incidences of alcohol use, the US Motion Picture Academy Association (MPAA) ratings system, dating from 1968 but with alterations over the years since, creates distinctions based on a shifting set of prescribed criteria that typically include language, violence, nudity and other sexual elements, danger, and so on. The ratings ‘G,’ ‘PG,’ and ‘PG-13’ all include an implied child viewership. These ratings are culture-bound (other international ratings for films include 11, 12, and 15, for example) and have variable thresholds for acceptability in different countries.9 The ratio of violence to sexuality within specific age group ratings is one wildly variable indicator of different cultural standards of acceptable viewing for youth. The history of ratings disputes for individual films and the creation and erosion of the PG-13 rating, ‘ratings creep,’ describe the shifting sands on which these lines are drawn at any given time. But the same societal shifts that result in ratings creep— what is child-appropriate viewing, what is teen-appropriate—also result in ongoing reframing of what constitutes ‘childhood’ or ‘adolescence’10 in a sort of mutually reinforcing, mutually defining, feedback loop. The ‘children’s film’ versus ‘film for adults’ categories are by no means watertight, even beyond the family film’s mixed child/adult audience. Many adult books are ‘crossover’ successes with YA readers (such as Jane Eyre, for that matter) and vice versa. Many YA readers are in fact adult readers as the recent evidence of audiences from The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer, and the Divergent series by Veronica Roth attest. By extension, an adaptation of a children’s book doesn’t automatically make a children’s film, and an adult book can be made into a children’s film, such as in the case of The Princess Bride.11 The presupposed reader/viewer is key. And while, on the

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one hand, the children’s film is as old as the medium, on the other hand early films did not distinguish between audiences. Children and adults alike are the implied viewers of Georges Méliès’ short films Cendrillon (Cinderella, 1899) and Barbe Bleue (Blue Beard, 1901). As Timothy Shary notes, ‘In the earliest days of cinema there did not exist a distinct youth genre, nor for that matter much of an agreed social sense of what constituted youth’ (583).12 Akin to one of the defenses of children’s literature—that its ‘growing complexity’ increasingly defies generic limits—the same argument is well underway for children’s film. Ian Wojcik-Andrews, in Children’s Films: History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory, cites a number of scholars of children’s literature making this argument and then compares the metacinematic techniques of much children’s film to the metafiction of children’s literature: Just as children’s literature is often metafictional, children’s films as different as The Three Caballeros, Stand By Me, Life of Brian,13 Last Action Hero, North, and/or Toy Story might be defined by their metafilmic qualities, those that suggest innovation, experimentation, and a high degree of playful self-consciousness. These and other films draw attention to themselves as artifice by playing with the various filmic conventions and extrafilmic practices that constitute cinema as a whole, including children’s cinema. In the process, they contest the very definition of what constitutes a children’s film. (2000: 11)

While it is good to see a growing critical understanding of the sophistication of children’s genres, the issue is that such arguments for the complexity of children’s genres essentially confirm the existence of a sliding scale between simplicity and complexity with ‘juvenile’ at one end and ‘adult’ at the other. Preferable is M. O. Grenby’s position, where he applauds not the growing sophistication of children’s literature but instead the ‘increasing amount, and sophistication, of the scholarship devoted to it’ (2008: 8). Adapting children’s literature—and children’s metafiction—to children’s film is to multiply the paradoxes and complexities of children’s genres in general. These include the paradox of their ‘impossibility,’ pace Jacqueline Rose,14 the tensions between pedagogy and pleasure associated with the children’s genres, the increased expectation of fidelity to the source text usually expressed as a measure of closeness to the book, and a broadly imagined, varied audience with significant border overlaps. What is certainly the case is, as Douglas Street writes, ‘the business of filmmaking for the child audience includes more variables than movies primarily intended for adults; if the film has a literary counterpart, that movie’s

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issu es in adap t ing chil dre n’s me ta f i c t i o n t o f i l m 57 multifaceted nature adds further complications’ (xiii). And then the ‘meta’ contexts of the literary sourcetext comes into play as well.

Fidelity: Special Challenges to Adapting Children’s Literature The view that ‘There is no such thing . . . as a secret adaptation’15 is perhaps never more valid than in the context of adaptations of children’s books to screen. Most such adaptations explicitly claim a relationship to the source text. Many films take the same name as the source title, for example. However, inviting an overt relationship with the source text alone is not necessarily a reason to invite a close comparison of book to film—the fidelity approach to adaptation. Fidelity is not the goal of every film adaptation from a literary source and, as H. Porter Abbot warns, we should consider whether fidelity is a goal before applying the standard or else ‘judge on other grounds’ ([2002], 2003: 106). The axiomatic ‘fatal flaws’ of measuring the success of an adaptation by the degree of ‘faithfulness’ to some aspect of its source (and—as a number of adaptation scholars have repeatedly asked—to which?) persist here too. Douglas Street writes: ‘When applied particularly to children’s fiction and the films from it, the faithful transplanting and cultivating of these “seeds” [of creation] is crucial’ (1983: xviii). Nevertheless, because fidelity is a central preoccupation of the reception of children’s adaptations, so it must also be of the scholarship about them as well. ‘Faithfulness matters when it matters to the viewer,’16 and in the context of children’s ­adaptations it matters a great deal for a variety of reasons, discussed below. A more neutral language for assessing degrees of ‘closeness’ of an adaptation to its source text exists: close, intermediate, and loose.17 But that neutrality belies the reception of children’s adaptations where fans, reviewers, and pedagogues alike anticipate and discuss film adaptations of books in terms of faithfulness. The evaluative language that proves so problematic for the fortunes of the fidelity approach to adaptation studies18 is nevertheless integral and important in the field of children’s adaptations of books to screen. Interestingly, the representation of the book on screen (an art form within another art form) is at the same time the most ‘faithful’ a­ daptation—a filmed book. Indeed, the practice of ‘iconography’ in which a (picture) book is simply filmed, pages turned,19 while the least ‘cinematic’ form of adaptation from book to screen is at the same time, strictly speaking, a highly faithful adaptation of the source and is perhaps better described as a medium transfer than an adaptation at all.

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The bias of privileging the literary medium—a bias that has dogged much of the history of film adaptation from literature thus far—also persists with children’s books. That is the case whether the fiction is of particular ‘literary value’ as a classic work, or not. This language of embattled media relations derives from earlier critics of adaptation, such as Marshall McLuhan who commented that film is ‘a rival of the book’ (301), and George Bluestone who notes that the relationship between film and literature is ‘overtly compatible, secretly hostile’ (2). The book/film ‘wars’ have been argued to be at their fiercest in adaptations of children’s books to screen.20 But it appears that children’s metafictions and their adaptations are the very front lines of that ‘war’—both by virtue of being children’s literature, and also due to some of the purposes ascribed to metafiction, in particular, as discussed in the previous chapter. In children’s metafiction, authors and authorial narrators appear to do battle for the hearts and minds of child readers and, by implication, future writers. One of Roald Dahl’s paragones (the assertion of a medium’s superiority over another) about television in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), many of them aimed at the screen-obsessed character Mike ‘Teavee’ (TV), is a good example: HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE! HE CANNOT THINK—HE ONLY SEES!21

A similar moment occurs in the opening of the novel The Princess Bride: For the first time in my life, I became actively interested in a book. Me the sports fanatic, me the game freak, me the only ten-year old in Illinois with a hate on for the alphabet wanted to know what happened next. ([1973] 1992: 10, original italics)

The scene in the opening of the film The Princess Bride where the grandfather must struggle with a video game to lure his grandson to being read a ‘boring’ book adapts this impetus from the novel’s prologue, where the author describes attempts to lure his son into the same book his father read to him as a child. Yet what Deborah Cartmell writes about the film adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory could also be loosely applied to The Princess Bride: ‘While the novel is “anti-screen,” the film seems to aspire to “literary cinema”’’ (2007: 177). In other words, the intermedial relationship is more complicated than may appear at first blush. A number of reasons have been suggested for why there is a greater expectation of fidelity in adaptations of children’s works. For one, the level of familiarity with the text is considered greater both in individual readers

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issu es in adap t ing chil dre n’s me ta f i c t i o n t o f i l m 59 and culturally. Carole Cox, a Curriculum and Instruction researcher, wrote in 1982 that there is empirical evidence that ‘children prefer film when it is closer to the book’; she writes ‘In studies of children’s preferences for film content, form and technique, the most-liked films were those that were most like books’ (10). In opening his book Children’s Novels and the Movies (1983), Douglas Street quotes the screenplay writers of The Wizard of Oz (1939), Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf: No screen writer faces a more difficult task than the translation of a classic from the printed word into celluloid, and when that classic is for children, the difficulty is increased because many generations have read and loved that book. (xiii)

And more recently still, Cartmell notes that children ‘love to re-read their favourite stories; and, correspondingly, in adapting these texts there will be higher demands on fidelity’ (2007: 168).22 And so there is a consequent valorization of certain children’s works as ‘classics,’ which have similar expectations of fidelity in adaptation— whether these works are in fact ‘canonical’ texts or not. As early as 1975, Charles Eidsvik identified this phenomenon: But such is not the case if the film is an adaptation of a book or a play, especially if that book or play is well known and highly regarded. Not only are our expectations higher for adaptations; what we are willing to put up with is radically less. (27, emphasis added)

Brian McFarlane goes so far as to say that fidelity is such a hallmark of heritage film that it actually helps to define the genre (2005: 207). Children’s literature in many canonical cases also constitutes ‘classic’ and even ‘heritage’ literature and those are the conditions under which ‘most readers will evaluate . . . on the basis of fidelity.’23 Adaptations of classic children’s works such as Little Women (Louisa May Alcott), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll), Peter and Wendy (J. M. Barrie), The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis), and contemporary classics like the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling thus derive additional pressures on fidelity by virtue of also being classic works—a genre that already has greater expectations of fidelity in adaptation. But children’s literature also broadens the scope of what constitutes a ‘classic’ work in the genre. The notion of a beloved book complicates these generic limits and again can be connected to the presence of adults at the heart of children’s literature. The adults in the genre equation have all been children in the past. Nostalgia for childhood—and beloved childhood books—forms part of the calculus of what works remain popular

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and in print, purchased for and read to children, and adapted to film.24 The children’s film adaptation thus often shares properties and burdens of expectations with other adaptations of classics—and the notion of what constitutes a children’s classic is enormously flexible. Such are the anxieties around the rivalry between media when the book is read and loved. But another reason for greater expectations of fidelity between screen and children’s source text is the perceived threat to children’s literacy, often ascribed to screen media. Deborah Cartmell has argued representatively that In the field of adaptation, the tension between the literary and the screen text is, possibly, most prominent in the area of children’s texts, where concerns over film’s moral influence and the threat to literacy have been prevalent since the inception of cinema. (2007: 167, emphasis added)

Due to this threat, adaptations of children’s literature are closely tied to the pedagogical impulse either in creation or reception. David Buchbinder describes such fidelity concerns as markers of a certain pedagogical anxiety around adaptations of children’s literature: However, the adaptation, especially into film or television, but also into graphic novel or even comic-book form, of a standard literary text represents a point of ethical as well as pedagogical ambivalence or dilemma for many. Nevertheless, there remains the sense of an imperative that young people ought to be familiar with the literary texts that form part of their cultural inheritance and, importantly, form a significant part of the cultural capital available to them. (2011: 136)

This type of anxiety is voiced by William Blackburn who says first that critics of children’s literature ‘should be particularly sensitive’ to evaluative criteria: The task of the critic of children’s literature, like that of the critic of film, is to discern the excellence proper to his subject. The necessity of doing so becomes apparent when a work of ‘children’s literature’ is adapted for the screen. How are we to judge the merits of such a film? (1983: 105)

Both the sensitivity of the critic and the need to discern criteria with which to judge merit is due entirely to the genre: children’s film adaptation of books. Nearly thirty years after this comment, a similar anxiety can be seen in a relatively recent dissertation on children’s adaptations: ‘If the pleasure of curling up with a good book is morphing into curling up to watch a film, more attention needs to be paid to the content of these films—so many of which are adaptations of books’ (McAllister 2009: 41). Pedagogical anxiety

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about screen’s threat to children’s literacy shows no signs of dissipating and indeed forms perhaps the most recent iteration of ‘moral panic’ around children’s media: what they should and should not read or see.25 The rise of new media in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries occasions an intensifying of this moral panic about textual literacy and literateness. In response, according to Arizpe and Smith, while ‘images of technology [in books] are still hard to find, . . . books featuring books have become increasingly common’ (2016: xiii). In a relevant point for adaptation of books (as artifacts) to the screen, these writers go on to note that in the context of such perceived threats from ‘electronic literacy,’ embedded books are used almost ekphrastically within their host medium (within metafiction) to symbolize the ‘romantic ideal of childhood’: ‘the book itself, the artefact not the content, has become a symbol for what we want childhood to be’ (Ibid.). Inextricable from this pedagogical anxiety is another pedagogical fact: film adaptations of children’s works are used to teach the literature they adapt. The ratings system implemented in Joyce Moss and George Wilson’s guide, From Page to Screen: Children’s and Young Adult Books on Film and Video, directly reflects this. Their dual system of ‘adaptation ratings’ and ‘cinematic ratings’ exhibits two different systems: one based on ‘how closely the film adaptations reflects the literary source’ and the other ‘the film’s strength independent of the book’ (1992: xiv). The pedagogical value presupposed for adaptations of films from novels for a youth viewership can be seen for example in a literacy program for youth inmates in New Zealand. The ‘audio-visual literacy course’ that began in Christchurch Men’s Prison Youth Unit in 2015 used only films ‘based on a novel.’ The program demonstrated that young inmates ‘generally use the library more afterwards’ (Dally 2013), and as such it was deemed ‘promising enough’ to expand to other units nationally. Unlike the use of film as a literary supplement in the classroom, this example is striking for its use of film to teach novels (presumably the only reason to use only film adaptations from novels for the program), without the novels. Author Philip Pullman calls this ‘a sort of worthiness argument,’ noting that adaptations of classic children’s stories are encouraged because if the children get a taste for the story they might read the books later on or— at least be able to display the sort of superficial familiarity that will help with homework and exams. It’s educational. So [the film] in this case is not a destination, but a road-sign: the real importance and value of the experience is not here but over there.26

These pedagogical anxieties are obviously interconnected. Children should read and become literate (versed in both literacy and l­iterateness);

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children’s films should teach the books on which they are based, particularly if that is the only way children will ‘read’ those texts, or if the film will entice children to read those texts. And fidelity of the film to the source text is therefore considered key in considering the adaptation and the impact of that adaptation on other adaptations that follow. In his article about the ‘Ozification’ of children’s fantasy film adaptations, Joel D. Chaston argues that the iconic 1939 film adaptation The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is an example of a film that has overwritten its source text in popular consciousness. But Chaston’s argument is less that knowledge of the novel is impoverished but rather that given the many homages to the film in other children’s fantasy adaptations that children are being impoverished in their film options: ‘Perhaps those who adapt children’s fantasy stories to film will eventually realize that children ought to be given more than a single story, retold again and again’ (1997: 18). In sum, adaptation of children’s texts to screen is therefore a process fraught with multiple and competing pressures to invoke and measure by fidelity standards. Some of these pressures are due to the age-old rivalry between book and screen media in which the literature traditionally tips the scale by virtue of priority or prestige factors. Other fidelity expectations derive from the ‘classic’ or ‘heritage’ work context, often expanded in this genre to include a greater number of beloved or revered childhood books whether or not they have widely achieved such prestige status. The pedagogical contexts exert pressures on fidelity expectations as well, as the film often stands for the book in education and a popular film influences other adaptations as well. And finally, but significantly, metafiction—specifically—has its own didactic work fostering literacy and literateness to do, and thus pedagogical anxiety concerns the ‘loss’ of this work in adaptation.

Three Ways that Film Adapts Metafiction Despite these many challenges to adaptation and special conditions present in adapting children’s metafiction to film, adaptations of children’s works abound and are growing in number. There are three central adaptation options available to any filmmakers adapting metafiction (who choose to retain the metafictionality of the source material in some way) and they are not mutually exclusive. 1.  Filming the fiction (the ‘story only’ option) 2.  Employing metafilm as discursive ‘equivalence’ 3.  Performing meta-adaptation

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issu es in adap t ing chil dre n’s me ta f i c t i o n t o f i l m 63 Discussion of each of these three options with specific examples of children’s works comprise the remaining three chapters of this study. What I aim to do in the rest of this chapter is to briefly introduce each option and describe how they are distinct from one another but not mutually exclusive. Indeed, in the examples that follow in this and later chapters, these strategies typically work in combination.

Filming the Fiction (‘Story Only’) The story/discourse distinction is historically important in theories of transmediation, not least from book to film. The story is arguably something that can be rendered recognizably in a new medium, with whatever degree of closeness the adapters choose and the medium affords. The story told in a metafiction is the embedded level, while the ‘meta’ is instead a function of the discourse and, as such, is medium-specific. The ‘story only’ option in transmediating metafiction to film is to render the bookish plots and characters of the metafictional source text which employs them on screen. When metafictional children’s works feature such bookish elements, any ‘close’ film adaptation of such a book must also include its thematic bookish plot points. Essentially, it is as straightforward to show a reader reading a book on film as it is to show a character holding an umbrella or jumping into a swimming pool. There are a staple number of cinematic devices used to show these things, as will be discussed below. However, in transmediation what began as ‘thematized metafiction’ is now ‘thematized fiction’; it is the story level without the discursive self-­reflexivity. Nevertheless, many filmic devices for showing the story level also create internal (story) embedding, finding story equivalence for the layering of the metafiction. Any close adaptation of a children’s metafictional text to film will transmediate the story, but not all adaptations of children’s metafictions to film transmediate the metafictional discourse. That adaptations of children’s books to screen can be largely silent on the fact of their adaptation is evinced by the post-millennial Chronicles of Narnia film series. There are three such adaptations to date: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), Prince Caspian (2008), and Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010). The metafiction of Lewis’ perhaps best-known novel of the series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is quite pronounced through the device of the authorial-narrator. However, the film adaptations do not employ any overt ‘meta’ framework other than a coda at the end of the film The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where the kindly professor (Jim Broadbent) confirms to Lucy that he has firsthand experience of the closet—this scene interrupts the credits. And while select

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cinematic devices in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe draw brief attention to themselves, such as the fast motion blurred exit of all the remaining fighters from the scene to leave Peter and Aslan alone at the end of the final battle, they are in service of the thematized fantasy rather than part of a metacinematic pattern. The film adaptation does not use any ‘open book’ or voiceover device to frame the film as a retold story or a film adapted from a well-known book. While showing the story rather than telling it takes care of some of the business (‘if you had been there you would have seen. . .’ [Lewis [1950] 1998: 146]), the novel’s metafiction serves other purposes as well. The viewer must come to terms with Edmund’s betrayal of his siblings without such narratorial intrusions as: ‘You mustn’t think that even now Edmund was quite so bad that he actually wanted his brother and sisters to be turned into stone’ (Ibid.: 96), for example. And while the closing image of the closet, open a crack, with light from Narnia spilling from it into the room may metaphorically represent film and its ability to enable the viewer to see fantastical things, it remains a very allusive ‘mirror’ in the cinematic ‘text.’27 In the process of transmediating the story layer by filming metafiction, what was intra-medial (referring within the same medium) becomes intermedial (referring across media).28 A book within a book is internal, self-referential, while a book on screen is a prop within a filmic medium. Conversely, what was inter-medial may also become intra-medial. So, a reference to film, television, acting, and so on within a book (intermedial) becomes self-referential on screen (intramedial). This inversion through transmediation takes on an interesting cast in the context of ekphrasis: the descriptive representation of one art work within another. Historically a classical, rhetorical figure, the definition of ekphrasis has since broadened to include other media and is discussed in adaptation contexts. However, ekphrasis as a descriptive, referential ‘quotation’ of a transmedial work is distinguishable from the generic, sustained ‘quotation’ of one work by another through adaptation.29 Hajnal Király explains the broader definition in a way that best fits this study as follows: ‘According to a more general interpretation, ekphrasis is not only an aesthetic figure, but also an artistic practice in which an artwork becomes the object of or a mirror for another’ (2013: 181, original emphasis). While not all adapted texts are ekphrastic by virtue of their transmediation, a class of metafictions can and do perform ekphrasis when they themselves feature a significant text. In these metafictional stories, the bookish nature of the book is held up to the reader’s view. Remediated, this meditation on the book’s features fulfills the descriptive nature of ekphrasis. The intramedial book-within-a-book of fiction, in other words,

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can indeed become (reverse) ekphrasis on screen.30 Elsewhere, this same feature in adaptation has been called ‘“figurative” intermediality,’ or ‘quotation of form’ whereby ‘the formal aspects of one medium are displayed in another medium’ (Böhn 2009: 602). Here again, transmedial difference alone does not suffice for this quotation to occur; there has to be a clear ‘rupture’ between the quoted form and its surrounding context. The difference may be illustrated as follows: the presence of a book on a shelf in someone’s room in a film is certainly a transmediated book, but nothing about the transmediation is being foregrounded. Instead, a significant embedded book used as a narrative plot driver may indeed constitute such quotation or (reverse) ekphrasis by virtue of being held up to view within the new medium. It is the difference between text as part of the diegetic landscape, and Charlotte writing ‘Some pig’ on a web in any adaptation of Charlotte’s Web. While ekphrasis is a term that arrives in adaptation studies with some historical baggage, nevertheless it is synonymous in that context with ‘quotation of form’ and so will be termed ekphrasis for consistency here. The value of this point about ekphrasis lies in finding an explicit litmus for ‘reading’ a given film’s position on the book/film relationship featured visibly onscreen. Quotation, after all, can be laudatory or derogatory. While the treatment of the embedded book may be largely prescribed by the story, charting shifts between text and film adaptation and considering the ekphrastic representation of the book on screen provides a useful constellation of points by which to examine an adaptation. Such instances of ekphrasis may form one useful ‘interpretant’ for concluding where an individual film positions itself in the book/film tensions of children’s media. The term ‘interpretant’ derives from Charles Peirce, but its use here is via Michael Riffaterre’s application of it within intertextuality studies. In Riffaterrean terms, the ‘interpretant’ is what makes sense of the shifts between the text and its intertext. Riffaterre posits a ‘three-way relationship between the text . . . its intertext, and the second intertext that the text brings to bear on its relationship with the first’ (1985: 44). The text in my formulation is the film adaptation; the intertext is the metafictional source novel, and the second intertext is the interpretant. Riffaterre describes the work of the interpretant as follows. The second intertext, by producing a sign system equivalent to the first but couched in a different code, provides the reader with the means properly to decipher what significance results from or must be attached to the text’s departure from the first intertext. (1985: 44)

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Riffaterre’s use of ‘proper’ here simply means repeatable; one person’s interpretant should be like another’s as it derives from signals in the work itself (51, 53). In other words, the interpretant, which is a ‘sign’ (47), facilitates the film viewer to attach ‘significance’ to the shifts the film has made in representing the novel it adapts: ‘both . . . a continuous reference to the intertext and a series of departures from it’ (51).31 Each actual selection and, even more so, each gap or omission represents an interpretant. To decipher these is to retrace the interpretation that gave rise to the signs, the writer’s specific view of objects that are common knowledge, or his determination, or creation, of imaginary objects starting from signs. (52)

This idea of the interpretant fits with other, established, adaptation truisms. Looking at film adaptations of literary sources as a form of literary criticism is foundational, although current preference is for conversational models (dialogism) that place less emphasis on the literary source as a result. In Reflexivity in Film and Literature, Robert Stam notes that in adaptation the literary text ‘has been transformed by operations of ­selection, amplification, concretization, actualization, and so forth’ (1992: 25),32 and the fidelity approach forms a necessary baseline for determining what guiding principles have influenced these operations. And in Adaptation and Appropriation Julie Sanders writes that ‘it is usually at the very point of infidelity that the most creative acts of adaptation and appropriation take place’ (2006: 20). It is perhaps rather that at such radical points of shift the interpretant is most visible. The interpretant, what Riffaterre elsewhere refers to as a ‘significance system’ (1981a: 231), is thus a shorthand to describe the end result of the many adaptation processes, one that points to film’s conversational relationship with the adapted source as well as one that acknowledges the various motivated choices brought to bear on the adaptation process along with those of media affordance. Examples of embedded (quoted, ekphrastic) books abound within children’s metafictions and thus in their film adaptations as well and can prove extremely useful to infer the interpretant. Each of the novels The Neverending Story, The Princess Bride, and Inkheart, include within their pages an embedded book of the same title. In each of the films The Neverending Story, The Princess Bride, and Inkheart, this embedded book is featured on screen, and the film of course takes its name from that book and the novel of the same name it adapts. In each film, the book-prop signifies both the embedded book and the real-world novel that embeds it, with a tangible extra-filmic existence and readership. By contrast, the adaptation The Secret of Moonacre (2008), an adaptation of Elizabeth

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Goudge’s novel The Little White Horse (1949), invents the narrative device of a magical book. By virtue of its choice of a new title for the film as well as in its invention of a book, the book-prop in the film ‘points elsewhere’ to a genre outside itself, but the sign has no recuperable referent beyond the film. In this way, the ekphrastic use of a book on screen, for instance, can further be viewed as an ‘ungrammaticality’ in the film ‘text.’ This idea also derives from Michael Riffaterre’s pragmatic answer to the question ‘if the reader doesn’t get the intertextual reference, is the text still intertextual?’33 This question from intertextuality theory can be connected to the present study of adaptations of children’s metafictions with similar questions of ‘competence’ in the sense of what a reader knows or can be presumed to know. The correlative question then is: if the reader doesn’t know the source, is it still an adaptation? Christine Geraghty writes of these ‘silent’ adaptations: There are many films based on previous sources that go unacknowledged as adaptations: the book is not well-known, the film does not draw attention to its status as an adaptation, and the publicity machinery ignores the original source. Faithfulness is not an issue, and the film in a very real sense is not an adaptation. (2008: 3, emphasis added)

Riffaterre argued that texts contained ‘pointers’ (which he termed ‘ungrammaticalities’) to intertextuality. These ungrammaticalities in the text served to foreground the text’s own incompleteness. These textual ‘enigmas’ in turn prompt the reader to note the detour—ideally to recover the intertext, the missing piece of the puzzle, as Riffaterre describes: What I must emphasize is that even while the hypogram remains unidentified, the text’s troublesomeness keeps pointing to this need: the hypogram must be found, a solution outside the text must be found, in the intertext. (1981b: 14)

The reader’s own competence at tracing intertexts becomes entirely irrelevant in this paradigm.34 The reader may not ‘realize’ the intertextual potentiality, in the sense of recuperating the intertext, but they must register it. That, for Riffaterre, suffices. The troublesomeness of the text and the indexical nature of the ungrammaticality prompts the reader’s awareness of textual incompleteness, and of a corresponding intertext elsewhere. That argument (which had logical objections raised to it) has interesting parallels in the child reader/viewer parallel, where intertextuality (with the adaptation’s source) is a prerequisite of experiencing an adaptation as an adaptation. Riffaterre’s discussion of the role of the ‘troublesome’

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ungrammaticality as a stand-in for literary competence (in the intertextual sense) makes for a useful parallel: This may eventually make it possible for us to show that literary competence, as a special variety of linguistic competence, rests upon presupposition. Reading in accordance with the rules of literariness, literary reading, may be found not strictly to require a knowledge of the intertext, a familiarity with a corpus: the only requirement may be a presupposition of the intertext. (1981b: 16, author’s emphasis)

In this context, then, the indexical and ekphrastic loading of the bookprop on screen can be connected to ways in which children’s films signal their status as adaptations. The name of the film and its marketing and so on will often signal that the film is intended to be viewed as an adaptation. But the further inclusion of a significant embedded book as an onscreen (and marketing) prop further signals a form of fidelity to the ‘filmed book.’ Catherine Grant argues that select adaptations urge the viewer to view them as adaptations: The most important act that films and their surrounding discourses need to perform in order to communicate unequivocally their status as adaptations is to [make their audiences] recall the adapted work, or the cultural memory of it. There is no such thing . . . as a ‘secret’ adaptation.35

If there is no such thing as a secret adaptation, then, it is because adaptations that aim to be viewed as adaptations perform their status as adaptations. Filmed metafictions in many cases ‘quote’ the text on screen in ways that other adaptations do not and thus comprise one very specific way in which certain adaptations perform their adaptedness at the story level. Chapter 3 will further examine these ideas by way of specific examples of the quoted children’s book on screen.

Employing Metafilm as Discursive ‘Equivalence’ Children’s metafilm exists as a genre outside of adaptation of children’s literature, or metafiction. Films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Monsters, Inc., and Hoodwinked! all function metafilmically in different ways, but they aren’t adaptations from a literary source. Metafilm—self-reflexive film—may feature thematic cinematicity (studio settings, plots involving movie-going or filmmaking, and so on) and/or they may feature formal self-reflexivity whereby the viewer is made aware of the film’s constructedness through cinematography, editing, and so on. Certain camera angles, or special effects may render self-reflexive moments, as may the

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reflection of sunlight or the presence of raindrops on a camera lens. As Janine Hauthal writes, ‘metaizations in film can point to the materiality of the filmic medium’ (586) by any number of means. Yet not all examples of reflexivity function to render the transparency of cinematic illusion opaque. There is after all a difference between a character looking at the camera without ‘seeing’ it (precursor to a 180-degree turn when the camera shows us whom the character is facing, or what they are looking at), or a character looking at a diegetic camera where that contributes to the aesthetic illusion by being diegetically motivated, and a character looking at the extradiegetic camera—at us.36 Metafilmicity is a ‘gradable phenomenon’ (Wolf 2009: 58). In the same way that not all books on film are used ekphrastically, not all film in film is used self-referentially37 (Ibid.: 58). Furthermore, not all metafictions become metafilms or use metafilmic equivalences in adaptation. As seen in the previous section, in some cases the ‘story’ level is adapted but without the ‘meta-’ level of discursive selfreflexivity. In the film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as previously mentioned, the author-narrator’s intrusions are entirely absent from the translation; the metafictional aspect of the source text is not part of the adaptation. However, in most cases ‘cinematic adaptations of self-conscious novels are obliged to wrestle with the challenge thrown up by these reflexive techniques,’38 and many adaptations of children’s metafictions do choose to adapt the ‘meta’ layer—as metafilm. The concept of ‘medium-specific equivalence’ is endemic to adaptation studies. It allows for the necessity of considering that what one medium accomplishes one way, another medium may also accomplish—differently, using the affordances of its own medium. For convenience and consistency, the term ‘equivalence’ will be used here as well, although it may be more accurate to refer to these ‘equivalences’ as ‘metaphors,’39 at least in the case of the relationship between metafiction and metafilm. Metafilm is the medium-specific equivalent of metafiction in its own medium. Yet between metafiction and metafilm the gulf is so wide, that when the issue is adaptation from one to the other, the term ‘equivalence’ (even with medium-specific affordances) becomes intensely problematic. Metafilmicity in adaptations of children’s metafictions posits an equivalent role for the ‘meta’ in the new medium. In this case, metafiction can be viewed as a filmic correlative for metafiction, an example of ‘metafiction by other, medium-specific means,’ or ‘faithful in its fashion’ (Cahir [2006], 2008: 97).40 The effect of meta-cinema retains the duality and self-­referentiality of metafiction but instead turns the mirroring lens back on the processes of filmmaking and film watching, rather than on fiction

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writing and reading. In so doing, film adaptations may shift the focus further from the book it adapts. This introduces an important irony in the present context. As ‘metafiction’ cannot be literally adapted, it may be more ‘faithfully’ adapted through the meta-filmic mode. In other words, a meta-filmic film may be ‘faithful to the spirit’ of a metafictional fiction. A. R. Fulton uses an early example of this type of statement in ‘From Novel to Film’: ‘A novel, on the other hand, is faithfully adapted to the screen by using a translation of the novelistic terms into cinematic ones and thus by being different’ ([1960] 1977: 151). Describing the film Adaptation (2002), Julie Levinson indicates that its ‘[t]ransgressive metalepsis’ is ‘perfectly suited to the metafictional agenda’ (2007: 165). It is this agenda that can be transmediated. However, while this preserves the mirroring aspects of metafiction, the lens shifts to focusing on the processes and products of filmmaking. Whether this is an homage to metafiction or a usurpation of it depends on each film rather than the practice. Commenting on Norman McLeod’s film Alice in Wonderland (1933), critic Roderick McGillis writes, it is a film about film, as much as it is an adaptation of Carroll’s book. Rather than weakening the film as an adaptation, this aesthetic dimension neatly turns the books’ synchronism into filmic terms. (1983: 23)

In this instance, the meta-filmic adaptation is interpreted as a ‘film-specific equivalent.’41 But it could perhaps just as easily be interpreted as a form of appropriation, if the ‘bookishness’ of the metafictional source were a criterion. By contrast, Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan write that the classic Disney ‘picture of a book opening into a “real” world’ does the opposite, in fact ‘implying that the film of the book will be an infinitely superior experience to that of its literary source’; ‘The implicit message introducing the films is that the adaptation will be magical, vastly superior to its literary source which is, after all, only words’ (2010: 74–75). But Erica Sheen describes similar phenomena as examples of ‘[a] certain literary fetishism’ (2000: 10), ones which can even be used to suggest ‘high production value’ to the viewer (Ibid.: 10). The book/film (or word/ image) rivalry is, as I have argued, brought to the forefront in these adaptations. Is it homage or appropriation? It is not always easy to tell! Janine Hauthal examines the phenomenon of transmediating one metawork into another meta-work. She writes that ‘instances in which a metawork is adapted from another medium or art form are rare’ (2009: 569). I don’t necessarily agree that such instances are rare—after all, children’s metafictions are frequently adapted metafilmically. However, her assertion

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issu es in adap t ing chil dre n’s me ta f i c t i o n t o f i l m 71 underscores the medium-specificity of self-reflexive works, the challenges they pose to adaptation, and perhaps also the difficulty of recognizing that a meta-work adaptation is in fact an adaptation of another meta-work from a different medium. And that again underscores the potential appropriation at work. In other words: can a metafilm be a ‘faithful’ adaptation of a metafiction if the source’s ‘meta’ is no longer recognizable in the new medium? Chapter 4 discusses several children’s metafilms before focusing on the metafilmic treatment of select adaptations of children’s metafictional texts that employ self-referential strategies as formal equivalence for the ‘meta’ of the sourcetext, in addition to their transmediation of the text’s story.

Performing Meta-adaptation Finally, in this third option—which may also enact the first two options as well, as none of these strategies is mutually exclusive—the mirror of the adaptation is focused inward on the act of adaptation itself. It may be useful at this juncture to recall perhaps the earliest definition of ‘metafiction’ by William H. Gass who coined the term: metafiction is fiction in which ‘the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed.’42 This is useful here in noting ‘the material’ that metafiction works with or upon. The ‘material’ of meta-adaptation is adaptation. Arguably, meta-adaptation is the quintessential ‘faithful’ adaptation of children’s metafiction. By drawing on the didactic impulses of the ‘meta’ of metafiction to reflect upon the discourse or medium of the message, metafilm has been posited as an equivalence for metafiction. But, as will be seen in the following chapter, that equivalence is problematic as it co-opts the viewer’s focus from textuality to filmicity, and from textual literacies to filmic and visual literacies. If, instead, the ‘material’ of the adaptation is adaptation itself, both textual and filmic literacies are observed and, additionally, the processes of transmediation themselves are laid bare for the young viewer.

Notes   1. Screenwriter Diane Lake also says of ‘unfilmable books’: ‘there’s no such animal’ ([2012], 2014: 408). By contrast, in 1982 John Daniel Stahl wrote that ‘Because of these differences between literary works and film, some children’s books do not translate into cinema’ (8). Stahl’s argument is fairly representative of a major strain of adaptation scholarship by literary scholars at the time.

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 2. ‘The production of so-called family films, that is, films that address children and adults alike, and the increasing complexity of modern children’s films demonstrate that the typical properties of children’s films are becoming increasingly similar to those of films targeted at an adult audience. This convergence applies to both the themes and the narrative strategies of children’s films, as we can observe in their increasingly frequent treatment of difficult, sensitive, or “taboo” subjects, as well as in their directors’ use of complex narrative and aesthetic devices such as first person narration, retrospective, multiple perspectives, the combination of different temporal levels, and intermedial allusions to other films’ (Kümmerling-Meibauer 2013a: 39). Timothy Shary writes of the ‘teen film’: ‘most recent youth films have become as complex and sophisticated as adult dramas’ (2002: 577).   3. Shary includes other names for this type of film alongside teen or teenage movies: ‘the “juve” movie,’ and ‘youth picture’ or ‘youth film’ (2002: 579).   4. However, Catherine Driscoll contends that ‘teen film is not defined by representing teenagers’ (2011: 2–3).   5. Noel Brown and Bruce Babington make this distinction in Family Films in Global Cinema (2015: 1).   6. Douglas Street (1983: xv).  7. See Morris (You’re Only Young Twice), Street (Children’s Novels and the Movies), Mallan and Bradford (Contemporary Children’s Literature and Film). Noel Brown writes similarly in 2012 that ‘as a subject for historical, critical and theoretical analysis, the family film has been woefully under-addressed’ (9), and again in 2017, that children’s film is likewise ‘vastly under-addressed’ (1).   8. ‘Even though a number of monographs and essay collections have explored the role of paratexts in cinema and television in the last decade, the analysis of paratexts in children’s films is still at a fledgling stage’ (2013: 111).   9. Noel Brown provides a helpful summary of such diversity in Family Film in Global Cinema (2015: 5–6). 10. Children’s literature has long focused on reverse engineering the ‘shifting notions of childhood’ (Hintz and Tribunella) by way of literature produced for children over time. The same holds true of the century-long shifts in defining childhood by way of the screen entertainment produced for children. See for example Timothy Shary (2002: 584) where he discusses the elongation of adolescence, and factors such as teenage mobility and financial quasi-independence changing over the twentieth century, as well as the role of the mall cinema multiplex. 11. The novel by William Goldman was not written as a novel for children, but the film adaptation is rendered as a children’s film and has become a children’s classic. It is included here as a case study for its unique status as an adult metafiction adapted into a self-reflexive children’s film. 12. He notes elsewhere that ‘adolescence’ was ‘discovered’ at the same time as film, at the turn of the twentieth century (2005: 1).

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issu es in adap t ing chil dre n’s me ta f i c t i o n t o f i l m 73 13. Life of Brian (dir. Terry Jones, Handmade Films Ltd., 1979) is rated R in the MPAA rating system, so its inclusion in this list does seem misplaced. 14. The title of her landmark book on children’s literature: The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984). 15. Catherine Grant (2002), ‘Recognising Billy Budd in Beau Travail: Epistemology and Hermeneutics of Auteurist “Free” Adaptation,’ (Screen Vol. 43. 1, Spring: 57), quoted in Geraghty (2008: 3). Notwithstanding the idea that an adaptation can ‘bury’ its relationship with the source so deeply that it signals a desire not to be experienced as an adaptation. 16. Christine Geraghty (2008: 3). 17. So delineated by John M. Desmond and Peter Hawkes in Adaptation: Studying Film and Literature (2006: 2, 43–44). 18. For a recent review ultimately arguing for the continued usefulness of the fidelity approach within adaptation studies, see Hermansson (2015). 19. Lechner and Nist (1993: 176). 20. Deborah Cartmell writes, for example: ‘When it comes to adaptations of children’s literature, the battle between film and literature seems to be at its most ferocious’ (2007: 168). 21. Quoted in Cartmell ‘Adapting Children’s Literature’ (2007: 167). 22. Linda Hutcheon goes against the grain here when she states: ‘It has become a truism of adaptation theory lately that adult literary adaptations are held to the criterion of fidelity to the adapted text much more than children’s book adaptations are’ (2008: 175). However, her comment is made in the context of Chris Columbus’ observance of fidelity pressures in adapting Harry Potter (the first two novels) and in contrast with some of the looser adaptations of Disney and presents no fatal flaw for the current argument. Similarly, Benjamin Lefebvre writes in the introduction to Textual Transformations in Children’s Literature that it is time to apply the post-fidelity school of adaptation to children’s literature in particular, noting that children’s literature creates special conditions involving ‘the generic, pedagogical, and ideological underpinnings that drive both the process and the product’ (2013: 2). Ironically, perhaps, Lefebvre’s very call to consider the particular contexts of children’s literature and its adaptations brings fidelity directly back into play. 23. Cathlena Martin (2009: 94). 24. Writing of The Secret Garden, Maire Messenger Davies posits that ‘children’s classic screen adaptations can be more successful and longer-lived in video or DVD form than other kinds of screen costume drama,’ and speculates that it is perhaps due to their timeless quality: ‘the fairytale universality of many children’s story themes’ (2004: 92). 25. Timothy Shary discusses the role of ‘moral panics’ about youth and their behavior in his article on teen films (2002: 581–82). Karen Diehl situates this intensification of pedagogical anxiety around literary adaptations within a larger phenomenon: the ‘decline of reading’ (2005: 104). In her study, this may result either in affirming the canonization of the author in adaptation, or

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its opposite. And Evelyn Arizpe and Vivienne Smith note that as ‘electronic literacy’ is perceived ‘as a threat to the innocence of the child,’ the symbolic image of the book has gained in importance in children’s literature (2016: xiii). 26. Philip Pullman, ‘Let’s Pretend.’ The Guardian, 24 November 2004, quoted in McAllister (2009: 71). 27. In ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Multiplex,’ Paul Tankard situates the film as a product of Walden Media, a religiously and politically conservative company. The decision not to be particularly ‘experimental’ in filming the metafictional elements should also be considered in that light. As Tankard notes, ‘the filmmakers have been careful not to take too innovative an approach’ (2007: 81). 28. Janine Hauthal mentions this inter- to intramedial shift in her discussion of meta-work adaptation (2009: 570), and so does and Eckart Voigts-Virchow in the context of metadaptation [sic] (2009: 149). 29. As Thomas Leitch writes in ‘Adaptation and Intertextuality,’ ‘Ekphrasis involves embedded representation, not a point-by-point simulacrum of an earlier work that is coextensive with a later work’ (2012: 93–94). In ‘Ekphrasis and Adaptation,’ Claus Clüver similarly notes that adaptation is not automatically ekphrastic: ‘Unlike ekphrasis, adaptation does not result in a new text that only refers back to the adapted configuration or medium’ (2017: 474); its ‘primary function is not descriptive.’ However, while Clüver broadens the visual medium to include new media in its scope, he does not discuss ‘reverse’ ekphrasis, or the artistic (here, filmic) representation of a significant textual artifact on screen that in my formulation can and does function as descriptive quotation by virtue of transmedial adaptation. The embedded book-withina-book becomes ekphrastic on screen. 30. Because the verbal text is the source text for the rhetorical figure (a visual text descriptively cited within a verbal text), it is possible to refer to textual citation within a visual medium as ‘reverse’ ekphrasis. But in the same way that adaptation is redefining ekphrasis, so too I will refer to the descriptive quotation of a book on screen simply as ‘ekphrasis,’ without needing to further reference how this inverts the historical definition. 31. In Sémiotique Intertextuelle, he notes it is the ‘signe médiateur entre un signe et son objet’ (the mediating sign between a sign and its referent) (1979: 133–34). 32. Julie Sanders similarly calls these ‘complex processes of filtration’ (2006: 24). 33. Portions of my discussion of Riffaterre were used in an earlier study, Reading Feminist Intertextuality through Bluebeard Stories (Hermansson 2001), and drew more widely on Riffaterre’s work on intertextuality in particular. 34. A fact that prompted much of the backlash against Riffaterre’s system centered as it is on the idea that the reader’s response is guaranteed, dictated by the text. 35. Catherine Grant quoted in Geraghty. See note 15 above.

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issu es in adap t ing chil dre n’s me ta f i c t i o n t o f i l m 75 36. Jean-Marc Limoges makes this distinction: ‘looking at the camera is not necessarily self-reflexive (and anti-illusionist) if it is (diegetically) motivated’ (2009: 403). Limoges thus distinguishes between the formal devices and their effect on the viewer (404). 37. Werner Wolf (2009) makes the distinction by arguing that some medium selfreflexivity is used referentially, a form of ‘hetero-referentiality’ rather than self-referentiality. The same distinction as made earlier about ekphrasis or quotation of form stands in Wolf ’s description of the spectrum of the phenomenon: some degree of ‘pointing’ seems to be required. 38. Robert Stam, Literature through Film (2005: 112). 39. As does Gerd Bayer in reference to the film adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman: ‘It would take [Harold] Pinter’s realization that the metadiegetic nature of the novel has to be transformed into a meta-cinematic metaphor for The French Lieutenant’s Woman to work well on the screen’ (2010: 905). 40. The use of ‘filmic correlatives’ (113), ‘stylistic-cinematic equivalent’ processes (Ibid.: 118) and ‘transposed reflexivity’ (Ibid.: 119) are staples of Robert Stam’s work Literature through Film, for example. Other terms for this medium equivalence have been called ‘faithful to the spirit,’ creative infidelity, and so on (see for example Seymour Chatman [1980]; David Kranz and Nancy C. Mellerski [2008]; Colin MacCabe et al. [2011]). 41. Janine Hauthal (2009: 575). 42. William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970), quoted in WilkieStibbs (2005: 20).

C HA PT E R 3

Through the Looking Glass: Children’s Books on Screen

After more than a century of depicting readers, writers, books, and their embedded stories on screen, film has developed a staple ‘grammar’ of shots and techniques for rendering them. Books and bookishness frequently dominate the screen. Children’s film uses the same shot patterns to film textual elements as adult-oriented films do. And while a film doesn’t need to be an adaptation to employ these ‘bookish’ characters, settings, and plots, transmediations of children’s metafictions typically do feature the film devices surveyed below. As noted in the Introduction, ‘Bookishness’ is a deliberately loose term to cover a broad array of textual types from books, magical and ordinary, to libraries and bookstores; librarians, teachers, booksellers, and other such mentors and helper figures; struggling readers and master readers, authors and writing. These types and tropes occur with great frequency in children’s transmediated metafiction. The filmic devices themselves are technically neutral, although they add up to a repository of types on screen that parallel those types in children’s books, and particularly in children’s metafictions. These align with the broad division in children’s books: ‘good’ characters generally read and are (or become) pro-book, while ‘bad’ characters do not and are not. While they do burn her book collection, giving her cause, Elinor’s insults in the film Inkheart make this clear. She calls the black jackets ‘illiterate cretins’; ‘ignorant halfwit[s]’; and a ‘bunch of unread, solecistic thugs.’ Being illiterate and unread equate with ignorance and—a self-confessed ‘bookworm’ herself—these are her most damning insults.1 At the same time, by examining how an individual film treats the onscreen relationship with textuality, the ‘interpretant’ of the film—its particular position in the conversation—can be inferred. This chapter first provides a range of examples from children’s films to illustrate a shot ‘grammar’ and a subsequent ‘type’ list, but then discusses two significant, embedded books from the Harry Potter adaptations in more detail to

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chil dre n’s b o o ks o n s c r e e n 77 demonstrate how shifts in the ekphrastic use of books on screen in a given adaptation shapes the dialogue between media.

A Film ‘Grammar’ for Transmediating Bookishness The following is not an exhaustive list, but rather a selection of some of the typical devices used to represent some of the more common situations of representations of ‘bookishness’ on screen. Children’s adapted metafictions form a subset of children’s films that feature and foreground these ‘bookish’ elements in a highly visible way to a young audience. Becky Parry writes in Children, Film and Literacy that ‘children develop skills as readers of film by gaining an understanding of editing conventions’ (2013: 65) and the following outlines some of those editing conventions and their results.

Title Cards, Intertitles, and Subtitles Although ‘text on screen’ is a topic broader than my own focus here, film titles, intertitles, and subtitles are three forms of onscreen text that function peritextually and which are used both to claim an allegiance to a source novel in many of the following examples, and also to transmediate some form of the intangible: literary style. Title Cards and Intertitles2 Early (silent) film drew heavily on the device of intertitles to provide text cues to the silent drama onscreen. In the case of adaptations from books, intertitles provide the further ability to represent by direct quotation some of the textual and stylistic flavor of the source text—something that remains a challenge for film adaptations to do when the filmmakers wish to do so. An example is the 1924 silent film adaptation of Peter Pan directed by Herbert Brenon, the first film adaptation of J. M. Barrie’s 1911 novel Peter and Wendy, and the children’s play (Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up) that predated it (1904).3 Barrie’s novel is a metafictional source; the lengthy and descriptive stage directions of the children’s play that reflected Barrie’s dry humor and urbane voice are interwoven throughout the novel in the form of an intrusive authorial-narrator. Intertitles in the Paramount film adaptation of 1924, in which Barrie had a minor hand,4 serve two purposes. For one, the intertitles explain plot elements or setting shifts to the viewer, taking the place of establishing shots: ‘In Kids’ Creek the Jolly Roger floated immune in the horror of her

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name.’ Viewers, however, were generally presupposed to be familiar with at least two of the dominant prior texts featuring Peter Pan—the novel and children’s play—which were both still enormously popular in 1924.5 The play, for example, was still staged at least annually by touring companies on both sides of the Atlantic. The other purpose of the intertitles is to present quotations from the play and novel to recall its stylistic flavor and best known and beloved moments. The film further adapts the famous meta-theatrical moment of the play into a metacinematic one when Peter addresses the audience directly in a bid to get them to applaud and save the dying fairy Tinkerbell’s life. In the Paramount film adaptation, and predating Dora the Explorer by nearly a century,6 Peter looks at the camera to implore the viewer’s assistance. The sequence of shots (my description of them) and the film’s intertitle text for this breach of the fourth wall is as follows: Medium shot of Peter next to Tinkerbell’s room. Intertitle: ‘She says she thinks she could get well again if children believed in fairies—’ Medium shot of Peter turning to face the camera. Intertitle: ‘DO YOU BELIEVE?’ Medium shot of Peter taking half step toward camera. Intertitle: ‘Oh, say quick that you believe!’ Medium shot of Peter bringing hands to clasp together. Intertitle: ‘If you believe clap your hands . . . like this!’ Medium shot of Peter rapidly applauding, still looking at the camera. Intertitle: ‘Don’t let Tinkerbell die!’ Medium shot of Peter applauding, still looking at the camera, outstretching arms, then applauding more. Intertitle: ‘More! . . . MORE! . . . That’s it! Medium shot of Peter turning to point at Tinkerbell and returning to face the camera. Intertitle: ‘See! Her light is growing stronger!’ Medium shot of Peter looking up and raising his arms in jubilation. Intertitle: ‘She is all right now!’ Medium shot of Peter clasping hands towards the camera. Intertitle: ‘Oh thank you! Thank you!’

This sequence is not by any means the first example of metafilm in film history,7 and in fact serves as a de facto series of subtitles to the words that Peter is mouthing throughout this scene. But it is nevertheless striking both because of the sudden and late-in-the-film breach of the fourth wall, and because a viewing audience of adults and children alike would likely have been expecting to see some form of equivalence given their knowledge of this famous break in the fourth wall in the well-known play version.

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Figure 3.1  Filmic title cards (Source: Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, episode 8).

With the advent of cinema sound, the use of film title cards and intertitles have instead become a self-conscious device that nevertheless recalls authoritative textuality to the screen. The opening of each episode of the recent Netflix adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017) uses stylized title cards announcing which novel it adapts, Part One and Part Two (see Figure 3.1), visually echoing the archaic style of historical intertitles. What is interesting about the opening sequence and the use of title cards in the Netflix series is that it even-handedly combines literary and filmic references (see detailed discussion in Chapter 5). This duality is represented in the opening credit sequence as well; following the use of the filmic title card, complete with flickering projector light, the sequence continues with a black screen and individually typed letters appearing on screen accompanied by the sound of a typewriter. The dedication these reproduce derives not only from the novel sources, but from the novelistic tradition. Dedications that are both typed and placed at the beginning of a work are typical of fictional texts while they are not typical of filmic ones (see Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2  Typed dedication (Source: Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, episode 1).

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Figure 3.3  Literary chapter divisions in film (Source: Hunt for the Wilderpeople).

The film Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), directed by Taika Waititi, adapts the concept of on screen chapter titles from its source novel— if not the actual chapter titles of the source novel—to onscreen text that serves the function of intertitles as well (see Figure 3.3). The film adapts the titles as well: the first chapter of the film is ‘A Real Bad Egg,’ while the corresponding first chapter of the novel is ‘The Wife’s Sister’s Boy.’8 The Hunt for the Wilderpeople adapts a little known, formerly out of print title by New Zealand author Barry Crump, Wild Pork and Watercress (1986). The novel was also reprinted in 2016, with cover art that reflected both the dated original (the style of drawn illustration is distinctly oldfashioned) and its adaptation (the drawing depicts Sam Neill and Julian Dennison in the two lead roles of Ricky and Uncle Hec—the actors who play them on screen in their iconic swanndri wool bushshirts).9 In 1982, the novel’s author Barry Crump appeared in a Toyota Hilux television commercial in New Zealand, where his nervous passenger Scotty calls him ‘Barry,’ and ‘Crumpy.’ In one of Hunt for the Wilderpeople’s many homages, the manic bush character Psycho Sam has a hidden ‘ute’ (utility vehicle) called ‘Crumpy’ and the bush driving sequence that follows deliberately recalls Crump’s television commercial.10 The use of ‘chapters’ for the film’s narrative episodes consistently effects metaleptic interruptions throughout the film, and frame the film as an adaptation from a literary source. Subtitles While subtitles are usually a function of closed captioning or of translation from one language to another in lieu of dubbing, and are not often features of children’s film and television, they are sometimes used as an

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Figure 3.4  Sunny’s speech in subtitles (Source: Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events).

onscreen device for conveying textually something that cannot otherwise be conveyed. That is for example the case in both adaptations of A Series of Unfortunate Events (the film, 2004, and Netflix’s streaming adaptation, from 2017—), as the youngest Baudelaire orphan, Sunny, is pre-speech. Her onscreen baby ‘babble’ is therefore given sophisticated expression in onscreen subtitling (see Figure 3.4). The contrast between the infant pre-speech and the sophistication of the subtitles is further heightened in the Netflix adaptation through casting, as Sunny (Presley Smith) is clearly younger there than the toddlers (Kara and Shelby Hoffman) who play her in the Nickelodeon film.

Opening (with) ‘the Book’ The film The Jungle Book (1967) is one classic Disney example that uses the device of opening the film with the book. The film’s opening shot is of a book called ‘The Jungle Book’ lying on deep blue velvet. At the bottom of the screen, the words ‘Color by Technicolor’ appear and then disappear, partially overlaying the book cover. The book opens—without aid of any visible hand—flipping past a table of contents listing chapters and coming to rest on the first page of ‘Chapter 1.’ The camera zooms slowly in to a close-up of the drawn illustration and then uses the editing device of overlap and dissolve (lap dissolve) to transform into the cartoon animation of the same image. The animated, CGI film Shrek (2001) is not an adaptation. However, it opens in a now-traditional way with a filmed storybook and ­voiceover

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­ arrator (Shrek) reading the text aloud. The opening draws attention n to itself by virtue of its highly artificial nature; in addition to being a computer-animated reproduction of a book, it is an illuminated manuscript and one about ogres and dragons and a princess named, mundanely enough, Fiona. Film titles representing bookish source texts in this way serve a number of functions. They facilitate in signaling the adaptation as an adaptation; they recuperate the prestige and legitimacy of literariness—even if, as with Shrek, that use is parodic; and they create a framing layer to the film, rendering the entirety of the film en abyme, within metaphorical quotation marks. The opening of Fantastic Mr. Fox, for example, offers up an image of the source book of the same name, by author Roald Dahl, being held by one of the ‘human’ characters in the film. This shot both makes its adaptation status clear (see Figure 3.5) but also functions as a portal, since the cover image is that of the next shot within the embedded (story) layer of the film. This film, like Hunt for the Wilderpeople, also uses chapter intertitles as ‘leaders,’ further foregrounding a textual (book) organization to the film.11 In the case of transmediated children’s metafictions, this explicit claim to the source book is important. Given the freighting that metafiction has—what it purports to be and do for the child reader—and the expectations of fidelity in adaptation in the children’s contexts, as discussed in earlier chapters, the use of the source book by quotation is also indexical (it points to an extant book elsewhere). This shot is a good example of the representation of a metaleptic threshold. The name ‘Roald Dahl’

Figure 3.5  The book (Source: Fantastic Mr. Fox).

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chil dre n’s b o o ks o n s c r e e n 83 correlates to an actual historical personage in the world of the viewer, while this Mr. Fox as pictured on the cover is the Mr. Fox of the film. Figure 3.5 refers simultaneously inward and outward as most such ‘book’ openings do.

Voicing the Narrator Typically, a voiceover may be used to represent an omniscient narrator (whether or not there is a source text and whether or not that source text used a narrator, but particularly when one does). The live action film Peter Pan (2003) uses narratorial voiceover sparingly (only at the beginning of the film),12 echoing the prior, animated Disney version, which also began with narratorial voiceover. In both cases, the narrator mediates the distinctive voice of the intrusive authorial narrator of the novel (a version of the literary stage directions provided in J. M. Barrie’s 1928 published version of the children’s play). However, voiceover is no more neutral than other forms of casting decisions. While Disney employs the male, authoritative speaker, the twentyfirst century live-action film instead uses a female voice, although not that of the Darling children’s mother, despite their similarity. This shift is interesting in the context of the particular text being adapted. The novel Peter and Wendy evinces a dated masculine narrative point of view. Wendy, for example, ‘was every inch a woman’ when she curiously peeped out from under the bedclothes, and ‘made herself rather cheap’ (31) by offering her cheek to a hoped-for kiss from Peter in the nursery. Late in the novel, the narrator indicates ‘he’ is rather annoyed with Mrs. Darling and even ‘despise[s] her,’ if for a moment (183). Although ‘he’ is equally cutting about other, male characters in the story, such comments align ‘his’ perspective with a masculine one. Aligning the voiceover with women generally, and possibly Mrs. Darling in particular, thus shifts the film’s framing allegiance from the outset. At the same time, as it is Mrs. Darling who sets the night lights to watch the children as they sleep and is the voice of calm reason in the parental household, her reassurance as the Darling parents are sprinting in slow motion toward the (now empty) nursery is decidedly maternal: ‘It would be delightful to report that they reached the nursery in time . . . But then, there would be no story.’ Similarly, while the two extant screen adaptations of Daniel Handler’s Series of Unfortunate Events both use male narrators, in keeping with the male Lemony Snicket of the novels, Jude Law voices Snicket with his native British accent for the 2004 Nickelodeon film, while Patrick Warburton voices Snicket with his own American one for the Netflix series

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launched in 2017. Is Lemony Snicket, narrator of Handler’s thirteen novels, British or American? It is significant that Bastian’s own voice provides the voiceover of reading in The Neverending Story. Bastian is not reading aloud, but rather internally, to himself. The film is about Bastian’s own hero’s journey as a reader; just as Atreyu the warrior is tasked with undertaking his quest alone and without weapons, so Bastian is both a lonely child and alone when he reads the book. Bastian has to accomplish his own bildung. But the premise of the embedded book is also that new readers are needed to keep Fantastica (Fantasia, in the film) alive. Without the omniscient, overarching narrator, Bastian is the only hope. And to the extent that he gives the new name to the Empress, he is the ‘author’ of this Fantastica as well. Positioning the final (male, adult) voiceover in the final scenes of the film leaves the next layer of this metalepsis (the viewer’s world) as an implicit one throughout the film until the Empress mentions that we have followed Bastian’s adventures just as Bastian has followed Atreyu’s. So too the quantity of voiceover narration contributes aesthetically to the adaptation. The omniscient narratorial voiceover in The Tale of Despereaux (2008), spoken by Sigourney Weaver, is a much more frequently used device throughout that film adaptation. One reviewer in the industry magazine Daily Variety faulted this film’s attempt to approximate ‘the tender direct address to the reader that allowed the author’s moral insights . . . to sink in without condescension’ (Chang 2008: 4). Instead, the ‘lecturesome voiceover narration that spells out every last nuance as the fil[m] proceeds’ creates condescension in the film. Narratorial voiceover and the embodied onscreen narrator will both be discussed again in Chapter 5, in the context of A Series of Unfortunate Events. As with the trope of ‘opening (with) the book,’ this voiceover narration creates a layer in the narrative levels of the film. In using sound editing this way, one of film’s multimodal aspects is employed to create a meta-level above the narrative that also serves a self-reflexive nature (‘this is a story’).

Depicting Thematized Readers and Writers Perhaps the most visible form of ‘filmed fiction’ can be seen in the common but significant character types: ‘the reader’ and, less common, perhaps by virtue of being typically an adult figure, ‘the author.’ In each case, the character type is signified by what they do: readers read (books, usually) and writers write (or type). In the case of metafiction’s embedded narratives which depict the stories being read and written, film has

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Figures 3.6 and 3.7  Two shots as Meggie reads The Wizard of Oz (Source: Inkheart).

evolved a shot sequence for showing both what the reader is reading or the writer is writing, and for metaleptic crossing of the threshold into the embedded narrative itself as well. As books are metaphorically portals into other worlds—Elinor says in Inkheart, she has had all sorts of adventures without ever leaving her library, and Mr. Dewey of The Pagemaster refers to a library card as a ‘passport’—filmic performance of metalepsis ­actualizes that portal and movement through it. The sequence for showing a reader or writer in the act of reading or writing is typically a two-shot process. In the first, in long or medium shot, the reader or writer is depicted. The next shot may either feature a closeup of the page they are reading/writing, or an ‘over the shoulder’ shot of the same. A representative example of this standard shot sequence can be seen in Inkheart (see Figures 3.6 and 3.7). Meggie is reading Frank L. Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. That text has a recurring role in the film, and characters from it (Toto, flying monkeys) are brought into Meggie’s world along with other recognizable figures from other classic texts (Cinderella’s glass slipper; Huck Finn’s raft; a hound of the Baskervilles; the ticking crocodile from Peter Pan; the gingerbread house from ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ and so on) and one of Capricorn’s gang is sent into the book with a tornado. The illustration page is visible as part of the key to the nature of the book—a ‘children’s’ book—while the text page is secondary in this framing, partially hidden by Meggie’s hair. It is this book that Dustfinger rescues from the flames and returns to Meggie, as a clue to his good character. The theme ‘there’s no place like home’ runs through Inkheart as both Dustfinger and Resa are displaced from their homes and families, and the classic novel thus serves as a signifying text. The same shot sequence in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) shows an author (Lemony Snicket) typing, then shows a shot of what he has written (see Figures 3.8 and 3.9). And a representative example of the juxtaposed reaction shot (adding an extreme close-up reaction shot of the reader) can be seen in The Spiderwick Chronicles as Jared reacts to an exciting episode he is reading—in this

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Figures 3.8 and 3.9  Two shots as the writer types the story (Source: Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Nickelodeon).

Figures 3.10 and 3.11  Two shots as the reader reacts (Source: The Spiderwick Chronicles).

instance, shown filmically and with Arthur Spiderwick’s authorial voiceover (see Figures 3.10 and 3.11). As noted, the main function of the metafiction of The Neverending Story is to depict the effect of reading on Bastian—his ‘hero’s journey’ is undertaken vicariously by reading Atreyu’s hero’s journey and at the end, having rescued Fantastica, Bastian is a hero in his own right. The frame action of the film, then, is primarily Bastian reading and thereby experiencing catharsis.13 That gives greater focus on the range of responses Bastian makes to his reading, alternating scenes of intense embedded action with reactions of grief, fear, exhaustion, or jubilation (see Figures 3.12–14). It is Bastian’s voice providing the voiceover of the narrative; he is reading, internally, to himself.

Books and their Embedded Stories Filmed metafiction, in which a story within a significant book within the film is depicted, is an obvious subset of films to consider, and the one in which ekphrastic ‘quotation’ within an adaptation context is most clearly visible. The paratextual theatrical release posters and DVD covers for both Inkheart and Ella Enchanted employ the trope of the open book with sparks or light emitting from its pages signaling magic. In the case of

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Figure 3.12  Bastian cries at Artax’s death (Source: The Neverending Story).

Figure 3.13  Bastian shouts at the revelation of Morla (Source: The Neverending Story).

Figure 3.14  Bastian is exhausted by Atreyu’s adventures (Source: The Neverending Story).

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Inkheart, the magic it signifies is closely associated with reading. However, while the ‘magic book’ in Ella Enchanted is a book of fairy tales that shows Ella largely epistolary records that she reads, in the film adaptation the oversized book is actually ‘Benny,’ a beau who has been turned into a book by magic gone wrong. The book functions only as access to moving images that ‘show’ Ella things she needs to know and couldn’t find out easily another way.14 The Spiderwick Chronicles also uses the image of an open book emitting sparks for its DVD cover, while Maria of The Secret of Moonacre is also clutching an oversized, archaic magical book on the DVD cover for that film. The same magical imagery of light and/or sparks emanating from within a book appears inside select films as well, such as in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when Harry is drawn into and later thrown out of Tom Riddle’s cursed diary (see Figure 3.15). In The Spiderwick Chronicles, when the main character Jared first breaks the seal to open his great grandfather’s ‘Field Guide,’ there is a gust of wind indoors, and a bird’s eye view above the roof of the house reveals a ripple effect emanating from the house at the center, accompanied by the roar of Mulgarath—the ogre seeking the book. This reverses the same sequence already shown when the author sealed the book. Clearly, Jared has ‘activated’ the book which, although not magical in and of itself, has been sealed by its author and protected by a magical charm. Further, it is a key to the fantastical world. The book is dangerous because of the knowledge it contains. While the books in these examples derive from children’s fantasy adaptations where the book is literally magical (or, as in Inkheart, the storyteller’s ability to bring characters forth from a book is the magic and curse), the same trope is evident in ascribing ‘magic’ to all books and the act of reading

Figure 3.15  Light from Tom Riddle’s diary (Source: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets).

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them. The cover art of Carrie Hintz and Eric Tribunella’s exemplary book, Reading Children’s Literature, is a case in point. Scott McKowen’s cover illustration features a young boy holding up a book; light from the open pages illuminates his face, while a variety of images—a crown, a key, a playing card and so on—fly up from its pages as well. In this familiar iconography, whether a book is literally magical or not, reading is pictured as a magical act and the book itself a portal for fantasy—good and bad. Yet while the embedded and eponymous book is also central to The Princess Bride and to The Neverending Story, only the embedded fantasy story features on the posters advertising the original film release of each. And despite the importance of books to The Pagemaster, and The Tale of Despereaux, like The Spiderwick Chronicles, and The Secret of Moonacre, similarly the film posters feature only elements from the embedded adventure story. Within each of these films, however, the significant book involves an important embedded story, so they require transitional techniques and often differences in cinematography as well to distinguish between layers. The embedded story is thereby mise en abyme (placed within), creating a hierarchy of levels and, with that, the need for metaleptic traversal across thresholds in either direction. The following editing sequences give a range of typical transitional techniques and other filmic elements to show the embedding and simultaneous layering. An obvious example is The Pagemaster, which transitions from a frame of live action (featuring Macaulay Culkin as Richard, a young boy escaping a storm by taking shelter in a library) to a cartoon for the sequence of events that happen while the protagonist is ostensibly knocked out on the library floor. Visually, the frame narrative and mise en abyme are clearly distinguishable, and the sequence is entered and exited via parallel shots of Richard lying spread-eagled on the tiles of the rotunda floor. The same device is used in The Tale of Despereaux, which is already an animated film. The embedded story Despereaux reads and which gives him insight into the history of the family whose castle he inhabits, and which gives him the idea of being a gentleman on a quest is rendered in a very different style of animation, as it is also in ‘The Tale of the Three Brothers’ from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1. The stories-within-stories thus become pictures-within-pictures to achieve metafilmic effect. Other editing techniques for effecting and demonstrating metalepsis are perhaps somewhat more subtle but nevertheless render it very visible. The Lap Dissolve In the (over)lap dissolve, both the reader and the narrative being read share the screen as one image comes to dominate over the other. Examples

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Figure 3.16  Lap dissolve from reader to book (Source: The Princess Bride, with DVD closed captions).

Figure 3.17  Lap dissolve from reader to book (Source: Inkheart, with DVD closed captions).

from Inkheart and The Princess Bride are shown in Figures 3.16 and 3.17. In each case, a reader is reading aloud as the story details assume the screen space. In The Spiderwick Chronicles, the same device is used although Jared is not reading aloud; the accompanying voiceover is that of Arthur Spiderwick, the author of the ‘Field Guide’ that Jared is reading (see Figure 3.18). In fact, in The Spiderwick Chronicles this lap dissolve is obtrusive and persistent throughout this sequence, not only in the representation of

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Figure 3.18  Lap dissolve from reader to book (Source: The Spiderwick Chronicles).

Figure 3.19  Pan right to ‘meet’ the author (Source: The Spiderwick Chronicles).

Jared reading, but also of Arthur writing the ‘Field Guide.’ The liminality of the text as a shared ground for the reader and the author is clearly emphasized with this strategy, and reaches its culmination in the alternative shot type whereby a fast pan between reader and writer, finally connects the two directly on screen together despite the eighty years that separate them. The camera performs a fast pan to the right and elides a cut to a second  shot of the author writing what Jared is reading (see Figure 3.19). A different example of lap dissolve that functions in a more disruptive and brutal way is the lap dissolve in Inkheart to show the course of magic (metalepsis) working as the Silvertongue reads aloud.15 We learn that when such a silver tongue (like Mortimer and his daughter Meggie) reads aloud, they have the power to bring things alive from books into the real world. But at the same time, something from this world goes into

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Figure 3.20  Mo’s metaleptic magic as ‘double vision’ (Source: Inkheart).

the book in exchange. This causes the arrival of Capricorn and his gang from ‘Inkheart,’ and loses Resa, Mortimer’s wife and Meggie’s mother, to that world. The film’s first instance of showing this rupturing effect is when Mo reads aloud to his newborn infant daughter. The camera takes on a rapid handheld shake effect, and blurred images overlap in a form of ‘double vision’ similar to the lap dissolve (see Figure 3.20). This occurs several more times in the course of the film, and again as Meggie reads the destruction of Capricorn at the end. The effect is extremely disjunctive and self-foregrounding, by contrast to the lap dissolve also used in the same film and as pictured earlier. These editing techniques have evolved as a perfect example of medium specific ‘equivalence’ that is perhaps rather a ‘metaphor’ than an equivalent. The simultaneous doubleness created by this editing captures the ‘double vision’ of metafiction in a medium-specific way. But while metalepsis results in each case, and they facilitate transitions into ‘filmed fiction,’ these shots are fundamentally metacinematic in nature. Shift from Still to Moving Image A frequently employed transition (as seen in Disney’s The Jungle Book opening of 1967, noted previously) is from still to moving image, and vice versa to bookend embedded sequences of story from within a book or narrative. One example of this type of bookending to get into and out of the abyme occurs in the film Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004). The voiceover narrator holds up a still photograph in an over-theshoulder shot; the camera then zooms slowly toward the image, which then straightens and becomes the cinematic depiction of the events (see Figures 3.21 and 3.22).

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Figures 3.21 and 3.22  Two shots: from film still . . . to film (Source: Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events).

The sequence is then reversed at the end of the embedded narrative with a freeze of the cinematic image and a zoom out to reveal it as a photograph in the authorial-narrator’s hands. A similar effect is achieved in The Secret of Moonacre whereby the book Maria is reading—The Ancient Chronicle of Moonacre Valley—is shot first as a drawn, color illustration that then dissolves into cinematic sequence. That sequence is also reversed but, in an interesting moment that breaks the fourth wall, the character turns to face Maria as if suddenly aware of her voiceover, and shocks Maria into abruptly closing the book (see Figures 3.23 and 3.24). At the end of the film, set in the same spot, Maria herself is captured this way for the viewer as well, revealing for the first time another outer layer to the embedded narrative as though Maria herself is in a story and is suddenly aware of us. This strategy thus effects a similar result as the end of The Neverending Story, when a narrator appears in closing to ‘narrate’ Bastian’s conclusion using a phrase Ende’s narrator uses throughout the novel: ‘But that’s another story. . .’ The frame story is now another embedded story, which presupposes that we are there to see it. The Secret of Moonacre also depicts the embedded story in a yellow-sepia color, as did the embedded narrative of The Spiderwick Chronicles, and with a visibly lensed focal point; everything outside the center of the image is blurred.

Figures 3.23 and 3.24  Two shots: from film still . . . to book (Source: The Secret of Moonacre).

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These strategies help to ensure a visible distinction between frame and embedded narratives. Metaphors for Metalepsis: Windows and Mirrors The ‘mirror in the text’ is sometimes literal, as with Bastian and Atreyu’s metaleptic encounter at the Magic Mirror Gate in The Neverending Story. In The Look of Reading, 1514–1990, Garrett Stewart notes that paintings of people reading or holding books are an identifiable subgroup, and that the presence of a reading figure is often juxtaposed with ‘a window, a mirror, and a series of horizontal stripes suggestive of the written text, which together may comment on reading as an activity allowing both the escape from and the examination of the self ’ (Stewart as paraphrased by Claudia Nelson 2006: 223). This movement simultaneously outward and inward occurs with all reading and is fundamentally metaleptic. Layered reading, such as metafiction, foregrounds and intensifies metalepsis. But a similar ‘portal’ iconography can be seen in filmic mirrors and windows in such scenes as well. The many instances of windows blowing open in the film The Neverending Story function as more than an interruption to Bastian’s reading but as an expression of metalepsis. A storm in Fantasia is juxtaposed with a storm outside Bastian’s school. And when he shouts the name of the new Empress, he does so out of the garret window. The storm in fact obscures the name he shouts—we are to understand it is his mother’s name—so that the film leaves an indeterminacy for the viewer to fill. Bastian’s rescue of the Empress needn’t preclude our own. Similarly, when Dustfinger arrives with the black jackets in the film Inkheart, he steps into Mo’s study through the French doors as a storm rages outside. In multiple shots he is dramatically backlit by lightning. Meggie is shown in the library as she first sees one of Capricorn’s men behind her, leering through the window. While such scenes derive equally from the Gothic playbook, in the context of these highly metaleptic novel adaptations such threshold crossings also serve a reflexive function. As these examples show, there is variety among the treatment of representations and transitions from film to film, but the basic shot grammar remains comfortably familiar and visible. Embedded stories frequently appear distinct from the frame narrative, cinematically, in order to facilitate recognition of the different levels of narrative embedding. ­ Although there may be a sophisticated set of transitions between multiple levels and time frames of narrative, shots in children’s film employ a host of varied techniques that foreground these metaleptic crossings for young viewers.

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The Usual Suspects: Bookish Typecasting Just as we can discern a film ‘grammar’ of shots that has developed in order to depict bookishness on screen in children’s film, so too there are stock ways in which children’s film characterizes bookishness and anti-bookishness. In Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) Belle is depicted from the outset as an avid bookworm—a Disney characterization rather than one drawn from her fairy tale origins.16 Her unassuming family home boasts an impressive library, and she suffers near misses in town because she is walking with her face in a book. Yet her ‘bookishness’ doesn’t feature much into her characterization. Instead, it is the litmus test for distinguishing between the outwardly handsome but ‘stupid’ Gaston, and her future beau, the ‘Beast.’ Gaston typifies the physically handsome but doltish oaf by holding Belle’s book sideways to read it, asking ‘How do you read this? There’s no pictures!’ [sic] (see Figure 3.25)—although there actually are pictures, as we have just seen in an over-the-shoulder shot of Belle in the market square looking at the book she has been gifted by the bookseller. Their first interaction in the film is for Gaston to take her book, Belle to ask for it back, and Gaston to toss the book into a muddy puddle while telling her she needs to pay attention to more important things, like him. He interrupts her reading with his proposal the next day, and further desecrates her book with his muddy socked feet. When Belle retrieves the book, Gaston takes it again, and she has to wrest it from him. Beast on the other hand, has an exaggeratedly

Figure 3.25  Gaston can’t make books work (Source: Beauty and the Beast).

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Figure 3.26  The Beast remembers how to read (Source: Beauty and the Beast).

enormous library to which Belle responds: ‘I can’t believe it! I’ve never seen so many books in all my life!’ Beast gives her the library because she  likes it. He is enraptured by Belle reading aloud and remembers how to read—from  Belle  (see Figure  3.26).  Literacy makes the worthy man. The film’s  last use of books  is when Gaston brings the mob to attack Beast at his castle; books feature in several shots as debris (as in Figure 3.29). Disney’s more recent live-action adaptation Beauty and the Beast (2017, directed by Bill Condon) follows the studio’s earlier lead with regard to Belle (Emma Watson) and her books. With some additions, it uses the same music (some of which pertains to Belle’s reading) and amplifies the earlier bookish theme—enhanced intertextually through her strong associations with Hermione Granger, the bookish heroine of the Harry Potter series, Watson’s debut and signature film role. Belle not only reads but teaches other girls to read. As the Headmaster says, horrified: ‘What on earth are you doing? Teaching another girl to read? Isn’t one enough?’ Gaston doesn’t desecrate Belle’s books but he doesn’t read either. Their first encounter in this film, modeled on the Disney animation, has Gaston caught in empty praise. When he compliments Belle’s book as ‘Wonderful book you have there,’ she asks if he has read it, to which he is forced to reply nonsensically: ‘Well, not that one, but, you know, books . . .’ Beast gifts his library to Belle the same way—with the addition of showing her an enchanted book by means of which Belle returns to the Paris of her childhood to discover what happened to her mother. Reviewer Susan Wloszczyna described the symbolism of the library scene: ‘One can only

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chil dre n’s b o o ks o n s c r e e n 97 describe the reaction on Watson’s face as she takes in this leather-bound orgy of reading material as a biblio-gasm’ (2017). When the mob attacks the castle, books are used in defense: Cogsworth the clock (butler) sets the books at the heads of attackers, shouting at them to ‘teach them a lesson’ and mocking the mob as illiterate: ‘Yes, those are called books, you third rate musketeers.’ And just as in the prior film, books disappear from this moment on: their function to contrast Beast’s character against Gaston’s and to show Beast as civilized and beautiful on the inside has been accomplished. The use of books as a shortcut to characterization is perhaps best seen in the following moment from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, precisely because it creates a moment that does not exist in the novel, but which clearly shows a character index measured by how characters treat books and reading. The scene in Flourish and Blotts, the bookstore in Diagon Alley where Harry and his pseudo-family the Weasleys go to purchase the year’s textbooks for all the children, adapts a chapter of the same scene from the novel called ‘At Flourish and Blotts.’ A crucial encounter  occurs there in the novel with Draco Malfoy and his father, both of whom are aligned with the dark forces of the world, as will be ­discussed  further  below; it is here that Ginny is slipped the offending diary that is the major plot driver of this novel. But the revelation of  Draco’s presence in the store in the film is quickly followed by showing  Draco  tearing a page  from a book and pocketing it (see Figure 3.27). The contrast between Draco’s socially unacceptable behavior (he not only steals a page from a book in a store, but defaces the book in order to do so) is underscored by the presence of the Weasley twins in the bottom right

Figure 3.27  Bookstore behaviors in Flourish and Blotts (Source: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets).

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corner of the frame. While neither twin is a particularly good student, and in fact they ultimately drop out of Hogwarts before their schooling is completed, they are shown here in an uncharacteristically studious moment, sharing a book. The bookstore is presented as a place for families from the outset, when a mother and child pore over a book display together. The diagonally opposed framing here exacerbates the point that Draco is not just anti-Weasley, or anti-book, but that he is operating altogether outside the social contract of the good characters of Harry Potter’s world. Two more stock types are evident in The Pagemaster, clearly visible by virtue of the fact that the film adaptation predates any book and thus the film has no direct textual source. Its ‘bookishness’ is an entirely filmic construct. The first stock type is the reluctant reader who becomes, by the end of the story, a convert to books. Richard Tyler is frightened of everything, which is part of the catalyst for his escape from a storm and downpour into an all but deserted city library. He does not have a library card until the librarian gives him one and has no intention of getting a book. He only wants to use the public phone to call his parents. By the end of his animated adventures with the helper figures of three books, ‘adventure,’ ‘horror,’ and ‘fantasy,’ he has completed three challenges, largely deriving from classic books. And as a result, he has overcome his paralyzing fears and even braves his own treehouse where his parents find him sleeping. Notably, he insists on checking out three books—the real correlatives to his three animated helper figures—which is permitted him in contravention of the ‘two book limit.’ Rich’s oversized, owlishly round spectacles appear to have been prescient indicators of a reader in the making. And although the film showcases animation techniques, being the first film to include not only live action and cartoon but also nascent CGI, the film’s overriding theme is the value and companionship of books; they are ‘almost as much fun’ as cartoons and video games.17 And the second familiar type from this film is the wise if wacky librarian Mr. Dewey, played by Christopher Lloyd. The type he embodies is the adult keen to engage a young child in reading books. The library is utterly deserted when Rich enters it. The librarian is frighteningly enthusiastic, spinning around Rich and guessing what type of book he must be looking for. In the painted rotunda ceiling, the central wizard of the painting has the librarian’s face; the wizard is revealed in the cartoon sequence to be ‘the Pagemaster,’ guardian of the books. (The connection with reading, wisdom, and wizards is strong in fantasy works—Harry Potter’s headmaster Dumbledore is no stranger to books, and nor is Gandalf, of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series of novels, beginning with the ‘prequel’

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The Hobbit, 1937.) Dewey’s insistence that he knows what each reader needs by way of a special book is initially comical, as he misreads Rich so completely, but at the end of the film after Rich has been permitted to check not two, but three books out, Mr. Dewey reprises the theme that he knows what a reader needs. The film ends with Mr. Dewey after Rich has left, grinning in close-up. The moment is nearly identical to that in The Neverending Story when the grumpy bookseller smiles and nods approvingly after Bastian has ‘borrowed’ the book and fled from the store.18 Librarians and grumpy booksellers, no matter how oddly they behave, really do seem to know it all. The forces of good and evil as pro- and anti-book (or, in the case of The Spiderwick Chronicles, for and against the ‘good’ use of a book) are evident in Lemony Snicket’s a Series of Unfortunate Events and The Tale of Despereaux, where they are already represented in the metafictional source novels themselves. Most significant books in children’s metafictions have to be protected against those who would misuse them. The very creation of ‘Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You,’ by Arthur Spiderwick was a form of transgression by concentrating in a single book more knowledge about the world of the fantastical creatures. Much of The Spiderwick Chronicles involves Jared trying to keep the book from being stolen by Mulgarath. That the library full of books is a conventional signifier for access to wisdom is perhaps clear in Lois Lowry’s Newbery-award-winning novel The Giver and in its film adaptation, where the library of books functions largely as backdrop. While the novel is metafictional and highly reflexive at the linguistic level about what words can be used with precision to describe things the community has never known, The Receiver has the only library in this circumscribed world and is the only one with access to memories of the past beyond the present generation. Books in dwellings are limited to reference works, and the Book of Rules. When Jonas becomes the new Receiver of Memory for his community, he enters the dwelling of the man who has now become The Giver—the former Receiver. This place is marked by its plethora of books: But this room’s walls were completely covered by book-cases, filled, which reached to the ceiling. There must have been hundreds—perhaps thousands—of books, their titles embossed in shiny letters. (Lowry 1993: 94)

Yet in the education that follows, books play almost no part at all. Instead, ‘transmission’ (108) is achieved by laying on of hands. The Giver tells Jonas they are the only two ‘with access to the books’ (128), and that when

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Figure 3.28  Jonas meets The Giver, and books (Source: The Giver).

Jonas has finished his training with The Giver and is the new Receiver, ‘You can read the books; you’ll have the memories. You have access to everything’ (183, original emphasis). As stated twice by The Giver, the books signify access to learning—wisdom by virtue of memory—but they don’t function to provide learning in the novel. The film adaptation The Giver (2014) follows this course set by the novel; while The Giver’s library is an impressive multi-story affair (see Figure 3.28), books are opened only two or three times. The library has more impact as we see no books in dwellings prior to the encounter. The Book of Rules is not shown; instead, the individual rules are narrated by Jonas in voiceover while they appear as text on the screen. Arriving at The Giver’s dwelling, then, Jonas immediately touches a book. The Giver announces ‘They’re called books. Your books.’ We are led to believe that Jonas has never seen a book before. Yet beyond this point, we rarely see The Giver holding a book as though he has been reading or intends to read, and Jonas spends mere seconds looking into any open book in the course of the film. While The Giver rummages through books on the bookshelves at one point, the pictorial map of the community is what he appears to be seeking there.

Sacking the Library As a consequence of villainous characters being anti-book, books are often attacked and libraries destroyed in these films. The only real function of the mischievous Cornish pixies in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets appears to be to destroy books and papers, and the destruction of Harry’s books and papers in his room by the person seeking Tom Riddle’s diary is a clue to the destructive nature of the character (Ginny Weasley, operating

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Figure 3.29  Attack on Beast’s books (Source: Beauty and the Beast).

under an imperius curse). While Gaston and his mob arrive at night with lit torches, watched from the library window by Beast’s helper figures, the library is not fired but apparently ransacked, suggested by the shot of tossed books (see Figure 3.29). Being made of paper, the true enemy of books is fire (see Figure 3.30) and, in The Tale of Despereaux, hungry mice. While Arthur Spiderwick’s book has a magical protection that prevents Jared from deliberately burning the book in The Spiderwick Chronicles (it sits untouched in the flames), other books and libraries are sacked and burned in children’s metafictions and in their film adaptations. The Baudelaire household library sanctuary is destroyed by arson with the rest of the house, in the outset of Daniel Handler’s The Bad Beginning

Figure 3.30  The book pyre (Source: Inkheart).

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(A Series of Unfortunate Events). Books are targeted also in Inkheart. First, all copies of ‘Inkheart’ itself are sought and destroyed as the characters who have escaped their book confines want to ensure they can’t be returned to them. But Meggie’s Aunt Elinor has a prized and priceless book collection that is burned gleefully by Capricorn’s black jacketed gang as well. The bonfire of books on Elinor’s lawn is reminiscent of other fascist book burnings in history, reinforced by the novel’s Italian setting, German author, and holocaust poems among the original novel’s many epigrams.19

Ekphrasis as Interpretant As discussed in the previous chapter, the transmediation of a book on screen is a form of ekphrasis—one art work embedded within another, transmedially, as a form of quotation. And how the film medium treats the book-prop in these cases can be seen as indicative of the relationship between the media from the perspective of the film adaptation.20 The foregrounding of the book-on-film is in some cases by virtue of the size of the book-prop, while in others it is due to special properties the book exhibits. Important books are emphasized by oversized tomes in The Neverending Story, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and The Secret of Moonacre. In Ella Enchanted, the significant book-prop ultimately transforms back into ‘Benny,’ a human character, but not until after many shots of Ella inconveniently carting the massive book everywhere on her travels (see Figure 3.31).

Figure 3.31  Ella’s book (Source: Ella Enchanted).

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chil dre n’s b o o ks o n s c r e e n 103 In The Tale of Despereaux the key tome is oversized relative to the size of a (very small) mouse. But it is also oversized in its significance to the formation of Despereaux’s character. By contrast to the metafictional sourcetext which remains explicitly self-reflexive until the very end, the most important book in the film is the one that Despereaux reads about the princess and from which he learns notions of courtly chivalry. Despereaux is already an outlier in his community both for his miniature size and because he reads books rather than dines on them. These lavish shots of Despereaux reading by physically moving across the pages of illuminated manuscripts indicate the film’s positive relationship to books and to reading. But once Despereaux has internalized the lessons of his reading—the code of a ‘gentleman’—books disappear from the film as visual iconography. One wonders what the story would have been had Despereaux happened upon a different book. Similarly, in Beauty and the Beast, books are crucial to Belle’s characterization and to that of Gaston and the Beast (one barely literate, the other a bibliophile). Yet once this characterization is established, books largely disappear from the film. After Gaston’s attack on the castle, there are no more scenes that show books. The interpretant—a film’s relationship to books and, by inference, to the sourcetext it adapts—may be signaled quite briefly in significant scenes. Once the interpretant is established, actual book-props may no longer even be necessary. A common interpretant is the book as transactional symbol for family bonds. Typically, this interpretant is shown in the framing of family scenes around books. The family connection created by reading ‘The Princess Bride’ aloud to his sick grandson is the frame story’s trajectory of The Princess Bride, for example. The grandson is disinterested in books and disinterested in his grandfather’s visit at the outset. By the conclusion, he is interested in both, and suggests it would be fine to reprise the readingvisit again tomorrow. The grandfather announces that he used to read this book aloud to the boy’s father, when the latter was sick. No other mention is made of the father figure in the film; we see only the boy’s mother taking care of him, and the grandfather visiting. The familial bond the grandfather restores by reading ‘The Princess Bride’—a book about true love, after all—foregrounds what the adaptation has extrapolated from the novel’s frame story. There, the author ‘William Goldman’ narrates about his father reading the novel to him as a child, the importance of the novel as a kunstlerroman (the author is now an author and his excitement about the book was a catalyst), his lack of connection with his own son, and his desire to capture the boy’s attention with the ‘good bits’ edition of it. The film adaptation dispenses with the extended conceit of the novel that S. Morgenstern’s novel ‘The Princess Bride’ is a dry history that required

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Figure 3.32  Framing the family idyll (Source: Inkheart).

intervention on ‘Goldman’s’ part. But it retains and foregrounds the book as a symbol of cross-generational family ties. The film Inkheart opens with Mo’s first experience of the metalepsis he creates by reading aloud. By implication, although he has conceivably had this ‘Silvertongue’ ability for years (Meggie already has it), he only activates it by reading aloud to his newborn daughter (see Figure 3.32). The voiceover narration says that the magic is activated only by ‘reading aloud.’ The incident when he reads characters out of ‘Inkheart’ and loses his wife to the book in exchange occurs later, when Meggie is a child. By showing Mortimer’s ability in a serene setting, where the only consequence appears to be the arrival of Little Red Riding Hood’s cape outside, the family idyll is established. Meggie then restores the family idyll through her own reading (of her own words) at the end of the film—a shift from the novel where it is not her words that ultimately restore her mother and neutralizes Capricorn and the Shadow, and furthermore her mother does not in the novel regain her voice. Reading aloud is a powerful act, one that impacts family bonds. Elinor, Meggie’s solitary aunt, has a collection of books but is anti-social with them. Meggie enters the library to find a book to read, but Elinor tells her to take three steps back from a valuable Persian book she has under glass. In the novel, she in fact tells Meggie to stay three feet away from all the shelves. She extolls that books ‘love anyone who opens them,’ and clearly for Elinor books are the only connections she has. By the end of the film, however, she has kindled close bonds with Mortimer and Meggie, and rides in battle on a white unicorn, actually living out a bookish adventure. Family bonds do not supplant book bonds for anyone in Meggie’s family, but books and family are inextricably interwoven and complete one another, enriching the characters who have both.

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Harry Potter: An Education in Resistant Reading The Harry Potter series, as is perhaps typical for a school story, features a significant number of books and many of them draw attention to themselves. The Monster Book of Monsters, for example, snaps and bites, and has to be belted shut. The stack of autobiographical books written by the poseur teacher Gilderoy Lockhart are a study in ego and ­fabrication. Hermione Granger’s encyclopedic knowledge of the school gleaned through her thorough reading of Hogwarts: A History comes in handy on numerous occasions. And one story in the collection Tales of Beedle the Bard, ‘The Tale of the Three Brothers,’ contains important information in the fight against the dark wizard Voldemort at the end of the series.21 However, two of the Harry Potter novels in particular, books two and six in the seven-book series, feature significant books that influence major protagonists in different ways. Against numerous references to books, textbooks, the library, the headmaster’s study, and so on, these two embedded books stand out and intertextually converse with one another from their relative positions in the series.22 In the series’ second novel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Tom Marvolo Riddle (an anagram for ‘I am Lord Voldemort’) has created a horcrux of his diary fifty years prior to the present day of the novels. As a horcrux, the diary houses and protects a portion of Riddle’s soul, insuring his future resurrection through dark magic—something that in fact does occur within the series. However, Riddle’s diary is planted for Ginny Weasley, the younger sister of Harry’s friend Ron. Ginny is possessed by the magic of Riddle’s diary and acts on his bidding. When Harry destroys the diary using a basilisk’s fang at the end of the novel, he not only destroys the diary but unwittingly also destroys the piece of Voldemort’s soul it protected. Harry and the reader learn that later in the series, in Half-Blood Prince, initiating a hunt for the remaining horcruxes. In that sixth novel, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry takes from the classroom cupboard an annotated Advanced Potions textbook and thereby becomes suddenly and suspiciously proficient in making potions. It later transpires that the book belonged to Professor Snape, the current Hogwarts Potions master, from his time as a student. While the book is not in itself a magical object, unlike Riddle’s diary in Chamber of Secrets, the proficiency its advanced knowledge confers on Harry is illicit and leads him to learn and use a sectumpsempra curse on Draco Malfoy that badly injures the boy. The use of this curse is what causes Snape to discover that Harry has his old textbook. But throughout the novel, Harry’s growing dependence on and obsession with the book is

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i­ncreasingly similar to that displayed by Ginny Weasley in the earlier novel. And once his friends discover the book’s properties, they draw the parallel themselves. Interestingly, while the first of the two novels is closely adapted—to an extent that sparked some backlash23—the sixth film in the series is widely considered to evince the greatest departures from the novel and in fact some of the greatest shifts are evident around its use of the significant book at the core of that novel’s plot as will be discussed below.24 The following section performs a closer reading of these two interconnected novels with respect to their depiction of the pair of dangerous books, and the two respective film adaptations. Using the matrix of filmic choices around the pair of embedded books is key to interpretation of the film series’ position in the conversation.

‘Books can be misleading’: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Jack Zipes commented in 2001 that the Harry Potter books (of which four had been published at the time) had ‘been fetishized, so that all sorts of magic powers are attributed to the very act of reading these works’ (290). Further, the value of reading is given prominence throughout the series as a key to knowledge, for instance through Hermione’s many successes derived from reading. But in book 2 of the series the thrust of the metafiction is that books are often dangerous and deceptive, but that it depends on the use to which they are put. The very first image of Harry in this film is of him ‘reading.’ We soon discover that it is a photo album, and that he is reviewing his family photos. Although it is a photo album, books and family are linked at the outset of the film in a way that is done differently in the novels where Harry’s grief at being an orphan is a constant motif. The reflection in his glasses (showing himself as a baby, in fact) blends past and present through books in a way that is key to this film and the series. The theme that Harry is looking at and for his family but ultimately must realize he carries them in himself is borne out in multiple ways in the series, and at the end of the series arc Harry has developed a romantic relationship with Ginny Weasley. In the series’ coda, the pair are married parents. In Chamber of Secrets, Harry begins his more personal relationship with Ginny, which is effected by way of a dangerous book. Harry finds a wet book in Moaning Myrtle’s flooded bathroom and picks it up. In the novel, this takes place in a chapter titled ‘The Very Secret Diary.’ The book is described as ‘nondescript and soggy’ (172) and Harry picks it up.

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chil dre n’s b o o ks o n s c r e e n 107 But his friend Ron Weasley gives Harry and the reader the risks the book presents, as follows: A small, thin book lay there. It had a shabby black cover and was as wet as everything else in the bathroom. Harry stepped forward to pick it up, but Ron suddenly flung out an arm to hold him back. ‘What?’ said Harry. ‘Are you mad?’ said Ron. ‘It could be dangerous.’ ‘Dangerous?’ said Harry laughing. Come off it, how could it be dangerous?’ ‘You’d be surprised,’ said Ron, who was looking apprehensively at the book. ‘Some of the books the Ministry’s confiscated—Dad’s told me—there was one that burned your eyes out. And everyone who read Sonnets of a Sorcerer spoke in limericks for the rest of their lives. And some old witch in Bath had a book that you could never stop reading! You just had to wander around with your nose in it, trying to do everything one-handed. And—’ ‘All right, I’ve got the point,’ said Harry. The little book lay on the floor, nondescript and soggy. ‘Well, we won’t find out unless we look at it,’ he said, and he ducked round Ron and picked it off the floor. (172)

Later, Harry looks through the diary alone in the Gryffindor House common room. In the film adaptation, this later scene is shown in a jump cut in the Gryffindor tower common room: the book is dry, Harry is in pyjamas, and he begins to read it alone. The jump cut passes over elapsed time. But in this case, the jump cut further exacerbates the film’s initial silence around the dangers posed by the book as the previous conversation between Ron and Harry is omitted. Harry is deprived of the risk context and thus is not making a daring and dangerous choice in picking the book up and, later, looking into it. Looking at the diary, the point of view (POV) shot aligns us with Harry’s reading eyes rather than over his shoulder and from a side angle. This effectively turns the film-viewing audience into readers—as happens whenever legible text appears on screen—which is similar to what happens in the novel when we read simultaneously with Harry. This POV shot is significant in the context of the narrative point of view of the novel, which is third person; the only time we have unfiltered access to first person point of view in the novel is when we are presented with text that Harry is reading and we read through his eyes, as it were. Here, the viewer attains a rare first-person point of view in both novel and film when presented with text that Harry reads (see Figures 3.33 and 3.34).25 While these are not extremely atypical POV shots, they do break from the conventional over-the-shoulder shot whereby the viewer sees the book from the side, as shown earlier in this chapter.

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Figure 3.33  Harry’s point of view (POV) (Source: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets).

Figure 3.34  Reading as Harry (Source: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets).

In the novel, immediately after discovering it and picking it up, Harry determines that it is a diary (172), and from the year on the cover that it was fifty years old (Ibid.: 173). On the first page he sees the name ‘T.  M.  Riddle in smudged ink.’ And then from other details, Harry deduces: ‘“He must’ve been Muggle born,” said Harry thoughtfully, “to have bought a diary from Vauxhall Road”’ (173). Ron remembers the name as one he has seen on an award for special services to the school and jokes about the nature of the special service: ‘“maybe he murdered Myrtle”’ (173), a joking conjecture that turns out to be true. Harry discovers the magical property of the diary: it draws in the ink he writes with and returns an answer from within the diary itself. In the film, these diary answers are not read aloud by Harry, so they must be read on screen by the spectator. Harry is then able to be drawn into a memory in the diary just as if it were a pensieve. The novel describes this magic in

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chil dre n’s b o o ks o n s c r e e n 109 visual terms that are proto-cinematic as much of the series is26—it uses the image of a television screen for the page. His hands trembling slightly, he raised the book to press his eye against the little window, and before he knew what was happening, he was tilting forwards; the window was widening, he felt his body leave his bed and he was pitched headfirst through the opening in the page, into a whirl of color and shadow. (180)

But what the diary shows him is deceptive: what he sees did happen but is only a version of the truth. The diary author Riddle/Voldemort is unreliable. And so, of course, is the camera. Showing us Harry in long shot from in front of him is not how Harry sees Riddle’s memories. The camera also lies as a matter of course, like Riddle’s diary. As Harry is ejected from the book’s ‘memory,’ his wide flung gesture evokes cruciform iconography. In the novel, this moment occurs in his bed. But here, in the common room, there is certainly a depiction of reading as a transformative experience and Harry’s wide flung arms offer another opportunity to connect Harry with Voldemort as Tom Riddle adopts a parallel attitude at the end of the film while his diary is being destroyed by basilisk venom. The diary is later stolen from Harry—he discovers his room vandalized. It turns out that Ginny Weasley, who tried to dispose of it in the bathroom before Harry found it, has taken it and is responsible for having used it under the imperius curse; she has experienced some of the very jeopardy that Ron warned Harry about. The debris of papers ripped and scattered is not present in the novel. Instead, all of his books have been pulled out of his trunk, and Harry finally notices which one is missing. Evil is represented by inordinate and unreasonable attacks on books, by contrast with Harry’s own reasonable stabbing of the diary to ‘kill’ it. As Harry takes a poisonous basilisk fang and stabs the toxic book repeatedly it gushes ink: ‘Ink spurted out of the diary in torrents, streaming over Harry’s hands, flooding the floor’ (237). The ink gushing from the diary has in fact been provided by Ginny Weasley who has spent months writing in it. Riddle is the author of the embedded diary but Ginny Weasley is a second author in this novel. Riddle disparages what an eleven-year-old writes about, calling her record of being teased by her brothers ‘pitiful’: ‘“It’s very boring, having to listen to the silly little troubles of an eleven-year-old girl,” he went on’ (228). Holly Blackford contrasts the novel’s masculine, authorized curriculum with the suppressed female experience: ‘while Ginny’s book [the Diary] acts like a sexual predator, Harry’s book [the Potions text] is a male mentor

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that helps him earn respect’ (166): ‘Harry’s book increases his social stature, whereas Ginny’s book isolates her’ (166). But the novel’s reference to ‘flooding the floor’ is also a reference back to where Harry found the diary, in Moaning Myrtle’s flooded bathroom. Myrtle is crying, as she often is, but this time because she thinks she is still being teased even in death. While Ginny had tried to dispose of the diary by flushing it down the toilet, Myrtle believes someone threw the diary at her on purpose. Ron even plays along, telling Harry he will win points for hitting her with the book. Myrtle was Riddle’s victim, but the reason she was crying in the bathroom fifty years ago and in harm’s way was for the same sort of reasons Ginny writes about in her book—she was being teased. The novel creates a complex connection here between Ginny and Myrtle both through their murder and near-murder by Tom Riddle but also through the diary and female experience. Tom was only patient with Ginny because, as he says, for months now his new object has been Harry himself. Ginny was simply the transactional means for Riddle to reopen the Chamber of Secrets and reanimate, but also for him to meet Harry. Earlier, Lucius Malfoy inserted Riddle’s book inside Ginny’s book, the ‘Beginner’s Guide to Transfiguration,’ which we are told was ‘one of the books her mother gave her’ (Rowling [1998] 2010: 243) in the store to put into her cauldron. And Ginny is unable to rescue herself—Harry rescues her from a state of near death. The last use of the diary in Chamber of Secrets is for Harry to grant Dobby the house elf his freedom by tricking Lucius Malfoy into giving Dobby an item of clothing—the very thing that will release the elf from servitude. Again, books are misleading, something this novel and film have made a firm point of by this time. Again, Harry is the rescuer of the otherwise disenfranchised. It is also—as it is in the novel—a fitting parallel to the sleight of hand that put the book into Ginny’s cauldron at Flourish and Blotts in the first place. That hand also belonged to Lucius Malfoy. Harry’s substitution of book-for-sock using Malfoy’s own hand to deliver Dobby thus redresses Malfoy’s earlier victimization of Ginny by slipping her one book hidden inside another. This is a good example of film adaptation retaining an element present in a different way in the novel (faithful in its fashion); in the novel, Harry puts the book inside his sock, and hands the sock to Lucius who peels off the sock and throws it aside in disgust. There are a lot of reasons why this may have been changed, even for practical purposes; it’s not easy to hide a book inside a sock. But there has been an earlier change in the film as well that makes this shift even more apt. In the novel, the reader has no way of knowing the diary first appeared in this context until the end. But the Flourish and Blotts encounters

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chil dre n’s b o o ks o n s c r e e n 111 are important in more ways than one for signaling that books can’t all be trusted. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the new Defense Against the Dark Arts (DADA) teacher is Gilderoy Lockhart. In the novel we were also introduced to Gilderoy Lockhart through his books first. Back at the Weasley’s Burrow before the school year has begun and before this trip to Diagon Alley to buy school books, Harry finds Mrs. Weasley using one of Lockhart’s books: Written across it in fancy gold letters were the words: Gilderoy Lockhart’s Guide to Household Pests. There was a big photograph. . . ‘Oh, he is marvellous,’ she said, ‘he knows his household pests all right, it’s a wonderful book . . .’ (32)

The first introduction to Lockhart is thus made in the novel through his book. His name is in the title. The link between ‘he knows’ and ‘it’s a ­wonderful book’ is seamless, and as a result he is ‘marvellous.’ The lesson of the misleading book has already been introduced and plays out in Chamber of Secrets: Tom Riddle is his diary, a memory preserved (227), willfully misleading readers like Ginny Weasley and Harry, and it/he is ‘Marvolo’s’ as well. Next in the film, in the bookstore scene, Draco Malfoy rips a page out of the book, as noted earlier. We see the same aspect of Malfoy’s characterization later in the film after Harry has taken Polyjuice potion to masquerade as Goyle, one of Draco’s cronies. In the novel, Harry realizes he needs to remove his glasses before he has even come out of the bathroom cubicle in which he had transformed into Goyle: ‘Then he realized that his glasses were clouding his eyes, because Goyle obviously didn’t need them. He took them off and called, “Are you two OK?”’ (162). But in the film, Harry doesn’t initially remove them, seemingly oblivious to the sudden change in his visual acuity, so Malfoy asks why ‘Goyle’ is wearing them. Harry-asGoyle answers ‘I was . . . reading.’ To which Malfoy says: ‘Reading? . . . I didn’t know you could read.’ This moment is a creation of the adaptation and, again, the moral hierarchy created between the two characters (and Malfoy’s characterization) centers on who reads (Harry, but not Goyle), and who rips up books (Malfoy). In a prior scene, pesky Cornish pixies were also shown ripping up books. Apart from lifting Neville onto the chandelier and ‘riding’ a dragon skeleton, in fact, the pixies’ primary form of mayhem seems to be to destroy books. Similarly, as has been mentioned, Ginny Weasley under the imperius curse also destroys books while looking for the Diary Harry has in his trunk. Back in Flourish and Blotts, we see that Lucius Malfoy removed one book from Ginny’s cauldron and disparages it as a ‘tatty, secondhand

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book.’ In the novel, another clue to the misleading nature of books is provided here. Lockhart’s books are given to Harry for free by the author, but Harry passes them to Ginny: ‘“You have these,” Harry mumbled to her, tipping the books into the cauldron. “I’ll buy my own—”’ (50). Then, Lucius Malfoy intervenes: ‘He reached into Ginny’s cauldron and extracted, from amidst the glossy Lockhart books, a very old, very battered copy of A Beginner’s Guide to Transfiguration’ (51). After Lucius Malfoy has had a scuffle with Arthur Weasley, Ginny’s father, the novel says: ‘He was still holding Ginny’s old transfiguration book. He thrust it at her, his eyes glittering with malice. “Here, girl—take your book—it’s the best your father can give you—”’ (51). Harry deduces at the end of the novel—quite miraculously—that the diary had been placed inside this textbook on Transfiguration. In the film adaptation, then, it is only fitting that Lucius be tricked by a sock hidden inside a book (or, as in the novel, a book inside a sock). However, we can be forgiven for not noticing that the diary actually appears much earlier for us in the film than it did in the novel—not in the bathroom, when Harry first picks it up, or even earlier when Ginny runs back into the Burrow before leaving on the Hogwarts Express because— we are told—she forgot her diary. Instead, we glimpse that it was planted in Ginny Weasley’s cauldron at the bookstore on the book-buying expedition. In the film, this shot appears on screen for a mere second or two (see Figure 3.35). Harry then looks down, out of frame, presumably to see what he will much later realize was the fateful moment. But this shot is the ‘tell’ for the entire film. It (of course) does things differently than the book to arrive at the same end. In both novel and film, Lucius Malfoy insults the Weasleys

Figure 3.35  The second book in Ginny’s cauldron (Source: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets).

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chil dre n’s b o o ks o n s c r e e n 113 for their reliance on poor quality books. As the reader (and Harry) learns late in the novel, however, another switch is made at this time as well when Lucius Malfoy slips into Ginny’s book the embedded book: the diary. The embedded book is literally placed en abyme (within another book, within a cauldron of books, within a bookstore, within a chapter named ‘At Flourish and Blotts’). Even now in the novel there are clues to the ‘misleading’ nature of the diary in that Malfoy chooses to slip the diary inside a book called A Beginner’s Guide to Transfiguration. Ginny says: ‘“I found it inside one of the books Mum got me. I ththought someone had just left it in there and forgotten about it”’ (243). But in the film, there is at first only one book in Ginny’s cauldron. When Lucius Malfoy returns it, there are two books in Ginny’s cauldron. The switch happens too fast for a casual viewer to notice, but the next shot depicts Harry looking down (at the books), before returning Malfoy’s glare, which helps to make his accusation somewhat believable at the end of the film: ‘“I think you slipped the diary into Ginny Weasley’s cauldron.”’ In the novel, Harry’s deductive powers are amazingly precise, lest the reader miss the crucial reference to transfiguration: ‘“Because you gave it to her,” said Harry. “In Flourish and Blotts. You picked up her old Transfiguration book, and slipped the diary inside it, didn’t you?”’ (247). And this reference to transfiguration as a (literal textbook) lesson, I would argue, is the central thrust of the metafiction of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The author Gilderoy Lockhart plays a vital role in it, as does the use of ‘The Beginner’s Guide to Transfiguration,’ and also Harry’s lesson about how he is not the same as Voldemort because he makes different choices than the dark lord does. In other words, books— misleading though they are—aren’t good or bad in and of themselves; it’s the use to which they are put. And Harry demonstrates his understanding of this at the end of the novel and film when he repurposes Riddle’s diary to free Dobby. While the film shows Lockhart as a fraud from early on with his complete ineptitude and narcissism, and Kenneth Branagh plays the part gleefully well, the novel in fact makes much more of the author Gilderoy Lockhart as a ‘clue.’ The line exists in the novel when the boys confront the cowardly Lockhart, planning to flee the school after his colleagues have called his bluff and told him to go after Ginny Weasley in the Chamber of Secrets. ‘“Books can be misleading,” said Lockhart delicately’ (220). But the novel does even more with this character. In the novel, unlike in this scene, the reader learns along with Harry that almost his entire curriculum this year will be Lockhart’s books. The connection between Lockhart’s books and the diary is made consistently

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throughout the novel in the intervening chapters as well. Lockhart’s books have forced others out of the trunk, as it were: ‘All the copies of Hogwarts: A History have been taken out,’ she said, sitting down next to Harry and Ron. ‘And there’s a two-week waiting list. I wish I hadn’t left my copy at home, but I couldn’t fit it in my trunk with all the Lockhart books.’ (112)

Later, a similar episode connects the diary in the same way: ‘Harry started to pick up all his things and throw them into his trunk. It was only as he threw the last of the Lockhart books back into it that he realized what wasn’t there. ‘“Riddle’s diary’s gone,” he said’ (188). In every instance, Lockhart’s books are the key to the riddle: books can be misleading. The diary is also revealed en abyme, first read by Harry in the chapter titled ‘The Very Secret Diary’ and later decoded in the chapter titled ‘The Chamber of Secrets.’ The hidden Slytherin chamber in the bowels of the school has been analyzed as the authorized, founding principle that the  school tries to suppress. But all along, the key to the ‘riddle’ of the diary has been inscribed in the very curriculum—in the form of Lockhart’s ‘misleading’ books and ‘The Beginner’s Guide to Transfiguration.’

Harry Learns his Lesson: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince The annotated potions textbook belonging to the unknown ‘half-blood prince’ is the significant embedded book in Harry Potter and the HalfBlood Prince. The unknown former owner of this old class textbook has annotated it heavily, in most cases correcting the potions so that they work. With it, Harry becomes top of his potions class under Professor Slughorn, who believes Harry has inherited his mother’s talent in potions. In contrast, Hermione who relies purely on the official textbook, a strategy that has worked for her until this point in the series, fails. In fact, she is criticized in her first class with Professor Snape (the half-blood prince himself) precisely for her reliance on the official book: ‘“An answer copied almost word for word from The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 6,” said Snape dismissively’ (170). The metafictional lesson of this novel is that following the textbook is not all that is required to be successful.27 Instead, it is the creativity of the annotator in modifying or authoring his own spells that is admired. What is astonishing, in the context of Chamber of Secrets, is that the film is silent at the thematic level on the numerous connections between the two, and thus ultimately between Tom Riddle’s dangerous diary and this

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chil dre n’s b o o ks o n s c r e e n 115 Advanced Potions textbook. Rowling’s novel Half-Blood Prince contains many intertextual allusions to Chamber of Secrets. Aragog’s death in the later novel, for example, reminds Harry in the novel of the time in his second year when he and Ron ventured into the Forbidden Forest, and Aragog was after all wrongly accused of being the monster in the chamber; Harry follows Malfoy to the dark magic store Borgin and Burke’s, identified in Half-Blood Prince as the only store in Knockturn Alley that Harry has ever been in previously—from his misadventure with floo powder in Chamber of Secrets; and Crabbe and Goyle use polyjuice potion in HalfBlood Prince while earlier, in Chamber of Secrets, Harry and Ron first took the potion to resemble Crabbe and Goyle. Both Riddle’s diary and the textbook date from the same era, some fifty years previous (CS 172–73; HBP 316) The novel even expresses the connection overtly: when the school is again under threat, Hagrid says: ‘“Chamber o’ Secrets all over again, isn’t it?”’ (379). And yet, with the exception of some parallel mise en scène and framing of bookish shots, the film is almost silent on this intra-series connection. The only real exception is an early shot: a close up of Professor Dumbledore’s hand holding Riddle’s diary, with the hole in it Harry made with the basilisk fang. Because it transpires that the diary was more than just a cursed book but one of seven horcruxes in which Voldemort parceled out his soul, then in stabbing the book, Harry unwittingly destroyed one horcrux. This second significance of the diary is something that Harry and the reader learn here, four years later, in Half-Blood Prince. In this critical sense, the two books are inextricably bound together. However, showing this early shot to the film spectator but not to Harry increases our distance from him in this film. Presumably, the film viewer is given an opportunity to draw a connection between the two dangerous books here (and only here) in the film, even before we learn of its use as a horcrux at the end. At the very least, we are invited to deduce more of a connection between the two dangerous books when the Potions textbook appears than Harry does, creating a dramatic irony that doesn’t yet  exist in the novels. Meanwhile, we see that Harry reads the book in bed  every night, and that like Ginny with the diary in Chamber of Secrets, he is never without the book. Furthermore, he lies to Hermione about why he won’t let her look at it (saying the binding is fragile). But none of this recalls to anyone on screen—least of all Ginny Weasley, whom it certainly does in the novel—the earlier dangers of Tom Riddle’s diary. In this film adaptation, it is Ginny who looks at the book and asks who the Half-Blood Prince is. But she then returns the book to Harry, with a smile.

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This contrasts with the novel, where this scene is crucially different. In the novel, Ron defends Harry first, in contrast to his earlier warning in Chamber of Secrets about dangerous books: ‘“He only followed different instructions to ours,” said Ron. “Could’ve been a catastrophe, couldn’t it? But he took a risk and it paid off”’ (182). Hermione next tries to see if the book is under any enchantments but in a sentence recollecting the deceptively innocent soggy diary: ‘The book simply lay there, looking old and dirty and dog-eared’ (183). Then Ginny raises the obvious red flag: ‘Did I hear right? You’ve been taking orders from something someone wrote in a book, Harry?’ She looked alarmed and angry. Harry knew what was on her mind at once. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said reassuringly, lowering his voice. ‘It’s not like, you know, Riddle’s diary. It’s just an old textbook someone’s scribbled in.’ (182)

In the film, however, Harry’s behavior around the book worries nobody but Hermione, for which the others presume she is just jealous and ­disgruntled as her place at the top of the class has been usurped by Harry. The spell that Harry reads in this book (sectumsempra in the novel, sectumpsempra in the film) is a rare instance of something Harry has to be ashamed of: his attack on Malfoy. And it is one of the two rarest shots in the Harry Potter film series: showing us the view through Harry’s (lensed) vision (see Figures 3.36 and 3.37). Reminding us in this way that Harry’s world view is lensed is something film can do in a way that literature cannot, and furthermore is a relatively complex metacinematic moment—translating Rowling’s cinematic writing or Harry’s lensed view of the world to screen. The gaze is turned not just

Figure 3.36  Harry’s POV—with prescription lenses (Source: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince).

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Figure 3.37  Sectum[p]sempra, ‘For Enemies’ (Source: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince).

on the book but on the discursive process of showing us the book in film. And in fact, the view from Harry’s glasses has actually been achieved by a camera lens and editing rather than by a pair of glasses. In this way, a metacinematic moment is arguably a more ‘faithful’ representation of Harry’s point of view than the third person point of view descriptions in Rowling’s novel of what Harry sees and reads. In the novel, the moment is described in the past: ‘He had just found an incantation (Sectum-sempra!) scrawled in a margin above the intriguing words, ‘For Enemies,’ and was itching to try it out’ (419). Therefore, in the film adaptation metacinema is being put in the service of metafiction where, for a moment, the film viewer can actually peer at the pages through Harry’s lensed eyes. Yet, at the same time, this is decidedly not how Harry would see the world through his glasses, which would generally give less distortion of vision than these shots do. Further, the corrective lenses shown by peripheral distortion in these shots feature quite a strong prescription, yet Harry’s glasses don’t show the thickness that such a prescription would require, nor in shots where we see the edges of his lenses do we see the refraction we would see were they to feature such lenses.28 Of course, the actor Daniel Radcliffe doesn’t wear glasses. The earlier scene takes on more relevance here: in the novel Harry-as-Goyle realizes instantly that Goyle doesn’t need Harry’s prescription. His world is blurred until he removes the glasses. In the film, Harry is seemingly oblivious to the blurred vision that comes with Goyle wearing prescription lenses he doesn’t need. In other words, these shots show a version of fidelity that is striking in its first-person glimpse of Harry’s actual vision; but which is highly artificial and aimed instead at rendering his lenses opaque and visible to the viewing audience instead.

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Again, there is a major revision to the novel that occurs here. After Harry uses the spell that badly wounds Draco Malfoy, Professor Snape demands that Harry bring him all of his textbooks. Harry wonders; ‘Would he confiscate or destroy the book that had taught Harry so much . . . the book that had become a kind of guide and friend? Harry could not let that happen . . . he could not’ (491). Harry swaps his book for Ron’s and hides his own in the Room of Requirement, planning to retrieve it later. But in the film, after wounding Draco Malfoy, Snape says nothing to Harry. Instead, Ginny Weasley says: ‘“You have to get rid of it. Today.”’ She leads Harry to the Room of Requirement, in a way that turns the table on the rescue of Ginny performed by Harry in the other ‘Chamber of Secrets.’ She takes his hand. In the Room of Requirement Ginny takes the book from Harry in a sexualized shot, as the book is down by his groin (see Figure 3.38).29 And ultimately, she rewards him for letting her hide it in the Room of Requirement with a first kiss, shown in close-up. It’s the first such contact in the film series between Harry and his future wife. In the novel, their first kiss happens in the same chapter: Harry hides the book himself, in a moment of jubilation in the Gryffindor common room after Gryffindor wins the Quidditch Cup, in front of an audience of fifty fellow students. But in the film, it is here in the Room of Requirement after Ginny has hidden the dangerous book for him. And this shift is an example of a major revision to the two-book sequence (Chamber of Secrets and Half-Blood Prince) and their metafictional use of embedded books. Chamber of Secrets underscores not only that books can be misleading, but that what is dangerous about them is not the book itself but the use to which it is put: using a diary as a form of vampiric possession to further

Figure 3.38  Ginny removes the book (Source: Harry Potter and the Half- Blood Prince).

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chil dre n’s b o o ks o n s c r e e n 119 bully someone who is weak and vulnerable; to hide a piece of your soul in to make you immortal; to make your fame by stealing the life experiences of others, as Lockhart does, and as Tom Riddle has done by stealing Ginny Weasley’s ink for himself. The metafiction of Chamber of Secrets is indeed the ‘Beginner’s Guide to Transfiguration.’ So, when in Half-Blood Prince, Harry relies heavily on a book whose author he does not know but which, like Lockhart’s books, is an assigned textbook and thus part of his curriculum, his insistence on ignoring the dangers of the book that he has already learned about in the earlier novel is presented as a true blind spot and a weakness. Just like his foe Voldemort, Harry is strongly tempted by a misuse of books for the power they can confer. And it is therefore all the more laudable in Chamber of Secrets that Harry is able to learn to distrust certain books because they have been shown in an entirely authoritative light to this point in the series. Hermione’s heavy reliance on books and libraries pays off utterly in Year 2. Often in the films we see the classic framing of Dumbledore’s study, surrounded by books on high shelves as he tells Harry about the nature of phoenixes, or of horcruxes. Even the Sorting Hat has a voice of authority from a high shelf in Dumbledore’s office, flanked by books. So, this use of the book in both novel and film Chamber of Secrets seems to demonstrate that Harry has learned his ‘Beginner’s Guide to Transfiguration’ (metafiction): that books can be manipulated. They can transfigure. And they can be used for good or evil, and repurposed from one to the other by the knowing and wise. But in the film, he does so entirely without benefit of Ron’s warning about dangerous books that was provided in the novel, any of the references to Ginny’s Transfiguration textbook, and without Lockhart as a cautionary example of misleading authority from the moment Harry arrives at the Burrow to find Mrs. Weasley using one of Lockhart’s books, to the discovery that Lockhart’s books comprise most of his reading list for the school year. The film adaptation thereby increases the impact of Harry’s mastery at discovering for himself the slippery nature of the book. By ridding the book of its prior text, emptying it of its ink as it were, Harry is able to ‘rewrite’ it—repurposing it as the vehicle for Dobby’s release from servitude to Lucius Malfoy. The diary is also connected through Moaning Myrtle and through Ginny Weasley’s lived experience recorded in it as well as to Dobby the house elf (at one point in the novel Ginny’s fearful demeanor reminds Harry expressly of Dobby’s) to a misuse of power over the disempowered. Philip Nel commented: ‘The Harry Potter films foreground interpretation, an activity crucial to Rowling’s multi-volume mystery. Just as the

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characters debate the meaning of clues, the films enter into a debate on the meanings of the novels’ (288). Nel’s comment predates the publication of Half-Blood Prince, let alone the novels’ film adaptations. But in the film adaptation of Half-Blood Prince, Harry, Ron and Hermione do not figure out who the ‘half-blood prince’ is. Instead, Professor Snape reveals himself to Harry at the end, after Dumbledore’s murder. James Russell notes that this ‘central mystery of the novel’ is ‘barely mentioned in the film’ which instead ‘consistently emphasizes relationships and romance over the core events of Rowling’s plot’ ([2012] 2014: 403). The revisions to the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince instead amplify the subtext of the quest for family. From Ginny defending Harry in the bookstore in Chamber of Secrets to the kiss in the Room of Requirement, it is a significant and creative ‘infidelity’ of the film adaptation.

Notes  1. Poushali Bhadury notes that Funke’s models of ‘“bad” readership’ in the Inkworld trilogy comprise a ‘radically subversive move away from the kinds of naive, trusting reader-text models other instances of children’s metafiction provide’ and thereby encourage child readers to be more self-reflexive in their relationships with books (2013). However, not all metafiction paints the same picture and it may instead be a function of level of readership. The presupposed reader of the metafictional Inkworld trilogy is an older or more sophisticated reader; in Maureen A. Farrell’s words, the readers of Inkheart are ‘thoroughly “book-identified”’ already (2016: 48).  2. Robert Stam includes titles and intertitles in his chapter on self-reflexive devices (1992: 147–48).   3. The play was not published until 1928, however; audience familiarity with it would be through performance.  4. Barrie in fact wrote an earlier screenplay but that was not used by the Paramount studio. Nevertheless, Barrie remained involved with the production and personally cast Betty Bronson to play Peter. See Hermansson (2016) for a discussion of Barrie’s screenplay in the contexts of Barrie’s own intertexts of the ‘Peter Pan’ story.   5. This presupposition is evidenced in the notes to Barrie’s own screenplay in 1918 where he frequently references past audience responses to the play at the correlating point in the film.   6. In the animated US children’s television series, Dora the Explorer, the main character Dora frequently addresses the child viewer and asks them to help her with a task or puzzle, exhorting them and giving encouragement.   7. Earlier examples include the gunslinger shooting directly at the camera in The Great Train Robbery (1903) and, it has been argued, the film Pygmalion and Galatea of George Méliès (1898) is a metacinematic comment on the emer-

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gence of the moving picture. Films such as Sherlock Jr (1924), in which the main protagonist is a film projectionist, and The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) are also explicitly metafilms. But metacinematic devices that draw attention to themselves are also evident for example in the elaborate special effects of films like Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902). While stop motion cinematography is intended there to give the illusion of the magic trick of an object’s disappearance, for instance, the nature of the special effect and its early audience is to highlight the artificiality of the moment—its magic—for the viewer’s entertainment.   8. Only one of the chapter titles is identical: the novel’s fifth chapter is ‘BrokenFoot Camp,’ while the film’s Chapter Four is ‘Broken Foot Camp.’ Both novel and film have a coda as well, although differently titled. The novel has eleven chapters and an Epitaph, while the film has ten chapter-leaders and an epilogue.   9. In fact, the title foregrounds the film over the novel: Wild Pork and Watercress: The Novel Behind the Feature Film Hunt for the Wilderpeople, by Barry Crump. Director Taika Waititi bought the rights to the novel after Crump’s death, so an interesting sleight of hand with regards to authorship occurs here. However, Waititi’s film achieved greater notoriety than the novel in its original publication. 10. And the commercial itself ‘capitalised on Crump’s reputation as a laconic bushman’ (Martin Crump 2016: 11). 11. As discussed by Gregory Robinson, who notes the use of leaders in Fantastic Mr. Fox serves to ‘break the action’ (2012: 37–38). 12. Nevertheless, the choice of a female voice for the voiceover (VO) is a radical adaptation choice given the very male-sounding narrator of Peter and Wendy, and ‘his’ often coyly antagonistic relationship with Mrs. Darling. The VO in Hogan’s Peter Pan instead voices a woman’s perspective, as it is voiced by Saffron Burrows. However, the voice is so similar to that of Olivia Williams, who plays Mrs. Darling, that it is possibly intended to stand in for hers. 13. Kath Filmer writes of Bastian in Ende’s novel that a spiritual longing ‘is generated . . . for Bastian by the experience of reading, indeed by the physical object of a book itself ’ (1991: 59). With the compression of film, the overarching frame narrative which sees Bastian both suffering grief at his mother’s death and experiencing disconnection from his father, who is lost to his own grief (corresponding to the novel, 1991: 32–33, and 40), and being bullied by fellow schoolchildren (7–8), gives a greater prominence to the bildung arc whereby Bastian must learn to overcome his grief and find courage. 14. In this, the film adapts the book’s function in the novel. The author writes: ‘I thought of the magic book because I wanted Ella and the readers to know a few things they couldn’t find out any other way’ (Levine 1997 ‘Extras’: 5). However, the book is largely ‘read’ by Ella while the film renders the book essentially a series of film clips as Ella commands it to ‘Show me Lucinda!’ or ‘Show me Edgar!’

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15. Poushali Bhadury reads metalepsis in Funke’s Inkworld trilogy as a form of violence as well: ‘For Funke, a metaleptic breach is always one of violence, symbolically represented by the condition that whatever emerges out of a text must necessarily be replaced by something forcefully wrenched from the diegetic reality instead’ (2013: n.p.). 16. In an interview with the LA Times, the screenwriter Linda Woolverton explained that she based Belle’s love of reading on Katherine Hepburn’s depiction of Jo March in the film Little Women (1933): ‘both were strong, active, women who loved to read—and wanted more than life was offering them’ (quoted in Dutka: n.p.). 17. Roger Ebert: ‘Its message seems to be that books can be almost as much fun as TV cartoons and video arcade games.’ Chicago Sun Times, 23 November 1994, (last accessed 27 August 2017). 18. The novel, instead, narrates Bastian’s theft in third person but from Bastian’s point of view. The act is contextualized by Bastian’s sense of the book springing a ‘trap’ on him, and having called him into the store in the first place, as a book always belonging to him. Nevertheless, fear of owning up to the theft hangs over the novel until the resolution. 19. In English translation, many of these intertexts have been changed to others from the Anglo-American children’s canon; see for example Hiley (2006: 131). 20. Andrew Burn takes a similar approach in taking a single episode from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and examining it across novel, film adaptation, and video game. He prefaces his analysis by saying: ‘This is an opportunity to think hard about the rhetorics of multiliteracy and media literacy . . . How does a particular image or narrative moment “translate” across different media?’ (2004: 5). 21. This tale is given filmic prominence by use of animation as Hermione reads it aloud from Tales of Beedle the Bard at Xenophilius Lovegood’s house in the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010). Ron knows the tale because his mother has told it to him, while Hermione knows the tale because she has read this book. Harry is the only one of the three who doesn’t know it, as he was raised among non-magical family, and is not particularly bookish, prompting the story to be read aloud. Yet it is actually Lovegood who reveals to them that the story explains the ‘deathly hallows’—the three items death gave to the three brothers—whose symbol Harry is trying to puzzle out. 22. Holly Blackford also discusses these two novels in conjunction with one another, stating that Half-Blood Prince is a ‘conscious rewriting of Chamber’ (2011: 165; see also 156–57). 23. The gist of the backlash is summarized by Cartmell and Whelehan: ‘fidelity at the expense of the interpretive skills of the director’ (2005: 46); ‘it could be argued that the film fails because it tries to be the book, or as close a copy as a film can be of a book, without realising what the consequences of such

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fidelity are’ (47–48). While this criticism of the two films directed by Chris Columbus appears to contradict the ‘greater fidelity in children’s adaptations’ argument, instead it perhaps points to the limits of such fidelity in creating a delicate balance in reception; the film is overly concerned with the book and not with itself as an artwork for an increasingly media-savvy audience. 24. See also James Russell who emphasizes this point as well. The film is ‘one of the more visually and structurally experimental entries in the franchise’ and one that ‘took significant liberties with the source text’ ([2012] 2014: 402)— for which the film was both praised and criticized in reception. 25. While the films contain a large number of shots that function as POV shots simply by virtue of showing us what Harry sees in the typical shot-reverse shot sequence, none of these draw attention to themselves as first person shots. However, when placed directly overhead in a POV shot whereby we are positioned at the correct distance for a seated Harry to read an open book in front of him, that shot is distinctly first person. Arguably, the positioning of this first person shot—directly where Harry’s reading eyes would be—is a proximity gained by camerawork in a series where the camerawork has been attributed to some of the increased detachment we may feel from Harry. Rosemary Johnston writes that ‘camera angles and perspectives position viewers in a position of dominant aesthetic specularity’ that contrasts with the novels’ interiority. The result, in Johnston’s words, is ‘a superaddressee who while admiring is more detached, more of an observer/viewer, less an intimate reader/participant’ (2002: n.p.). 26. Cartmell and Whelehan (2005: 48); Gunder ([2003] 2009; 2009) also notes the novels may have ‘been inspired by the modern mediascape they are such an important part of ’ (304) in pacing, visuality [sic], and so on. 27. Holly Blackford notes, further, that the textbook itself is misleading, and ‘set[s] the children up to fail’ (2011: 160). Interestingly, books fail Hermione throughout this novel, underscoring the dilemma: ‘Meanwhile, the Hogwarts library had failed Hermione for the first time in living memory’ (357). 28. I am indebted to Dr. Chris Jaquinot, O.D., for his expert reading of Harry’s ‘script’ from these two shots. 29. James Russell cites the filmmakers discussing making the film more sexual ([2012] 2014: 403).

C HA PT E R 4

Children’s Metafilm

As the previous chapter illustrated, adaptations of children’s metafiction do not have to be adapted as metafilms; instead, metafiction can be filmed through plot, character, and mise en scène, and foregrounded as a form of ekphrasis. Yet, to paraphrase Robert Stam again, many film adaptations of metafictions do indeed wrestle with the ‘obligation’ of adapting the metalevel as well.1 And while in many respects the resulting self-­reflexivity is a close adaptation of the self-reflexivity of the fictional source, at the same time, and by definition, medium self-referentiality is inherently self-­interested. With respect to meta-reference, equivalence in another medium is paradoxical. Metafilm is film (and other filmic media, such as television) that makes the viewer aware that they are viewing a filmic medium. Watching metafilm is therefore as double as reading metafiction: viewers are simultaneously aware of both story and discourse. In Brian Young’s words, ‘Through form and narrative, these are movies that draw attention to the processes of storytelling and, more specifically, the processes of filmmaking’ (2011: 5). In Winfried Nöth’s more poetic phrasing, ‘Instead of narrating, they narrate how and why they narrate, instead of filming, they film that they film the filming’ (2007: 3). Not all metacinematic moments are aimed at disrupting the cinematic illusion, however. To reprise Werner Wolf, metafilm is a ‘gradable phenomenon’ (2009: 58), and instances of metafilm must therefore be situated in context to determine the degree of self-referentiality they enact. Much of the storyline of the children’s film Bolt, in which Bolt is a dog on a television series called ‘Bolt,’ while it certainly features a ‘Hollywood on Hollywood’ reflexivity,2 ultimately upholds the story’s realism. Bolt must learn his real limitations as a dog: he has no superpowers. This realism can be contrasted with a meta-cinematic moment from within the film’s diegetic reality, not within the televised show, when the same helicopter is shown exploding from three different angles, consecutively. The film

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The Last Action Hero, by contrast, systematically disrupts the cinematic illusion in the same ways as Woody Allen’s film The Purple Rose of Cairo does,3 breaks the fourth wall by having the villain directly address the extra-diegetic camera, and focuses on ontological questions of what is real both on screen and off. Both are metafilms, but only one of the two is overtly ‘bidirectional,’ facing outward at the extra-diegetic world the filmgoer inhabits as well as inward at the diegetic world. Just as with metafiction, metafilm comprises a spectrum of degrees. In the same sense that all fiction is inherently metafictional merely by being linguistically constituted, so too all film is inherently metafilmic by virtue of being constituted in film ‘language.’ Film is a semiotic ­construction, composed according to systems of codes and conventions, and self-­reflexivity provides the same ‘ability to critique dominant ideological and signifying codes’ (Semenza [2012] 2013: 143) as for metafiction. However, it is the explicit form of filmic self-referentiality I am concerned with in this study. Children’s (and teen, tween, and family) films, like films that presuppose an adult viewer, often employ a range of self-reflexive strategies and, similarly to metafiction, metafilm is on the rise. Barbara Pfeifer credits this rise to audiences’ increasing media sophistication: ‘the recent boom in metareferential motion pictures can be ascribed to a rising critical awareness of the multitude of texts, images and representations characteristic of contemporary (popular) culture’ (2009: 420). Similar to the range of options described for metafiction in Chapter 1, metafilm may also be sustained throughout a film or present in brief, ‘metaleptic pops’ or metacinematic moments. This chapter will give examples of both types. However, I have focused for the purposes of this study on devices that reflect the filmic nature of the film rather than, as is certainly possible, its narrative nature. When a pirate in Peter Pan (2003) exclaims delightedly as Wendy is narrating that he is in a story, that is certainly an example of meta-referentiality; but the focus of the ‘meta’ in that instance is on storytelling, rather than on film. This type of self-reference can be called ‘metafiction’ too.4 But in analyzing ways in which film adapts textual metafiction and renders a medium-specific equivalence for the textual self-reflexivity of metafiction I have focused on ‘metafilmic’ films instead. The distinction may be seen when discussing a voiceover narrator, or an onscreen reader, however. Those instances are simultaneously metafictional (in the broad sense), and metafilmic; the latter arises out of the creation of filmic levels of diegesis and thus function in ways that correlate with metafiction’s employment of narrators and embedded narratives.

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At the heart of this chapter is the crux of metafiction’s challenge to adaptation: its discursive, least ‘transposable,’ nature. Adaptation requires that something be transferrable. But as noted at the outset of this study, metafiction’s discursive self-reflexivity—its ‘meta’ nature—presents particular challenges to the concept of medium-specific equivalence. The most direct ‘equivalent’ for metafiction in film is metafilm.5 Yet, as has been said, the object in the reflexive mirror of metafilm is then film. Metafilm holds up a mirror to the codes, conventions, and discursive practices of film. The traditional book/film rivalries discussed in Chapter 1, which reach their fever pitch in the contexts of children’s media and adaptations of metafiction, recur in this larger tension over which object is reflected in the ‘meta’ mirror.6 Ironically, perhaps, the most faithful adaptation of metafiction— metafilm—may actually be the least faithful adaptation. Julie Sanders’ work Adaptation and Appropriation (2006) identifies that some adaptation is in fact ‘appropriation.’ Although in many cases the appropriation label is reductive, it is a pertinent risk to raise here given the particular freightings of metafiction, and especially metafiction for children. The medium-specific equivalent, metafilm, may posit an appropriative stance in relation to the meta- of metafiction. Self-reflexivity in and of itself does not indicate a point of view. While Robert Stam notes that ‘Reflexivity comes with no pre-attached political valence’ (1992: xii), what choice of medium to reflect in the mirror does have political valence. As with any adaptation, considering the myriad shifts between adaptation and its dominant intertext can suggest the film’s interpretant, and the type and use of reflexivity is another point of comparison from which to draw such inference. This chapter will show how children’s metafilm functions, illustrating common types with select examples, and will discuss the issue of metafilm as an equivalence for metafiction. The paradoxes of such equivalence are then illustrated here with a close reading of The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008), in contrast with Inkheart (2008). Inkheart is not a particularly metafilmic film; discussion of it would fit neatly in the previous chapter about filmed (ekphrastic) metafiction. But its depiction of Meggie’s thematic arc—her kunstlerroman—is even stronger in the film than in the novel and can thus serve as a useful foil for The Spiderwick Chronicles and its treatment of a similar character trajectory. Perhaps echoing some similar unresolved tensions in the source series, The Spiderwick Chronicles adaptation exhibits unresolved intermedial tensions as well, and these can be traced by examining the kunstlerroman trajectory in novels and in their (metafilmic) adaptation.

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What is Children’s Metafilm? While the following includes examples of a range of types of children’s metafilms, it is not my intention to present a taxonomy of self-­reference. As children’s metafiction is to all metafiction, so children’s metafilm is to all metafilm. That is, while the devices are similar, the child audience  is a significant factor that alters all aspects of how and why such reflexive devices are used, and what the child audience is projected to gain from them. As with definitions of children’s metafiction, some critics suggest that its increasing sophistication defies the limitations of the genre. Ian Wojcik-Andrews, for example writes that ‘by playing with the various filmic conventions and extra-filmic practices that constitute cinema as a whole . . . they contest the very definition of what constitutes a children’s film’ (2000: 11). Yet, as with children’s metafiction, an argument for the increasing sophistication of other children’s genres should not also need to constitute an argument that they have transcended children’s genres. As also with children’s metafiction, children’s films and metafilms may manifest a greater prevalence of certain strategies and techniques due to the children’s contexts; for instance, due to the fact that there are a greater number of fantasy films for youth audiences there may be a corresponding greater number of self-referential shots in which special effects are foregrounded. The importance of metafilm for young viewers is itself a correlative for the importance of metafiction for young readers. Such ‘metafilmic awareness’ and thereby ‘the ability to reflect and reason on the structure and function of films’ is argued to be as significant for developing young viewers as metafiction is for developing young readers.7 ‘[M]ovies teach movies,’ as Becky Parry writes. She specifically cites film’s ‘meta-language’ as a tool for children to ‘develop implicit knowledge of the way films are constructed’ (2013: 56). She therefore places equal formative function on viewing experiences: It is important to recognise that early experiences of film and moving image might be as influential on developing an understanding of story as early experiences of literature are, and that these experiences help us develop as readers of books and films and of other narrative forms. (Ibid.: 59)

Although children’s metafilm has been less widely theorized than children’s metafiction, clearly many of the same aspirations for (visual, multi-) literacy carry over. The multi-code reading of metafiction, and of illustrated fiction, is posited to extend to other multi-literacies expected and required of the post-internet readership (see Chapter 1). By ­definition,

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those literacies include and presuppose the various visual literacies required of film viewers as well. As with films that presuppose an adult audience, it is possible to distinguish between dominant types of children’s metafilm. The following give some examples of these types along with examples from children’s films with a view to illustrating the ways in which metafilm and metafilmicity function as medium-specific equivalences for metafiction.

Thematizing Films and Filmmaking Just as some metafictional texts feature readers, writers, and books, so some self-referential films feature films and filmmaking as their thematic material. As noted, the CGI film Bolt, for example, depicts a young girl, Penny, and her dog within the world of media production. Together they star in a hit television series, but Bolt believes himself actually to have the superpowers he has in the series—heat vision, super speed, and strength. The director explains: ‘If the dog believes it, the audience believes it.’ The film depicts all the crew at work behind the scenes—à la The Truman Show (1998)—to keep Bolt in his media bubble. When Bolt escapes, after a surprise cliffhanger leads him to believe that Penny is in actual peril, Penny must resume filming with a replacement ‘Bolt.’ After the film’s buddy road trip (with a cat and a hamster), Bolt’s gradual acceptance that he has no real superpowers, and eventual reunion and happy ending, in which Bolt actually does rescue Penny from a burning studio set, the television series has to replace both Penny, parodying the device of replacing an actor on a popular series by writing a story that requires her to have facial reconstruction surgery, and Bolt—again. The animated film features all the apparatus of a thematized studio production: Penny’s fast talking and superficial agent, threatening studio executives, crew, and stunt people. Accordingly, the film features a reflexive lexicon, discussing ‘release junkets,’ tracking shots, ‘fade to black,’ and so on. One scene takes place in an editing bay and focuses on the accidental capture of a mic boom in the shot (see Figure 4.1), while in another the clapper board from ‘Bolt’ is held up to the viewer of Bolt (see Figure 4.2). In a parody of Hollywood, even a trio of pigeons are two writing partners and a personal assistant ordered to go and find whole grain crumbs. There is both thematized film watching and ‘Disney on Disney’ reflexivity in the cartoon animated film The Lion King 1½ (2004), in which two minor characters commentate a screening of The Lion King. The children’s film The Lion King is a sustained adaptation of Shakespeare’s

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Figure 4.1  The mic boom in the shot from ‘Bolt’ in Bolt (Source: Bolt).

Figure 4.2  The clapper board from ‘Bolt’ in Bolt (Source: Bolt).

play Hamlet, played out through a pride of lions and attendant animals. The bulk of the 1½ film, the third film released in The Lion King sequence, embeds the ‘during filming’ story of what the two characters were doing off-screen. In other words, Lion King 1½ is to Lion King as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is to Hamlet. While both intertexts are well beyond the scope of young viewers, the prior Lion King film featuring Timon and Pumbaa—two minor characters who owe their very existence to it—as well as the prior sequel, The Lion King 2, would not be.

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Considerable merchandising of the blockbuster animation had also given the two minor characters notoriety. Further, Timon and Pumbaa stand in for prototypical viewers of the Lion King as well; they sing along (out of tune and using the wrong words) to the score’s iconic song, ‘Circle of Life,’ and Pumbaa exclaims ‘I gotta tell ya, Timon, that song always gets me, right here.’ Timon claims the remote control and fast forwards to the parts he is in, until Pumbaa tells him not to confuse people, and to go back to the very beginning of their story. The intertextual self-referentiality extends at the film’s conclusion to ‘cameo’ appearances by other animated Disney characters—a cartoon version of thespian intertextuality—who join the pair in their screening room, including Dumbo, Pocahontas, Peter Pan, Tinkerbell, the Lost Boys, and Stitch from Lilo and Stitch (2002). In the live action film The Last Action Hero (1993), we don’t see behind the filmmaking scenes as in Bolt, but the interplay between real and fictional worlds is intensely metafilmic and filmically intertextual. The silent intertext is The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Danny, a young fan of ‘Jack Slater’ action movies, is treated to a midnight showing of a pre-release Jack Slater IV by his projectionist friend Nick. With a magic ticket (originally from Houdini), a portal opens and Danny finds himself inside the film he is watching and partnered with Jack (Arnold Schwarzenegger). Danny is aware he is in a film, and repeatedly tries to convince Jack of the artificiality of the film world: ‘If this was a real world, they wouldn’t make me your partner, they’d assign me a social worker.’ Slater has an existential crisis first in the film, as he reveals he doesn’t have a home life and can’t understand why he keeps having crazy adventures (sequels, explains Danny), and then again in the real world when he realizes he isn’t real. In the real world of New York (rather than Los Angeles, the only world ‘Jack’ has known), Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife Maria Shriver attend the red carpet release of the newest Jack Slater film, giving interviews alongside other cameo stars—one of whom says he doesn’t like Arnold at all. Shriver tells Schwarzenegger not to plug his restaurant, or gym—but Arnold does anyway. Schwarzenegger tells ‘Slater’ he’s the best celebrity lookalike he’s ever seen. The Ripper, the villain of Jack Slater III, attends the release—brought out of his film by the intellectual villain Benedict— but so too does the tuxedoed actor who plays him, and his agent. Benedict realizes that with the magic ticket he can travel into and out of parallel worlds with impunity; and he begins addressing the audience. Once in the real world (where he can kill without being caught), he discovers that bad guys can ‘win,’ and he can amass a cast of villains from other films to help him. ‘Death,’ from an Ingmar Bergman film (played by Ian McKellan) comes out into the world as well and is ‘curious’ because Jack is not on any

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of his lists. By the end of the film, ‘Jack’ is back in his movie, telling Danny he needs him in the real world, ‘to believe in me,’ and his Lieutenant to stop shouting (‘You know why you’re shouting? Because it’s in the script. You’re the comic relief!’). The highly referential and self-reflexive film employs a number of ‘meta’ strategies from parody of the conventions of action films and action trailers (‘Jack Slater as Hamlet’ for example: ‘nobody tells this sweet prince “good night”!’), thespian intertextuality, thematized movies, and how a thematized young spectator depends on them for his own coming of age.8 Parody is often combined with overt intertextuality—as in the Lion King 1½ example—to create and thematize self-referentiality in children’s films as well. Many moments in children’s film do parodically reference other works. Fractured fairy tales such as Hoodwinked! (2005) rely on common knowledge of the ‘real’ story of ‘Little Red Riding Hood, and fairy tale references are relatively democratic, given their near archetypal nature, just as princess Fiona of Shrek (2001) parodies the female princess type common to children’s narratives—even to the extent of exploding a blue bird with her singing voice in a parody of the moment when Disney’s Snow White sings to a blue bird. Teen films often exhibit this form of knowing, parodic self-reference.9 The premise of the Scary Movie films (2000–) rely on an awareness of the formulaic nature of ‘slasher’ movies as well as iconic scenes and characters from specific films, while Not Another Teen Movie (2001) is knowingly in on the clichés governing its genre, and the comedy Easy A (2010) references popular teen films such as The Breakfast Club (1985), and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) among others. Given the rise of vlogs, reaction videos, amateur videos published to public sites like YouTube, confessional and documentary cameras in reality television shows, young viewers are cine-literate to a large extent. The television sitcom iCarly (2007–2012) for example, draws on the premise of an internet vlog series made by Carly for its narrative frame, while The Hunger Games trilogy relies on the televised ‘reality’ show of a blood sport to entertain a privileged regime and control citizens of repressed Districts through fear. To reprise Becky Parry again, ‘movies teach movies.’ There are numerous ways to thematize films and their production in children’s film just as in film generally, but the end result of these varied strategies is metafilmic.

Unmasking the Film There are two main types of unmasking10 that can also occur in metafilm, using various strategies. One type results in a film self-aware of itself as

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film, no matter what the film is actually (thematically) about, while the other leads the viewer to see the film as filmic even though the film otherwise shows no awareness of itself. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a good example of the self-aware film that is not otherwise about film at all. Ferris addresses the camera directly only in the opening and closing shots of the film; he is otherwise unaware of it. The frame sets up the premise for the epic ‘day off’ with his two closest friends: ‘life is short,’ he tells us. ‘Blink, and you’ll miss it.’ But at the end of the film, during the credits, he notices we are still there and flicks us away, telling us to ‘go home,’ as the movie is over. Other examples of this type include the ‘out-takes’ during the end credits of Pixar’s Toy Story (1995) films where characters are shown pranking one another during ‘filming,’ or flubbing their lines. The Toy Story trilogy is not about filmmaking or film watching. They concern a group of toys belonging to a boy (later a young man) called Andy who are anthropomorphic and have adventures. At no point during the film itself do the characters betray that they are ‘on camera’ and acting; it is only during the end credits that the device is revealed and, retroactively, the film is revealed to have been ‘a film’ all along. A similar tactic is taken in Over the Hedge (2006), a CGI film by DreamWorks Animation where the characters are not acting but in the final credits the juvenile characters have a camera and are secretly filming the ‘naked’ turtle Verne bathing. In a sub-type of the self-aware film, we see explicit intrusions of filmic apparatus—of camera, editing techniques, narrative devices and so on. These exist as moments of reflexivity irrespective of a given film’s thematic focus. Often, attention is drawn to reflexivity via a specific shot that foregrounds itself—as distinct from many such shots in films which do not draw attention to themselves. One example of such a shot is the ‘camera,’ visible for a moment in actuality or by inference. The shot from the Pixar short film Boundin’ for example has the approaching jackalope outpace and bound over the tracking ‘camera’ (see Figure 4.3). But, of course, since the film is CGI there is no camera to begin with, and thus the shot is playfully self-reflexive twice over. And in Bolt, in the dog’s POV shot looking up at New York’s unfamiliar skyscrapers, the bright sunlight is reflected off a ‘lens’ that was never there to begin with (see Figure 4.4). Another example of a shot that self-reflexively foregrounds itself through its atypical nature can be seen in Ella Enchanted. While a bird’seye view, overhead shot may be typical as an establishing shot orienting objects in spatial relation to one another on screen, it is decidedly out of place in an interior ‘library’ shot, when Ella is in the castle Hall of Records (see Figure 4.5). To further foreground the unusual shot, the

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Figure 4.3  The Jackalope overleaps the ‘camera’ (Source: Boundin’).

Figure 4.4  Sunlight hits the ‘lens’ (Source: Bolt).

camera zooms upward to an ‘impossible’ height for a ‘ceiling,’ ultimately rendering an extreme long shot of Ella sitting below. That is certainly atypical for an interior shot—particularly among the grammar of ‘library shots’ (for example Figure 3.28) and thus draws attention to itself as a filmic construct. A different self-referential shot occurs in The Tale of Despereaux, underscoring how small Despereaux is even by mouse standards. He stands on a page of calligraphic text, reading by moving up and down the rows. The

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Figure 4.5  An interior ‘bird’s-eye view’ inside the Hall of Records (Source: Ella Enchanted ).

Figure 4.6  Simultaneous close-up and long shot (Source: Tale of Despereaux).

close-up of the book is also a long shot of Despereaux on its open pages and, further, stands out as an atypical ‘protagonist reading a book’ shot by comparison to those described in Chapter 3 (see Figure 4.6). In the live action Peter Pan (2003), fantasy elements intrude with the arrival of Peter in the nursery. But in addition to Tinkerbell’s presence and Peter’s standalone shadow, a shot of Peter demonstrating his flying abilities transforms the ‘real’ nursery ceiling into something impossibly sky-like. Peter flies up into the ceiling/sky in a way which shows the ceiling no longer has the depth and dimensions of the nursery ceiling (see  Figure  4.7). As a live action film, this version of Peter Pan has a ­different relationship with realism than the iconic Disney animation of

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Figure 4.7  The nursery ceiling transforms (Source: Peter Pan).

1953 and thus certain shots are foregrounded in a way they would likely not be in a fully animated adaptation. The threshold into fantasy is crossed cinematically at this point of Peter’s impossible flight across the nursery ceiling, perhaps even more so than with the prior arrivals of the expected fairy Tinkerbell, or Peter’s wayward shadow. In the same way, while magic and fantasy are integral to the Peter Pan story and to Neverland in particular, scenes like the uncannily rapid breaking sun and melting of the snow ice that signal Peter’s return to Neverland, and the later ‘pink’ palette the film takes on after Wendy’s kiss underscore the filmic special effects. In the latter instance, the fantastical effect is unusual even by Neverland standards, as Hook (Jason Isaac) comments: ‘“Why, Pan . . . You’re pink!”’ Filmic intertextuality is also a common metafilmic strategy which can be used either in service of a self-aware film (like Not Another Teen Movie) or not. In this strategy, the cinematic illusion is ruptured by casting (thespian intertextuality) and/or by overt reference or ‘quotation’ of other films or film characters. This may be done diegetically or extra-diegetically. The scene in which Ricky and Uncle Hec are hiding under an overhang in the New Zealand bush in Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople is strongly reminiscent of the same scene in fellow New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), a scene also filmed in New Zealand bush (on Mount Victoria, in Wellington) where Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin are hiding from one of the Ringwraiths. After the viewer is given a moment to draw the connection based on mise en scène, the onscreen character Ricky begins to mime to his uncle that they are in an echo of Jackson’s film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. When his uncle fails to understand him, Ricky spells it out first by trying to mime and mouth the allusion, then by voicing it once the danger has passed (see Figure 4.8).

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Figure 4.8  Hunt for the Wilderpeople references The Lord of the Rings as Ricky and Hec hide from Special Forces (Source: Hunt for the Wilderpeople).

Other inter-film references are less obvious but may serve the purpose of rendering the film construct visible to the viewer. Robert Stam notes the role of the cameo appearance in creating filmic intertextuality and thereby self-reference.11 Younger viewers may not catch some of the adult humor of having William Shatner voice an exaggeratedly melodramatic death scene as a possum in the animated film Over the Hedge (referencing ‘rosebud’ in the process—an allusion to Orson Welles’ iconic Citizen Kane, 1941), but may draw inferences from seeing the actor Cary Elwes go from playing the hero Wesley in The Princess Bride to the villain Edgar in Ella Enchanted, for example. Hoodwinked! ruptures cinematic realism by providing multiple, conflicting accounts of what happened to Red (Riding Hood). While young viewers may not connect this strategy with Rashomon (1950), the pioneering film adaptation directed by Akira Kurosawa in which mutually exclusive versions of ‘truth’ are represented, nevertheless the presence of more than one version of events reflexively foregrounds the film’s constructedness.12 By extension, as with Rashomon, the viewer is led to see the camera’s unreliability as well as the Rashomon effect in the various characters’ competing perceptions and memories of the events.

Frames, Embedding, and Metalepsis By comparison, the number of children’s films that overtly thematize filmmaking or ‘out’ themselves as films, by virtue of their own self-­awareness as films, are relatively few. Yet films with narrators and frames, with embedded stories shown filmically, and with metaleptic moments where the viewer is made aware of these constructed levels and the filmic nature of what they are viewing are rife, particularly in adaptations of children’s

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chil dre n’s me ta film 137 metafictions, as will be seen. The creation of story levels within frames also creates the conditions for breaching those levels, and this is by far the most common way in which metafilm manifests. When the action of the embedded story of ‘The Princess Bride’ becomes too suspenseful as Buttercup is in the sea and about to be eaten by a screaming eel, we suddenly find ourselves back in the frame narrative of The Princess Bride with the grandfather asking if his grandson would prefer to take a break from this story. Visibly, the boy is anxious, twisting the bedsheets in his hands. Similarly—to the point where it may be a deliberate echo of the film in Handler’s novel The Reptile Room in A Series of Unfortunate Events, an abrupt metaleptic ascending vault occurs just as the baby Sunny is ostensibly attacked by a python. Mid-strike, the film cuts abruptly to the frame level in which an authorial-narrator is typing this story as his typewriter ribbon breaks and he fixes it on screen before the action resumes. The novel effected a similar metalepsis signaled by an abrupt end to the chapter during the scene with the snake, and a lengthy apology for the interruption (the narrator forgot a dinner invitation and had to hurry away) before the embedded story resumes. In both corresponding films, The Princess Bride and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, the sudden ascent to the frame layer is both playful and increases suspense, but at the same time may reflect consideration of young viewers as well. The boy in The Princess Bride is displaying signs of distress, according to his grandfather. A break in the nerve-wracking action may be warranted. But in both cases, the abrupt metalepsis reminds the films’ viewers that the story being filmed is an embedded narrative, and there are storytellers in the frame mediating that narrative. As with metafiction and other meta-referential works, metalepsis—the ‘transgression and immersion’ movements that accompany shifts between one layer and the next—is also ubiquitous. The function of all metalepsis in filmic terms has the self-reflexive effect of affirming the film as a construct and, as Keyvan Sarkhosh writes, ‘breaking illusion’: The concealing of a film’s artificiality and factitiousness by means of conventionality is vital for the creation of a seemingly sound, complete, transparent and thus (supposedly) realistic diegesis. All the examples given so far break this convention by metaleptically laying bare certain aspects of the artificiality, textuality and assembly of the respective films, illustrating, moreover, their dependence on a superior extradiegetic world from which they originate by means of production and narration. This exposure nearly always comes about in terms of the story and thus may be characterised as metafictional. (Sarkhosh 2011: 184)

The lap dissolves discussed in the previous chapter are one metafilmic way of showing metalepsis occurring on screen. Metalepsis is activated

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Figure 4.9  Bastian and Atreyu see each other through the ‘mirror’ (Source: The Neverending Story).

by the presence of multiple narrative planes, a precondition of metaleptic movement from one to another in either direction. With various editing techniques, film depicts two levels of the narrative hierarchy simultaneously on screen, merging and then passing from one into the other, whether in ‘descending’ order (into the abyme) or ‘ascending’ (moving towards the outer frame). In these instances, film is not only using metalepsis, but representing it for the viewer to see. At the very heart of The Neverending Story, the warrior Atreyu, tasked with saving Fantastica, undertakes the mirror test, where he must ‘confront his true self.’ As he approaches the mirror, it becomes clear that the figure he sees in the reflection is actually Bastian; and in the real world of the film, Bastian realizes he is ‘seen’ by the character in the book he is reading (see Figure 4.9).13 This awareness of the porousness of the boundaries between levels is necessary for the culmination of the story: for Bastian to have to assume his role to give the dying Empress a new name and thereby save Fantasia; to have a conversation with the Empress; and for him to realize that the ‘neverending story’ is ultimately a circle that encompasses his level as well. The film concludes with a voiceover telling us that Bastian went on to have many other adventures before returning to the real world, and ‘that’s another story’; this omniscient narrator, while present in the novel, has been invisible (or inaudible) until this moment. Similarly, the characters from Inkheart who are poorly read out of their books into the real world (by a stuttering Silvertongue) are marked; they have inky text on their skin like tattoos. Metalepsis has literally marked their passage from one diegetic plane to another. Metalepsis is quite ­literally rendered visible to the viewer.

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chil dre n’s me ta film 139 Before entering into a closer discussion of three films in the remainder of this chapter, it is worth noting the generic intensifications occurring when a metafilm is an adaptation of a children’s metafictional source. As already noted, children’s fiction is inherently (at least) doubled by its dual address and the presence of the not-so hidden adult in the text. Children’s film is inherently (at least) double for the same reasons. Metafiction is inherently double—as is metafilm—each by virtue of their dual focus, both on the story and the processes by which the story is told. Finally, adaptation is also of course inherently (at least) double as well. Irrespective of further ‘multilaminating’ by virtue of subgenre, or the multi-modality of illustrated texts, for instance, the many challenges for such children’s metafilms as adaptations of children’s metafictions are well established. Further, the pressures identified at the outset of this study with respect to fidelity expectations and their intensification in children’s contexts come into play here as well. Reception of children’s film adaptations of metafictional source texts are conditioned to a large extent by fidelity expectations. Children’s metafictions promote literacy and literariness. Yet at the same time the pressure to be as ‘faithful’ to the source text as transmedially possible is most intense, options for faithfully transmediating the meta-text are least feasible. Thus, in film adaptations of children’s metafictions we see the traditional intermedial rivalry writ large.

The Paradox of ‘Meta’ Equivalence The previous examples illustrate what metafilm is and how it manifests in children’s films on a spectrum of degrees, in content (story) and form (discourse), and both in a sustained engagement and in brief moments. The devices of children’s metafilm are inherently similar if not the same to those of metafilm more generally, save that children’s film itself is a subgenre that exhibits many of the same tensions and paradoxes as children’s literature. The metafilmic apparatus functions similarly to that of metafiction, with the same aims: to reflect to the viewer the processes and results of filmmaking. In these important ways, metafilm is in the broadest sense a medium-specific equivalent for metafiction. Yet, by virtue of turning the reflective lens away from literature to reflect instead on film, it may be less an ‘equivalence’ for the novels’ metafiction than a metaphor for it. And due in large part to the important functions of metafiction for children as discussed previously, and the established intermedial rivalries between fiction and film—themselves traditionally intensified in children’s contexts—in some cases metafilm may constitute an appropriation of metafiction instead.

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In Adaptation and Appropriation (2006), Julie Sanders distinguishes between ‘adaptation’ and adaptation which is ‘appropriation.’ She notes the term ‘appropriation’ itself contains ‘the notion of hostile takeover’ (9) and indicates that some appropriations ‘adop[t] a posture of critique, even assault’ (4) of the source. Sanders includes plagiarism, for example, as an obvious form of appropriation. Clearly, the distinction between adaptation and appropriation concerns that ‘posture,’ which results from ‘multiple interactions’ and the ‘matrix of possibilities’ (160) of adaptation. In the case of appropriation, the interpretant of the adaptation reveals some form of critical or hostile relationship to the source. While Sanders essentially divides adaptations into two camps, it is perhaps more plausible to fine tune the distinction. After all, a lot of territory lies between ‘critique’ and ‘assault.’ Further, it’s likely that in some of an adaptation’s ‘multiple interactions’ with its dominant intertext that appropriation is indeed taking place, while in others it isn’t. Isolating a film adaptation’s treatment of embedded books, for instance, may be one delimiting focus for determining the adaptation’s posture, or interpretant, with respect to its source, as shown in the previous chapter. But additionally, how a film adaptation treats an important type of children’s metafiction, one featuring a kunstlerroman—an arc of artistic development for its protagonist—is another useful gauge for the film’s stance on the intermedial relationship it portrays. Given that in adaptation from metafiction to (meta)film the intermedial relationship is strongly foregrounded in content, form, or both the interpretant reveals the ways in which a given film reflects (on) the literary medium. The following case studies illustrate this tension in action by contrasting Inkheart (2008), and The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008). In both source texts, the main protagonist (Meggie and Jared respectively) develops from a reader to a writer. In the respective metafictional series, this arc of artistic development manifests an ‘apotheosis’ of the reader to the role of authorship, a frequent theme of children’s metafictions. The proper conclusion of a reader’s career, this prevalent metafictional theme suggests, is empowerment exhibited through authorship. If the embedded story illustrates such an apotheosis of a reader-protagonist then, by implication, the book’s extra-diegetic reader is also encouraged to aspire to the same goal. However, the closest equivalent for this kunstler trajectory in metafilm would instead be apotheosis from film viewer to filmmaker. As will be seen in the following chapter, the film adaptation Hugo does largely foreground such a type of trajectory—Hugo’s arc of development from cinephile to film restorer—but so too does the metafictional source novel that film adapts, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Instead, film adaptations of

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chil dre n’s me ta film 141 a ­metafictional source in which a child protagonist develops from reader to writer make a matrix of choices around this embedded apotheosis. Filming that kunstler trajectory may well serve as a metaphor for the filmgoer’s possibilities, but functions more as a ‘story only’ aspect of adaptation than it does as ‘meta.’ The diegetic reading protagonist may be a stand in for the extra-diegetic film viewer, but no longer reflects them. Opting for a closer equivalence of the ‘meta’ experience of the film viewer by altering the trajectory of artistic development to bend toward the film medium— depicting apotheosis to filmmaker in lieu of author—is a choice for a closer equivalence for ‘meta,’ and a concomitant looser ‘fidelity.’

Inkheart and Authorship The film Inkheart (2008) is not a particularly metafilmic film in any sustained way. As will be shown, the film in fact heightens the metafictional theme of a reader developing into a writer, foregrounding something more implicit in the novel of the same name. The novel Inkheart by Cornelia Funke (2003), the first in an ‘Inkworld’ trilogy, is intensely concerned with books—their readers, writers, characters, collectors, doctors, destroyers, and their quasi-magical powers—and so is the film adaptation. The film does not therefore exhibit the intermedial tensions of The Spiderwick Chronicles through its many adaptation choices, but rather the reverse. The source novel’s numerous metafictional gestures are further foregrounded by these choices. The novel Inkheart turns on the premise of Silvertongues: people who read aloud and by doing so magically draw characters or things from the story they are reading. Yet at the same time, something in the Silvertongue’s world transfers into the story being read. Meggie’s father Mortimer (Mo) is a Silvertongue, but no longer reads aloud since his wife Resa disappeared into the book ‘Inkheart.’ Trying to recall her, he occasioned the transfer of a mail carrier, and realized he could not continue his efforts. One character who was read out of ‘Inkheart,’ the fire juggler Dustfinger, wishes to be read back to his family there and has been following Mo to that end. However, the villain Capricorn, also read out of ‘Inkheart,’ destroys all the copies of the book but one. Instead, he has a Silvertongue in captivity who reads riches out of books for them. The problem with that Silvertongue is his stumbling reading; it impairs the transfer, so that, for example, most of Capricorn’s black jacketed henchmen have ink print across their skin. Meggie first meets Dustfinger who is interested in the book Mo is keeping from her. While at her great aunt Elinor’s, Capricorn’s men

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abduct Mo and take him to Capricorn’s village. However, Elinor has switched the copy of ‘Inkheart’ and Mo has the wrong one with him. Dustfinger, tasked with bringing Meggie and the right book to Capricorn, leads Meggie and Elinor to the village. Reunited and held captive with Mo, Meggie learns of Mo’s special ability and what happened to her mother years ago. Unbeknownst to them, Teresa (Resa) has been poorly read back out of ‘Inkheart’ five years previously—losing her ability to speak in the process—and now serves at the castle. With Dustfinger’s help, they escape the castle, unwittingly leaving Resa behind, to find Fenoglio, the original author of ‘Inkheart.’ After Meggie and Fenoglio are recaptured by Capricorn’s men, Meggie discovers her own ability as a Silvertongue. Elinor, Mo, and Dustfinger’s helper Farid ultimately are recaptured as well, along with Resa who tried to steal the book. Capricorn intends for Meggie to read the Shadow out of ‘Inkheart’ to complete his domination, but Fenoglio writes a counter curse against the Shadow when it appears. Meggie does read the Shadow out of ‘Inkheart,’ but Capricorn is killed and  Mo destroys it. Fenoglio is read into ‘Inkheart,’ which is what he wishes for. Inkspell (2005) and Inkdeath (2007) complete the trilogy. In these novels, Dustfinger, Meggie, Mo, and Resa all enter the embedded work ‘Inkheart,’ where they remain even as the series ends. Resa has her voice restored in that world. Fenoglio eschews writing for a time but has resumed authorship by later in Inkdeath. And while Capricorn was dispatched in the first novel, other villains—in particular Orpheus and Adderhead—are in control in this world until Adderhead is killed and Orpheus is forced to flee. A consistent dynamic across the trilogy is the relationship between literary characters, their author, and the extent to which they are bound to the destiny Fenoglio wrote for them. The diegetic mise en abyme is largely internal. While one edition of cover art references the metalepsis that occurs in the novel—a hand appears to extend out of the embedded cover art into the colored frame around it—and the chapter epigrams quote from actual books in our world, most of the novel’s metalepsis is in and out of embedded books. However, on one occasion Meggie does wonder if in fact she could be in a story too (178). The novel is a bibliophile’s book. In addition to the overt intertextual relationships created through references to specific book titles in the novel such as Tom Sawyer, Peter Pan, or Winnie the Pooh, each chapter is prefaced with an epigraph—a quotation from another novel. In the English translation of Funke’s novel, these include references to The Princess Bride, Peter Pan, The Neverending Story, Fahrenheit 451, and so on. Mo is a book ‘doctor,’ and Meggie has inherited her love of reading from her

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chil dre n’s me ta film 143 father. Books ‘whisper’ to her. Their house is piled high with books that are clearly well-loved: Stacks of books were piled high all over the house—not just arranged in neat rows on bookshelves, the way other people kept them, oh no! The books in Mo and Meggie’s house were stacked under tables, on chairs, in the corners of the rooms. There were books in the kitchen and books in the lavatory. Books on the TV set and in the wardrobe, small piles of books, tall piles of books, books thick and thin, books old and new. They welcomed Meggie down to breakfast with invitingly opened pages, they kept boredom at bay when the weather was bad. And sometimes you fell over them. (Funke 2003: 10)

Meggie’s great aunt Elinor is a book collector with an extensive library— but in contrast to the haphazard book piles at Meggie’s house, here ‘Every book obviously had its place’ (42). While Elinor’s library is largely destroyed by Capricorn’s men, she replenishes it at the end of the novel with book-buying junkets. The nature of books as ‘home,’ as containing worlds, and of a Silvertongue’s magical ability to have all auditors hear the story as if it were real, is repeatedly detailed. In the novel, a Silvertongue’s magic only works with ‘printers ink’ and words written by someone else (199–200). Halfway through the novel, Meggie begins to yearn for her father’s ability (210); her wish is to be a Silvertongue, not to be an author. The defeat of Capricorn and the Shadow are effected by Fenoglio writing a new ending: it is ‘your voice and my words’ he tells Meggie (427). The plan is for Meggie to read the Shadow out of the book, but to change the story in the process and thereby resolve their predicament: ‘I, Fenoglio, master of words, enchanter in ink, sorcerer on paper. I made Capricorn and I shall destroy him as if he’d never existed’ (429). While it is Meggie who ultimately suggests the Shadow must kill Capricorn, she is to be the reader who makes the author’s words come alive. While the plan works to the extent that Meggie reads from the slip of extra paper Fenoglio has written, the death she had planned for Capricorn is ultimately achieved when Mo literally takes the book out of her hands ‘and in a firm voice read to the end of what the old man had written’ (519). But although characterized as a master reader, albeit one who does not finish the story written for her to read aloud, Meggie is more than a reading protagonist by the end of Inkheart. As a child, Meggie makes her own illustrated books, which Mo then professionally binds for her. When Mo writes Meggie a coded message, using the elvish language from The Lord of the Rings, he comments that Meggie is even better at this type of coded writing than he is (394). Authorship is also demystified for her in the person of Fenoglio, the author of ‘Inkheart,’ and his many comments

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to her on writing. Before they meet him, Mo tells her that Fenoglio—like all authors—is a person like any other, despite his tendency to think he is a ‘minor god’ to his characters (268): Most people don’t stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago—they don’t expect to meet them in the street, or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. (240)

Asking for pen and paper from Basta, one of the men Mo had read out of ‘Inkheart’ along with Capricorn, Fenoglio extols ‘the magic of the written word’: ‘Nothing is more powerful, for good or evil, I do assure you’ (422). In the conclusion, Mo says he has no head for inventing words—for being an author—but quotes a writer saying that writers can be storyteller, teacher, or magician, and that the latter is ‘in the ascendent’ (537). Initially, we are told it is Meggie’s mother who writes. Because she remains mute in this world, she writes copiously after her final rescue—even on leaves and her own clothing (528). Later, she takes her memories to paper, and Meggie reads them. But on the novel’s final page, we learn that Meggie ‘began to write,’ and further ‘decided that words would be her trade’ (543). The novel’s last words affirm the magic of writing, and that a home filled with books was the best place to ‘learn that trade.’ As Maureen A. Farrell writes, ‘by the end of the novel, her experiences have coalesced in such a way that she is determined to become an author in order to achieve, in her eyes, the ultimate form of agency’ (2016: 47). In the two subsequent novels, however, Meggie’s agency as an author is not the path shown; Fenoglio is the featured writer still, and Meggie’s magical reading abilities are again foregrounded. The novel, in other words, for the most part depicts Meggie as a master reader, but one whose most powerful triumph as a reader is usurped by her father. And in a comparatively hasty conclusion, the novel shows that her extensive reading proved an apt apprenticeship for her transformation to authorship. The film adaptation, on the other hand, casts Meggie as a much more assertive young protagonist in respect of this transformation. While Fenoglio writes an alternative narrative, saying ‘They have to be written by the writer. It has to sound like “Inkheart,”’ that paper is insufficient to resolve the cataclysmic arrival of the Shadow. Instead, Meggie engineers the climax of events, defeat of Capricorn and the Shadow, herself. At the point where she tells Mo ‘there’s nothing left to read!’ he holds up a pen and tells her ‘Then write!’ She writes on her own arm (see Figure 4.10), and reads aloud as she does so, altering events as she narrates them. Because

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Figure 4.10  Meggie writes on her arm (Source: Inkheart).

Resa’s voice is restored, we never see Meggie’s mother writing copiously in order to preserve and communicate her memories, which highlights Meggie’s own transition. Further, the writer Fenoglio tells Meggie when they are in captivity that he knows she wants to be a writer. Thus, while Meggie’s trajectory from reader to writer is not a dominant feature of the film, still it is given emphasis—most particularly in the choices where such emphasis doesn’t occur in the metafictional source novel the film adapts. With the exception of a moment when one of the blackjackets is filming the summons of the Shadow—and for a shot we see in black and white through the camera—filmmaking is not thematized. Nor are the fantasy features and special effects particularly foregrounded as filmic; they serve the film’s diegesis. The most metafilmic moments occur, as noted in Chapter 3, in manifesting the metaleptic nature of Mo and Meggie’s silvertongued reading, where the image flickers and overlaps. The question here then is less on the question of ‘meta’ equivalence than demonstrating a film adaptation where the reader-to-writer arc is foregrounded—even more so than it was in the novel the film adapts. This contrasts with the choices evident in The Spiderwick Chronicles around the same trajectory from reader to writer, and the unresolved intermedial tensions those choices reveal.

The Spiderwick Chronicles as a Metafilmic Adaptation The film The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008) adapts a five-novel series of the same name, written by Holly Black and illustrated by Tony DiTerlizzi, which features a reluctant reader, Jared Grace. Jared Grace is a troubled boy who learns shortly after arriving at his spinster great aunt’s house that his father won’t be joining them.14 The book that Jared discovers in

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the house—‘Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You’ (the ‘Field Guide’)—among other magical properties it shares, enables Jared to meet his great- great-grandfather in person and restore his spinster great aunt to her father, healing his family’s past and his own by this reunion of father and abandoned child. And, in the course of doing this, Jared repairs his own troubled relationships with his mother and two siblings, one of whom is Jared’s twin. As in other metafictions discussed, books create family bonds even across generations. Jared begins as an angry non-reader, a foil to his studious and wellbehaved twin brother Simon. While Simon is an avid reader, Jared is not: ‘Simon was the reader. Jared mostly just got into trouble’ (56). When Jared discovers the ‘Field Guide,’ his older sister Mallory dismisses it: ‘“This is baby stuff. A storybook”’ (53). And when Jared is suddenly gripped with reading fever, Simon notes: ‘You don’t usually like to read’ (56). Yet quickly Jared’s ownership of the ‘Field Guide’ becomes key to his rise in his siblings’ estimation. As they depend on Jared to tell them what the Guide has to say about the creatures they become embroiled with, Jared’s authority—and his status as a reader—grows. At the end of the series, the Guide which had been sought by Mulgarath for the wrong reasons, and sought by the elves in order to protect the book from falling into the wrong hands, is returned to the Grace children. They have proven that they are capable of using the book for good and preventing it from falling into the wrong hands as well. The Field Guide itself is an illustrated book found inside a ‘secret library.’ While it features ‘fantastical’ creatures, it is modeled on a botanical field guide with specimens, illustrations, and notes. The relationship between pictures and text is perhaps more significant here because of the genesis of The Spiderwick Chronicles themselves; they originated with drawings by diTerlizzi which were then spun into story by Holly Black; after Black drafted story sections, diTerlizzi altered images to suit. In the section titled ‘Tony diTerlizzi’s Sketchbook’ at the end of the collected edition of the series, The Completely Fantastical Edition, Black writes ‘Sometimes I sent words to him and got art back, sometimes it was the other way around’ (n.p.). The collaboration is thus a revision of the traditional text-then-illustration model. Jared is consistently described as ‘reading’ the Field Guide, and descriptions of him reading resemble those of other reading protagonists of children’s metafictions: ‘As Jared read, each page took him deeper into the strange world’ (62). But there is also focus on the sketches in the book. Early in Jared’s adventures, he thinks to record in the Field Guide: ‘Jared resolved to write a note in the Guide about it’ (130). Simon later indicates

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chil dre n’s me ta film 147 that Jared is now both well-read enough and experienced enough either to recreate the Field Guide or to create one: ‘“Jared remembers a lot,” Simon said. “I bet he could make a book of his own”’ (464). Yet when Jared shows the Field Guide to its original author, Arthur Spiderwick, the latter asks ‘“Who did these sketches?”’ and comments approvingly: ‘“I predict that you are going to be a great artist someday”’ (494). Jared’s writing is not mentioned, and the author’s praise is for the artist in Jared. At the end of the series, Jared determines to continue sketching: ‘He thought about everything that had happened, all of the things that he had seen, and suddenly realized how much he still had to sketch’ (497). The kunstler trajectory is thus not a typical reader-to-writer one for Jared, but rather reader-to-visual artist, and possibly reader-to-bookmaker. Certainly, the collaborative nature of the diTerlizzi-Black partnership in creating the novel series plays a role in this mutually affirming stance but, if anything, textual authorship is subordinated to visual artistry in the form of ‘apotheosis’ suggested for the reader Jared and, by extension, the extra-diegetic reader of The Spiderwick Chronicles series. The spinoff books similarly illustrate the interwoven nature of the text and illustrations of a ‘Field Guide.’ The Notebook for Fantastical Observations (2005) by both Black and diTerlizzi includes seventeen ‘miniadventures’ with ‘plenty of pages for readers to add their own stories, maps, charts, notes, lists, diagrams, and drawings’ (‘Notebook’). The age range provided for this book is 7–11 years. Other book-products tied to the film release in 2008 instead feature more art-oriented activities. The Make-Your-Own Field Guide (Harper, 2008) comes with crayons and stickers, and ‘Everything you need to be an artist’ (‘Make-Your-Own’), while Uncle Arthur’s Art Studio in the same series (Forrester and Nunn 2008) contains transparent, black line (stained-glass-style) illustrations to color, and comes with scissors, paints, stickers, and crayons. The following inferences drawn from the film adaptation’s treatment of the novel’s character trajectory for Jared must therefore be contextualized also within this ­intermedial hybridity already evident in the source novels as well. The film adaptation is a close adaptation of the five-novel series in most respects except this one: Jared’s participation in adding to the Field Guide. Early on, the film depicts him connected to digital devices with earbuds in, or on his phone. When he finds the book, it is in the spirit of disobedience and braving danger. He ignores all the books in his ancestor’s hidden library but solves riddles in order to search for the one in a locked trunk, bound up and marked ‘Warning.’ The first time Jared smiles in the film is when he opens this book. Soon, like other bookish protagonists, he is carrying the oversized book everywhere. However, unlike in the novels,

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Jared is never shown writing (or sketching) in the Field Guide himself. Instead, the film demonstrates the limits of the book by expanding the role of the seeing stone which is also a plot element in the novel. The book can only take Jared so far, but he can’t actually see for himself the magical world around him until he uses the ‘lens of stone’ (110) or ‘eyepiece’ (115). The seeing stone (later replaced by hobgoblin spit in his eye) gives him the Sight: the ability to see the magical creatures in the world, good and bad. This seeing stone becomes the metacinematic key to the film. It functions similarly in the novel in that after we see an illustration of Jared wearing the eyepiece, we then see illustrations of what he sees rather than simply illustrations that are from Spiderwick’s ‘Field Guide.’ But the arc from the book to the seeing stone becomes, transmediated to film, a step away from the book’s importance altogether. While the novel moves from self-reflexive intramediality (the embedded book) to inter-mediality (the seeing stone), within the novel, the film instead moves from intermedial representation (the book on screen, see Figure 4.11) toward self-reflexive intramediality (the seeing stone as representation of cinematicity and privileging of a type of lensed vision, see Figure 4.12). The shift from stone lens to hobgoblin spit simply removes the eyepiece prop and facilitates traditional fantasy film devices, where such creatures are visible to us and the protagonists as needed, permanently. The film itself, in that sense, is ‘spit’ in the viewer’s eye. Thus, notions of ‘equivalence’ are complicated by the transmediation of the two media. The film instead uses the symbolism of the stone lens as a visual representation of metacinema—even more pronounced by omitting the completion of the metafictional arc from reader to writer. Instead, in the film Arthur tells Jared that Jared is the Field Guide now. By virtue of seeing what he has seen, he is the book; he has internalized the book and doesn’t

Figure 4.11  Jared can read but can’t see (Source: The Spiderwick Chronicles).

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Figure 4.12  Jared gets the sight with the Seeing Stone (Source: The Spiderwick Chronicles).

need it anymore. The message to an implied viewer might also be the same then: because we have seen the film, we have internalized the book; we don’t need the book any longer. In this case what the film has accomplished is taking a book about learning to read and transforming it into a book about learning to read film. In the novels, the Field Guide is restored to Jared’s keeping. But in the film, the now-unbound book is thrown from the roof during Jared’s escape from the ogre Mulgarath; the book is scattered to pieces in the fall. While Simon picks up a few pages, and a disembodied hand collects a couple more, Jared pays no further attention to the ‘Guide’ at the end of the film. Thimbletack announces ‘“Book safe,’” but the book itself (its cover) is not shown again until the closing credits where it effectively dissolves from view leaving only the title on the screen. Thus, the book ‘The Spiderwick Chronicles’ becomes the film The Spiderwick Chronicles; by implication, Jared has no further use for it. Whether that is because he has not contributed to it, he has read and internalized it and has ‘become’ the book now, or because his own experiences and defeat of Mulgarath assert that his readerly apprenticeship has now been transcended (affirming in this case Amie Doughty’s argument in Throw the Book Away that experience is the proper conclusion for reading), Jared is a conquering hero but neither author nor artist at the end of the film adaptation. By extension to the extra-diegetic film viewer, film is the ‘fantastical world’ and we have now learned to see it clearly. Reinforcing this idea, the end credits continue to show the spectator that through the lens we can see a world of magic—as shown through the fallen lens of Arthur Spiderwick’s glasses (see Figure 4.13). The question now to revisit is that of ‘metafilm’ as a medium-­specific equivalent for metafiction. While the Spiderwick Chronicles novels

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Figure 4.13  End credits through the lens (Source: The Spiderwick Chronicles).

included the device of the seeing stone, ekphrastically, this device becomes metacinematic on film by mere virtue of its inclusion in the transmediation. But by additionally diverting the course of Jared’s trajectory away from contributing to the ‘Field Guide,’ and furthermore destroying the book at the end of the film, an important metafictional arc of the series is not only altered but coopted. Intramedially, and without showing Jared as an author, this lens becomes a metaphor for film spectatorship and possibly for filmmaking in lieu of authorship. The ‘Sight’ is privileged over the book. That is the ‘lesson’ of the ‘Field Guide,’ whose full title is ‘Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You,’ but while Jared becomes a co-author of the Field Guide by the conclusion of the novels, in the film he rather dispenses with the book. Instead, in adaptation, the apotheosis seems to be to a cinematographic one. Jared is an active spectator of the fantastical world, or a cinematographer-in-training.

Notes   1. Robert Stam, Literature through Film (2005: 112): ‘cinematic adaptations of self-conscious novels are obliged to wrestle with the challenge thrown up by these reflexive techniques.’ However, Stam also states elsewhere that while in themselves successful, such adaptations may not in fact adapt the metareferential aspect well: ‘many of the cinematic adaptations of self-conscious novels, including the more successful ones, often flounder on precisely this point’ (1992: 159).   2. In Gloria Withalm’s phrase (2009: 131)   3. Willy O. Muñoz writes of Allen’s film: it ‘thematizes the act of viewing film; it duplicates our actions in a mise en abyme that makes us aware of our position

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in relation to the film(s) we are viewing’ (1989: 99). The same duplication and reflection occurs in The Last Action Hero.   4. As it is by Keyvan Sarkhosh in ‘Metalepsis in Popular Comedy Film’ (2011: 184).   5. In a chapter titled ‘The Genre of Self-Consciousness,’ Robert Stam compares the self-conscious novel with the self-conscious film at some length (1992: 127–66).   6. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan note a parallel situation in transmediation of Hamlet’s play-within-the-play: ‘An obvious point, but one worth asking, is that on screen the play within the play becomes a play within a film, and unavoidably asks the rhetorical question to its viewers as to which form is preferred (film or theatre?).’ They go on to state that ‘the seemingly unavoidable meeting of theatre and film in these adaptations provide opportunities to foreground the theatre/film debate’ (2010: 35).   7. Kümmerling-Meibauer (2013b: 111, 120).   8. A similar strategy is used in Teen Beach Movie (2013) in which characters find themselves sucked into a television teen beach movie, ‘Wet Side Story.’ Their awareness of their predicament and the codes and conventions of this genre of movie inform the plot. During the end credits, characters from ‘Wet Side Story’ wash up in the ‘real’ world. The sequel, Teen Beach Movie 2 (2015) involves repeated transitions from one world to the other by various characters.   9. Ian Wojcik-Andrews gives only one specific example to support that parody is common in children’s films: when the cowboy Woody turns his head 360 degrees in Toy Story (1995) to scare the neighbor boy Sid, he is imitating the moment from the horror film The Exorcist (directed by William Friedken, 1973) when the child’s head also turns full circle (2000: 184). That said, the parody of that moment exists for the secondary (adult) audience of Toy Story rather than, one would expect, the child viewer. 10. William C. Siska refers to formal reflexivity as ‘a method of “unmasking” the Hollywood illusion’ (1979: 286). 11. Stam (1992: 130). 12. Owen Glieberman makes the reference in his review calling the film a ‘wacked kiddie Rashomon’ (2006). 13. In the novel, Bastian reads the sequence and then realizes its significance in  the description of Bastian himself and his surroundings (Ende [1979] 1984: 88). 14. Jared later does battle with the ogre Mulgarath who at one point takes the form of Jared’s own father. Jared ultimately prevails over the ogre—symbolic of coming to terms both with his absent father and his own ‘monstrous’ anger.

C HA PT E R 5

Children’s Meta-adaptation

In spite of the many and often unique challenges to adaptation of children’s literature, and particularly of children’s metafiction, such adaptations nevertheless do thrive. A common, medium-specific equivalence for the ‘meta’ of the source’s metafiction is metafilm. However, arguably a much more robust adaptation ‘equivalent’ is not metafilm at all, but rather a more globalized extrapolation of metafiction’s tendencies: metaadaptation. As will be shown, meta-adaptation transmediates metafiction’s didacticism, has subversive and empowering tendencies, and functions reflexively without necessarily replacing one medium in the mirror for another. The term ‘meta-adaptation’ is a relative newcomer. Eckart VoigtsVirchow coined the hybrid term: ‘metadaptation’ to describe the same phenomenon ‘for films and other texts that foreground not just the filmmaking process or other processes of text production, but also the adaptive processes between media, texts and genres’ (2008: 146). The film A Cock and Bull Story (2005) provides his descriptive case study; Voigts-Virchow argues that the film ‘is heuristically rich and worth studying . . . because it lays bare the specific mediality not only of literature and film, but also of the in-between process of adaptation’ (2008: 140). This ‘laying bare’ is the function of the ‘meta’ of both metafiction and metafilm. But in metaadaptation, the ‘adaptive processes’ which are typically all but invisible to the audience are rendered part of the ‘material’ reflected in the mirror. As Voigts-Virchow points out, ‘Any foregrounding of adaptive processes . . . is a heuristically extremely useful subgenre among adaptations’ (146; 149).1 In meta-adaptation, the object in the reflecting lens is no longer one medium or another—fiction or film—but rather both, and (implicitly or explicitly) transmediation itself. The didactic thrust of meta-adaptation is focused on the usually invisible codes, conventions, and processes of adaptation. That this has radically subversive potential in cultivating adaptation-informed youth viewers can be argued by extrapolation from

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the subversive, empowerment, and transformational arguments made for other meta-genres for children as well as from the needs and expectations for multi-literate and media-literate youth in the twenty-first century. Timothy Shary wrote that failure to cultivate media-literate youth means ‘our children will be raised as victims of the media, and they will not feel the authority to change the situation’ (2005: 109). He suggests an almost sinister apathy in ‘The huge corporations that control the majority of American media’ with respect to ‘promoting such media literacy’ (Ibid.). The solution, Shary writes, is ‘an entire programme of media literacy in [youths’] educational experience’ (Ibid.). But educational experiences can come from the works themselves—a central tenet of meta-reference. As metafiction teaches film and textual literacy—among other things— and metafilm teaches film and visual literacy, so meta-adaptation teaches ­adaptation and multi-literacy. To some extent, all adaptations of metafictional sources uphold ­(ekphrastically) the literary nature of the textual source, as Chapter 3 illustrated, whether or not they also do so as metafilms, as Chapter 4 illustrated,  and thus such films depict transmediation to some extent. Nevertheless, the characteristics I am outlining for ‘meta-adaptations’ remain distinctive and more overt. Not all adaptations of children’s ­metafictions are inherently meta-adaptations.2 In some way, the metaadaptation holds up a mirror to the adaptation process itself. As with the earlier, broader definition of ekphrasis, some form of ‘quotation’ or foregrounding the relationship between the two media is needed to tip the balance.3 Adaptation’s processes of selection, amplification, and so on constitute the matrix of choices that comprise the interpretant, as has been discussed earlier. Typically, the interpretant must be inferred from the evidence of choices traceable in the adaptation. But in meta-adaptation, self-reflexivity may make the interpretant overt—no longer implicit and inferred. Greg Colón Semenza notes that reflexive cinematic adaptations of literature very often dissect their own practices of adaptation, and they just as often include complex critical discourses on their own modes and priorities of adaptation—whether in an extended manner or not. Together they form a complex commentary on the palimpsestic nature of adaptation. (2013: 149)

The ‘modes and priorities of adaptation’ comprise the interpretant guiding the adaptation choices. Rendering these processes visible to a child reader/ viewer through meta-adaptation is to reveal the wizard behind all the ­curtains at once.

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A children’s film like Hoodwinked!, which provides contrasting versions of the same (known) fairy tale story within it, is an implicit metaadaptation. The film foregrounds similarities and differences first between the film and a known fairy tale (‘Little Red Riding Hood’), and then within competing versions of the tale shown in the film. The way in which such versions adapt one another and their source is the stuff of the film. What Hoodwinked! does implicitly, however, the (adult-oriented) film Adaptation (2002) does so explicitly by naming adaptation in the film’s title and by thematizing the work of an onscreen screenwriter to adapt an actual non-fiction literary source—The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean—to film. The resulting fiction film is not The Orchid Thief (an adaptation) but Adaptation (a meta-adaptation). As in the ‘film on film’ genre (Hollywood on Hollywood, Disney on Disney), Adaptation provides a (fictional) behind-the-scenes storyline featuring literature-to-film adaptation, foregrounding the transmediation processes, challenges, and economic contexts as plot material. This explicit form of meta-adaptation breaks the fifth wall. While the ‘fourth’ wall is that between the reader or viewer and the performance of the work, the ‘fifth’ wall is that of adaptation processes and the transmedial relationships they describe.4 Just as the majority of works preserve the fourth wall, and do not breach the illusion of the work’s mimetic realism, so the majority of adaptations preserve the ‘fifth’ wall which protects the transmedial processes of the adaptation from view. The adapted work is thus ‘always-already’ adapted; the performance is viewed after the fact. Meta-adaptations instead breach the illusion of the fait accompli, holding up some aspect(s) of the transmedial processes and results to view. Both the film Hugo and A Series of Unfortunate Events (the Nickelodeon film and the Netflix streaming television adaptation) adapt children’s metafictional sources. The three screen adaptations from the novels explored in this chapter function very differently, illustrating as in previous chapters the range of different strategies employed in children’s film adaptations. But they also illustrate an example of implicit meta-adaptation and an example of explicit meta-adaptation. The hybrid novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret is both a metafiction and  a cinematic hybrid in both style and subject matter. The novel is simultaneously an homage to books and to film. The symbiotic interweaving and co-dependence of the media in the sourcetext meet with an equally symbiotic intermedial treatment in Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation, Hugo. The way in which both media co-exist, self-reflexively and ekphrastically, in each work provides a good example of implicit metaadaptation. Adaptation is not explicitly thematized, but i­ntermediality

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chil dre n’s me ta - a dap t a t i o n 155 certainly is. Such foregrounding of media constitutes one form of meta-adaptation. The highly metafictional novel series A Series of Unfortunate Events, by ‘Lemony Snicket,’ aka. Daniel Handler, has been adapted twice to date. The first adaptation, the Nickelodeon film Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, adapts the first three novels of the series, with some creatively used snippets from book 7 as well. The film functions as a metafilm but does not specifically thematize adaptation or media and so does not rise to the level of reflexivity of meta-adaptation. By contrast, the recent first season of Netflix’s streaming adaptation, A Series of Unfortunate Events, which adapts the first four novels, employs additional strategies focusing on much more heightened reflexivity and explicitly performing meta-adaptation.

Hugo as an Implicit Meta-adaptation In the same way as earlier metafictions demonstrated a shift from intramedial use of a book within a book to intermedial book on screen in ­adaptation, the reverse can be seen in Hugo. The following diagram (Figure 5.1) illustrates these shifts: the shape on the left represents a novel (the outermost square) with significant ekphrastic use of film (the triangle) and some metafictional features as well (the embedded square). The shape on the right shows that the new medium is film (the outermost triangle). Hugo is an interesting case of implicit meta-adaptation. Author Brian Selznick won a Caldecott award (US picturebook illustration’s highest honor) for The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007). Selznick’s was the first novel to win the Caldecott, an award for picture books, largely due to the

Figure 5.1  Metafiction (also about film) becomes metafilm (also about literature).

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innovative way illustrations are used in the novel. Unlike traditionally ‘illustrated’ fiction, the black and white drawn illustrations of this novel take up the narrative at multiple points. Selznick described the relationship between text and illustration as ‘like a relay race, with the narrative being handed off between the words and the pictures’ (Selznick 2016: n.p.).5 Additionally, the novel is ‘cinematic’ both in that it features a history of early film as part of its main storyline, ‘most importantly,’6 as well as the character ‘Papa Georges,’ or Georges Méliès, pioneer of early narrative cinema and special effects and his relationship with the orphan Hugo, an ideal ‘cinephile.’7 In addition to being an ‘homage’ to early film, the novel functions cinematically—in a silent film fashion—due to the large sections of ‘silent’ narrative cinematic illustration. Selznick suggests that the hybrid form itself recalled the cinematicity of early film in its ‘alternating moments of silence’ during the image portions of the narrative: ‘These silences worked well in a story that was partly about silent movies.’ In both content and form, then, the novel intermedially and ekphrastically engages with and is an ode to cinema. The film Hugo (2011), directed—perhaps surprisingly—by Martin Scorsese, recreates a number of iconic Méliès sets and scenes, and was filmed in 3-D. Descriptions of the filming processes by Robert Richardson, ASC—who won his third Academy Award for Best Cinematography for Hugo—in the industry magazine American Cinematographer, reveal just how many of Scorsese’s choices dictated new approaches and technologies. Richardson notes that Selznick’s illustrations ‘begged for a provocative translation’ (quoted in Hope-Jones 2011: 55) and emphasizes the extent to which 3-D tools have created ‘a new language’ in filmmaking (Ibid.: 58). At the same time, much of Richardson’s description indicates the extent to which the filmmakers returned to ‘swim in the waters from which Méliès created his highly imaginative work’ (55), including recreating the effects of hand coloring film on the palette, and using cinematic color processes that were used in Méliès’ era. The result is something ‘that could never have been achieved if the filmmakers hadn’t captured it in 3-D’ (67) but which also pushed the limits of what 3-D could accomplish.8 ‘Every frame in Hugo was a commitment to the medium,’ Richardson summarizes (60). Thus, while the film is an ode to books, and to Selznick’s book in particular, it is utterly filmic in subject and form. Dan North writes that the end result is a film adaptation that realizes the book’s filmic potential as an equivalence: It is clear that Scorsese has cinematized the book rather than attempted to adapt its appearance directly for the screen: the effect is to break film’s usual allegiance to

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chil dre n’s me ta - a dap t a t i o n 157 literary texts and to foreground the film’s distinctly filmic textures, just as Selznick’s book makes a feature of the author’s grainy draftsmanship. (North 2015: 102)

And Victoria Duckett notes that while Selznick incorporated only one Lumière film (A Train Arrives in the Station, 1895) in addition to the many references to Méliès films, instead the film Hugo incorporates a ‘greatly expanded’ list.9 Both Selznick and the filmmakers have commented widely on the adaptation to film, creating a case study where the particularities of the intermedial dialogue can be clearly delineated. Selznick approved of the adaptation, noting that Scorsese was uniquely positioned to make it, being both a celebrated director and a film historian and preservationist. For that matter, Ben Kingsley who played filmmaker Georges Méliès in Hugo notes that he based his performance on Martin Scorsese himself: ‘Why look any further? . . . You are with a living pioneer of cinema’ (quoted in Selznick 2011: 73). Selznick identifies the successful ‘reversal of formula’ between novel and film: One of the things I love about the transition is that my book was a love letter to the cinema but also about the power of books. Scorsese makes a movie that celebrates books, filming scenes in bookstores and libraries, but in the end, it’s a valentine to the cinema and the importance of film. They were able to reverse the formula because they changed the medium through which the story’s being told; the story itself needed to shift, and they did it in a subtle and beautiful fashion. (Quoted in Brown 2013: 38)

The ‘reversal’ is a quintessential example of intermediality becoming intramediality (for film) while intramediality becomes intermediality (for text). Yet, interestingly, while the novel is ‘an homage to cinema’ (Selznick, quoted in Trierweiler 2011: n.p.), Selznick insists repeatedly on the materiality of the book, and references the medium’s resistance to transmediation. In interviews, he notes ‘I am a bookmaker. I love what books can do. I love holding books, smelling books, and turning pages’ (Ibid.). He notes that ‘the weight and appearance are important components of the Invention experience’ (‘Beyond Words’ 2008a: np), the fact that it is a ‘big, heavy book that feels substantial when you hold it in your hand’ is integral to the reading experience of it (Ibid.), and again that ‘The book in your hands is the most important part of the entire experience of reading the story’ (2008b: 61). He credits the Scholastic editorial team with understanding the importance of the book’s materiality in his acceptance speech for the Caldecott award:

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Everyone understood that even though The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a book about movies, and it is told like a movie, the main concern was still the book. We wanted readers to be aware of the object in their hands, to fall in love not just with Hugo but with the book itself, the thing with covers and pages and pictures and words. (Selznick 2008a: n.p., original emphasis)10

He discusses the page turn as the key both to the book and to the reader’s control over pacing (Ibid.), as one of the two things that book ‘technology’ can accomplish: People talk about books as though they aren’t a technology, but they are a technology. They only do two things: They open, and they have page turns. But within that limited technology, you can do anything, you can go anywhere, you can make anything happen.’ (Quoted in Trierweiler 2011: n.p.)

Selznick’s insistence on the materiality of the book to accomplish his aims in The Invention of Hugo Cabret are even cited as a generic resistance to remediation: ‘because the book depends on how the words and the pictures interact, it felt like that precluded the possibility of it being turned into a movie’ (Ibid.). Elsewhere, he noted that ‘Because the book in your hand is part of the plot, I didn’t think it could be filmed’ (quoted in Brown 2013: 35). At the same time, his use of cinematic image sequences (one reviewer even describes the first image as a ‘shot’11) is the very aspect of the book that won the book illustration award. He ‘decided to tell part of the story in images, like a movie’ (Selznick 2011: 13, original emphasis), so ‘we could watch those parts of the story’ (Ibid.). Selznick describes the book as using ‘the language of cinema to tell its story’ (which is ‘all about the history of cinema’) (Selznick 2008a: n.p.). Selznick even describes the book in metacinematic terms: ‘This book, steeped in the history of cinema, could then use the devices of cinema, like close-ups, pans, and cuts, to help tell its story’ (2008b: 60, original emphasis). Furthermore, according to Selznick the illustrations themselves are influenced by French cinema;12 a number of them are actual film stills. As is often the case, the film takes many of its shot cues from Selznick’s illustrations—the screenwriter John Logan notes how useful the illustrations were ‘because they reminded [him] of movie storyboards’ (quoted in Selznick 2011: 62). Interestingly, illustrations both incorporating cinema, influenced by cinema, and functioning cinematically are then referenced in transmediation from book to movie. A photograph by Japp Buitendjik in Brian Selznick’s book about the making of the film adaptation Hugo shows the director Martin Scorsese holding up a copy of the book on set and showing one of Selznick’s illustrations

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chil dre n’s me ta - a dap t a t i o n 159 to Asa Butterfield and Chloe Moretz. If The Invention of Hugo Cabret is already—to some extent—also metacinematic, then Scorsese’s film adaptation is meta-metacinematic. The novel is also, however, metafictional. The novel’s metafiction included the materiality of the book, as Selznick and his editing team at Scholastic have emphasized. It can also include the reflexivity of the ‘bookish technology’ of the page turn, and the way in which the book’s illustrations function differently than usual for an illustrated novel. But the novel also features characters and settings and generic scenarios typical for metafiction: an avid reader (in Isabelle), a bookstore, and a self-generating (circular) narrative. In Hugo’s first glimpse of Isabelle she is clutching a book under her arm as she ducks behind the toy shop counter, and then closes her book and runs off: ‘he often saw her go into the booth with a book under arm and disappear behind the counter’ (Selznick 2007: 46). Isabelle later tells Hugo to meet her inside the bookstore. Hugo hadn’t been in there before, but at the sight and smell of the dusty books he remembers his father reading to him stories by Jules Verne, and Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales. Isabelle then appears ‘like a mermaid rising from an ocean of paper’ (147), closes the books he has been reading, and tells Hugo his precious notebook has not been burned as the toyshop seller Papa Georges had told him it had. Isabelle takes a book on photography—like Belle in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast she is permitted to borrow books from a bookstore. Her good character is affirmed both by virtue of being a reader and being trustworthy enough for a bookseller to lend books to. The inside of the bookstore is illustrated—Isabelle is clutching a book to her chest, surrounded by tomes. It is later Monsieur Labisse, the bookseller, who tells Hugo about the Film Academy Library and a book he finds there to learn about early films. And at the end of the novel, the automaton at last writes, ‘these words’ (511). The book has been ‘written’ by the automaton Hugo repaired—the novel closes with its genesis, in the way of selfgenerating fictions, and ensures a connection between the extra-diegetic reader holding the pages that have been generated intra-diegetically. In these crucial ways, the novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret functions like a typical children’s metafiction. The film’s treatment of these three aspects in particular are indicative of the film’s interpretant with regard to books and bookishness. And what is clear is that, in adaptation, the film amplifies these traits. Isabelle indeed carries books and comes and goes from Monsieur Labisse’s bookstore. Monsieur Labisse smiles at Isabelle but looks coldly at Hugo; his assessment is both classist (Isabelle is well dressed, while Hugo is not) but also

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he uses books as his litmus for character: Isabelle is a frequent reader, while Hugo is someone he has not seen in his shop before. Monsieur Labisse is played by renowned actor Christopher Lee, already lending prestige to the character and his setting. The bookstore setting is crowded to overflowing with books on more than one floor; it is a bibliophile’s paradise. These scenes in the film—all of which include the bookseller, Monsieur Labisse, illustrate the film’s homage to books but also their close relationship with visual media (photography and film). In the first scene, Isabelle leads Hugo into the store for the first time. She refers to the bookstore as ‘“only the most wonderful place on earth.”’ She tells Monsieur Labisse she is ‘“half in love with David Copperfield,”’ but then asks where to find books on photography. Here, she explains she is helping him because it might be an adventure, and she hasn’t had an adventure ‘“outside of books, at least.’” She introduces herself to Hugo for the first time in this setting: ‘“By the way, my name’s Isabelle. Do you want a book?”’ She is thoroughly book-identified as a character (see Figure 5.2). She is horrified when he demurs, asking him in shocked tones ‘“Don’t you like books?”’ Clearly, like Monsieur Labisse, she also uses relationship to books to judge character, and is mollified when Hugo says he does, and that in fact he used to read Jules Verne with his father. In the second scene, soon after, they return to the bookstore again but here the focus is more on films. Hugo touches a copy of Robin Hood, but that prompts a discussion of the movies and having seen the film with his father. The nature of the book as a source for adaptation is foregrounded.

Figure 5.2  Isabelle and books (Source: Hugo).

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chil dre n’s me ta - a dap t a t i o n 161 Isabelle’s earlier shock at the thought that Hugo might not like books is now neatly reversed when Isabelle reveals she has never seen a movie, Hugo is shocked, and she replies ‘“Isn’t it appalling?”’ Here, Isabelle takes Hugo’s hand for the first time. The adventure Hugo then offers Isabelle is to go to the movies, which is also Isabelle’s first experience of them. Although surrounded by books, their first conversation in the bookstore is about films. Later, in the station entranceway, Monsieur Labisse gifts this book to Hugo, stating that the book which was intended for his godson is now intended for Hugo. This marks a turning point in Hugo’s character reformation with Monsieur Labisse: Hugo again touches the cover, but then opens the book. Monsieur Labisse asks ‘“You know this volume?”’ in a stern and sceptical tone. When Hugo answers he used to read it with his father, the book is then given to him. It is the first time Monsieur Labisse smiles at Hugo. The intimidating character thus reveals his kind nature to Hugo, an urchin, extending a symbolic familial connection both with the bookseller and with Hugo’s father. And it is Monsieur Labisse who tells both children where to go to find a book that will tell them all they need to know about movies: the Film Academy Library. However, the film does not have the automaton write the story of the book. Instead, the automaton draws an image from A Trip to the Moon, signed Georges Méliès. That drawing provides an important clue to the actual identity of ‘Papa Georges’ as the forgotten filmmaker. In the adaptation, however, Isabelle is the author of the narrative. In the final party scene, she picks up a notebook and pen, sits in an armchair, and writes. In voiceover, she states: ‘Once upon a time, I met a boy named Hugo Cabret. He lived in a train station. Why did he live in a train station? You might well ask. That’s what reading this book is going to be about.’ The screenwriter, John Logan, indicated that the change was made to show Isabelle ‘“arriving at her destiny”’: ‘“I wanted both Hugo and Isabelle to be stepping into their future, like in Brian’s book”’ (quoted in Selznick 2011: 221). The implication is that Isabelle’s destiny, and the proper outcome of a reading apprenticeship, coupled with lived adventure, is to become an author. The interpretant inferred from the ‘filmed metafiction’ aspects of the film adaptation demonstrates not only an homage to books and their readers, writers, and sellers, but to books as a source of film adaptations as well. Selznick, Scorsese, and many of the filmmakers have been very forthcoming with comments about the novel’s hybrid medium and cinematicity, the film’s inter- and intramedial preoccupations, and the nature of the latter as an adaptation. Both novel and film were nominated for and won

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many prestigious awards within their own medium. In addition to winning the Caldecott, Selznick’s hybrid novel was a National Book Award finalist (2007). In addition to winning five Academy Awards and being nominated for a further six, Scorsese’s film won a number of international awards from 2011 to 2013, including many for visual effects and art direction, and one specifically for Best Live Action 3-D Feature from International 3D & Advanced Imaging Society’s Creative Arts Awards, 2012 (Internet Movie Database [imdb] 1990–2017). Each was clearly heralded as an outstanding achievement within its respective medium. Given both the intermedial hybridity of the source and the novel’s particularly close approximation of cinematicity, the adaptation and its interpretant are of particular interest to the present study. While the novel is both a quintessential ‘book,’ it is also an homage to the cinema and cinematicity. The film’s positive reception as an adaptation of Selznick’s work shows no friction in the way in which it has embraced the opportunity to showcase its own metafilmic nature—both in terms of cinema history and contemporary digital filmmaking. Selznick’s many published comments about the adaptation indicate not only his satisfaction with Scorsese’s work as an adaptation of his novel, but of Scorsese’s use of medium-­specificity with which to do it: ‘There’s this constant reminder that Scorsese is doing something that could only be done through film . . . Scorsese [is] using the most modern technology to tell the story of the early technology that made film possible’ (quoted in Brown 2013: 27). In the case of Hugo, the adaptation of a children’s metafiction into a metafilm demonstrates an extremely high degree of equivalence by virtue of the particular cinematic nature and content of the novel. Rochelle Hurst says of adaptations, representatively, that they are ‘a hybrid, an amalgam of media—at once a cinematized novel and a literary film, confusing, bridging, and recycling the alleged discordance between page and screen, both insisting upon and occupying the overlap’ (2008: 187). In Hugo, as in The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the overlap belies the ‘alleged discordance’ between the two media. And by virtue of the intermedial symbiosis and homage evident in the adaptation (as in the source novel), the film functions as an implicit meta-adaptation, foregrounding and lauding both media.

Breaking the ‘Fifth’ Wall: A Series of Unfortunate Events13 The first three novels of A Series of Unfortunate Events were adapted in 2004 for the Nickelodeon film Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, while the first season of Netflix’s streaming long-form television

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chil dre n’s me ta - a dap t a t i o n 163 adaptation (2017) adapts the first four novels in a total of eight episodes (the remainder are contracted, and season two streamed on Netflix in 2018). As will be shown, the Nickelodeon film adapts the metafictional mode as select metafilmic gestures; the resulting adaptation of the sourcetext is both ‘filmed metafiction’ (at the thematic level) and a self-reflexive ‘metafilm.’ But while the Netflix series also does this, it goes further to engage in an onscreen critique of traditional cinema (and thus, by implication, with the film adaptation that preceded it) as well. In part by doing so,  the Netflix adaptation performs ‘meta-adaptation’ for the viewer, breaking the ‘fifth’ wall of adaptation. This comparative case study of both Series of Unfortunate Events adaptations illustrates that meta-adaptation is a highly effective way of adapting children’s metafiction both for delight and instruction; that the metafictional impetus of deconstruction and revelation is applicable to showing adaptation’s otherwise hidden transmedial work as well; and finally, that focusing on transmediality itself may suggest a way of transcending medium-specificity altogether.

Considering the Metafictional Source: The Novel Series Daniel Handler’s novel series is explicitly metafictional from first, titled The Bad Beginning (BB), to last, The End. On a metafictional spectrum, it situates itself at the prominent, foregrounded, and open end—perhaps just shy of works that incorporate some do-it-yourself invitations for the reader to supply pages (as in The Secret Series by ‘Pseudonymous Bosch’). While chronicling the adventures of the three unfortunate Baudelaire orphans, pursued for their fortune by their evil relative Count Olaf and his troupe of amateur actors, they feature direct address from a nearly omnipresent authorial-narrator; plots and characters that foreground books, libraries, and research; instructional asides on the nature of dramatic irony, or the difference between literal and figurative (BB 68–69), for example; and a full array of devices performing linguistic self-reflexivity. Danielle Russell (2010) notes that all devices present in Margaret Mackey’s list of such metafictional devices are present in the series, summarizing that ‘experimentation occurs in both form and content.’14 While varied in specifics, the series’ overall formula is established by the first book. At the thematic or story level, books and bookishness are prevalent, typical of many children’s metafictions. Klaus, the middle Baudelaire child, is a voracious reader whose goal for his future is to build a public library (Miserable Mill [MM] 70–71). As with Hermione Granger of the Harry Potter series, Klaus’ bookishness and extensive lexicon are the key

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to many of the children’s narrow escapes—in concert with his older sister Violet’s ability to invent, and his baby sister Sunny’s ability to bite. In the first novel, Klaus researches nuptial laws from one of Justice Strauss’ library books, which gives him insight into what Olaf is planning to do (give guardian consent for his ward Violet to marry, and then marry her himself for the Baudelaire fortune). One of Olaf ’s henchmen senses the danger in Klaus’ books: ‘“I think you should never be allowed inside this library again, at least until Friday. We don’t want a little boy getting big ideas”’ (BB 89–90). But Klaus also knows their value: ‘Maybe, just maybe, the book Klaus was smuggling would save their lives’ (BB 92). The tragedy of the fire that orphaned the children is compounded by the loss of the vast home library of ‘thousands of books on nearly every subject’ (BB 3) and the failure of all sympathetic adults to remain in their lives is each time accompanied by the loss of access to their libraries. As is typical for children’s metafictions and their adaptations, good characters encourage book reading while unsympathetic characters and villains are anti-book. Laurie Ousley (2007) makes this point in her article on the series, titled: ‘Well-read people are less likely to be evil.’ Characters like Justice Strauss (BB), Uncle Monty (Reptile Room) and Aunt Josephine (Wide Window) are sympathetic and have full home libraries (a fact pointed out in The Miserable Mill [58]), while Sir (MM) is unsympathetic and has just three dull books in the mill’s library. In addition to the thematic metafictionality, the novels use a high degree of stylistic self-reflexivity as well. Again, typically for children’s metafictions, riddles and codes are prevalent throughout the series’ adventures. One quotation can perhaps represent some of the flavor of the novels’ self-reflexive (and medium-specific) playful style: Occasionally his eyes would close. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over. (Bad Beginning 94)

In this same vein, Sunny’s baby pre-speech is largely babble in the early books, but her contributions are interpreted by the narrator as complex utterances, and her siblings understand her input the same way. Perhaps most significantly,15 the novels also use an intrusive, omnipresent, authorial-narrator as a frame device which creates a crucial layer interacting with the novels’ thematic storyline. ‘Lemony Snicket’ directly addresses the reader repeatedly from the outset, discussing his own research into the Baudelaires. He is the ‘author’ of the books, but also a participant in their mysterious plots. Snicket interjects constant warnings about the

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chil dre n’s me ta - a dap t a t i o n 165 awful subject matter. The first book opens: ‘If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book,’ and his exhortations to put the book down are one of the running gags of the series. As narrator, he is the one drawing attention to the linguistic construction of the narrative, referring repeatedly to the diction: ‘a word which here means. . .’ is one of the epithets of the series as well. In some cases, the denotation is literal: ‘smirked, a word which here means “smiled in an unfriendly, phony way”’ (BB 95), while in others it explains a secondary meaning or even one antithetical to the word’s denotative meaning. The authorial-narrator also contributes a paratextual level of reflexivity outside the story level as well. Daniel Handler’s name does not appear on the published novels. Instead, Lemony Snicket is the ascribed author. Inside the novels, both front and end matter contribute to the illusion of his authorship by providing telegrams to his editor, and epigrams that continue the narrative backstory (all novels are dedicated to Snicket’s lost love, Beatrice. At this level, the novels’ titles all draw alliterative attention to themselves, and refer to themselves also as a series (with a Beginning and an End novel). There are thirteen novels of thirteen chapters each, alluding to the unluckiness of the orphans which is a constant theme, although there is a ‘Chapter 14’ at the end of the thirteenth novel which actively frustrates the series’ closure. The metafiction is the primary and often only topic of criticism on the series, and critics and reviewers ascribe a range of purposes to it. Despite the novelty of the series, these comments are acutely typical for comments about children’s metafictions generically. Sara Austin comments that the text ‘disrupt[s] textual authority and break[s] readers’ trust in the narrative’ (2013: n.p.), and that ‘This dissonant reading experience constructs the child reader in a position of moral and cognitive authority that is transferrable to other texts.’ Danielle Russell writes that the novels ‘enlist the reader in the process of creation’ (2010: 32), and that by the final book readers must ‘fend for themselves’ (34). Laurie Ousley states that the novels ‘initiate readers into the power-structures that control knowledge and language’ (2007: 297), and that ‘Handler encourages readers to trust themselves, never accept the world at face value, and to take power for themselves’ (303). And Elizabeth Bullen discusses the way the novels have readers ‘rehearse resilience’ (2008: 206), ascribing the metafiction to ‘elements [that] offer child readers the conceptual tools to think critically about the stories they are told, and to think reflexively about their own life story’ (210). The challenges this series poses to ‘faithful’ screen adaptation are evident: the series is enormously metafictional in ways that are—by

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definition—intensely medium-specific. And metafiction’s pedagogical burden—to empower critical readers, to grant children agency, and to reveal the keys to the linguistic kingdom as it were—is both crucial to the novels’ work and the freight of the metafiction. The theoretical challenges to adaptation of metafiction discussed above are manifestly present in this concrete example. And we see that, whether ‘obliged’ to or not, the fact that both the 2004 Nickelodeon film adaptation of the first three novels and the 2017 Netflix streaming long-form television adaptation of the first four both do demonstrably adapt many aspects of the novels’ metafictionality indicates an importance attached by their respective adapters to representing the ‘meta’ levels for which the books are now very well known.16

Implicit Meta-adaptation: The Nickelodeon Film Adaptation (2004) The 2004 Nickelodeon film adaptation, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, directed by Brad Silberling and featuring Jim Carrey in the role of Count Olaf, adapts both the spirit and the letter of the first three novels of the series successfully, as evinced by its largely positive reviews. Even Roger Ebert, who disliked the depressing tone of the film, comments in a way that confirms its metafilmicity: ‘everything’s an act’ (Ebert 2004). The plots of the three novels are closely adapted and, in that respect, the thematic metafiction becomes ‘filmed metafiction’—it is now intermedial bookishness. In the transmediation process, however, select aspects become ‘meta’ in the new medium which in the novels were intermedial. One of these is Count Olaf ’s hobby, acting, along with his theatrical troupe. On screen, and embodied by Jim Carrey, Count Olaf ’s acting becomes exaggeratedly intramedial. When Olaf comes downstairs to meet  his orphaned relatives for the first time, he descends a grand staircase in self-conscious theatrical flair, and demands and then enacts a do-over as he flubs his lines: ‘Wait. Let me do that one more time. Give me the line again!’ Again, after his villain speech at the end of the film, he asks Violet ‘What do you think? Too diabolical? Give me some feedback!’ As he waits for the children to be mown down by the train on the tracks where he left them, he is reading the magazine Drama-logue with a large front-page image captioned ‘Lon Chaney: The Man of a Thousand Faces.’ In fact, the casting of Jim Carrey—another man of a thousand faces—as Count Olaf, a character who must repeatedly pretend to be someone other than himself, becomes a highly self-reflexive screen

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chil dre n’s me ta - a dap t a t i o n 167 gesture and one that fans appreciate. One online commenter on the Roger Ebert review of this film (Ebert 2004), named paramitch, notes of Carrey in the role of Olaf: ‘It’s the best he’s ever been, because he has to let us SEE him acting’ (original emphasis). The film cycles back—after it closely adapts the first three books of the series—to the conclusion of the first novel: the real wedding between Olaf and Violet couched as a play. In the novel, the play is clearly intermedial, but the staging of the play in the film becomes closer to metafilm—a feature enhanced by a cameo of actor Dustin Hoffman in the audience announcing at one point: ‘I didn’t know they had this kind of budget!’ And the novels’ mysterious use of eyes and spyglasses as symbols of a secret society similarly takes on a scopic reflexivity in screen adaptation, discussed further below. The novels’ stylistic elements become largely a feature of the ‘filmed metafiction,’ now intermedial and embedded within the storyline. However, one feature makes an easy transition to intramedial device: Sunny’s unintelligible baby speech. In the film adaptation, Sunny’s speech is subtitled on screen. The first instance of Sunny’s babble is interpreted by the voiceover narrator as in the novels: ‘which probably meant. . . or perhaps. . .,’ adapting closely the ‘interpretive’ work effected in the novels where the narrator usually doesn’t specify that his translation is exactly what Sunny’s speech denotes: ‘She probably meant something along the lines of. . .’ [RR 16]). But the later use of medium-specific subtitling to decode her speech and the disjunction between the baby on screen and the sophistication of the transcription on screen provided becomes a ­foregrounded screen element. The authorial-narrator (played by Jude Law) is never shown speaking on camera, but he is repeatedly shown typing (the present story) on screen. At the end of the film he makes an elaborate getaway, in keeping with Snicket’s mysterious back story in the novels as well. The newly intermedial act of filming his authorship nevertheless attains metafilmic status by Snicket’s repeated voiceover direct addresses to the audience, beginning at the very outset of the film. Many of the metafictional addresses to the reader in the first three novels are thus rendered verbatim using the medium-specific device of voiceover, thereby adapting with the narration many of the novels’ metafictional moments. The film in fact opens with titles for an animated film called The Littlest Elf, a device drawn from the series’ seventh novel, The Vile Village (2001), which references a pleasant book called The Littlest Elf that the narrator suggests would be a better reading choice than the present ­narrative. The film’s opening animation is then interrupted by Snicket’s voice

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Figure 5.3  This is Not the Film We are Watching (Source: Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events 2004).

and another non-diegetic sound of a needle being lifted off a record, ­accompanied by a freeze in onscreen action and the (sun)light going out (see Figure 5.3). Snicket here notes that unfortunately this is not the film we will be watching, and that there is still time to go watch a film about a happy elf in another cinema down the hall. The film thus references itself as a cinematic film, with viewers, and in this way adapts the narrator’s trademark refrain in the novels that the story is too awful to read. The elf reappears as a bobble-head toy in the back of Count Olaf ’s car when Olaf abandons the children on a railway line with an oncoming train—perhaps a nod to merchandising spinoffs from popular children’s films and further reinforcing the idea that the film The Littlest Elf exists, even if only in the world of the film. The elf is then decapitated by Klaus and Violet and becomes part of the mechanism they use to escape the oncoming train. This metafilmic frame actually constitutes a paratext— transitioning viewers into the film by way of opening credits and then, in fact, undermining that frame by foregrounding its artificiality. In her article ‘Paratexts in Children’s Films and the Concept of Meta-filmic Awareness,’ Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer writes that such moments ‘have a metafictive function’ (2013b: 117), and contribute to an awareness of ‘metafilm,’ arguing that: ‘the comprehension of paratexts is arguably an important aspect of media literacy’ (Ibid.: 110).17 Within the metafilmic frames provided by The Littlest Elf and the visible authorial-narrator, other select gestures take on a more overt metafilmic

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chil dre n’s me ta - a dap t a t i o n 169 self-reflexivity as well. The narrator introduces the three Baudelaire orphans and the moment when they are told they have been orphaned by holding a photograph which becomes a moving image. At the end of this scene, the process is reversed as the film becomes instead a still image and the camera zooms out to show that it is also a photograph in Lemony Snicket’s hand. A second example adapts the chapter break after a large snake appears to attack Sunny in The Reptile Room. In the heat of the action, the chapter abruptly ends. The new chapter apologizes for the interruption and gives an excuse. The film uses editing to create an abrupt rupture in the scene at the moment of the snake attack, catapulting the viewer to Snicket’s frame—as in the novel—with a broken typewriter ribbon that he fixes onscreen before the scene resumes. And as noted earlier, the novels feature many eyes (one of which is ominously tattooed on Count Olaf ’s ankle, for instance) and spyglasses, both of which symbolize the secret organization the children discover. But these symbols assume metafilmic status within the screen medium— one which foregrounds scopic vision—and within the heightened context of the many other metafilmic elements of the particular adaptation. While the tattoo, prominent eye symbols, and spyglasses are all present in the mise en scène—in the course of the close adaptation of thematic elements—other moments are foregrounded in more self-reflexively cinematic terms. From Count Olaf on, characters are often introduced via the peephole in their door, with an extreme close-up of the eye behind glass—a specifically lensed vision. When Olaf bends down to peer in close-up at the camera, the cinematic logic explains the shot as a 180degree reverse shot (we see Klaus from Olaf ’s perspective; we now see Olaf from Klaus’s perspective, up close) but as Olaf is in fact peering directly into the camera in an ominous fashion, the shot also suggests a breach of the fourth wall. And while both windows and eyeglasses are a series feature, Aunt Josephine’s eponymous ‘wide window’ is a giant eye that opens as a series of mechanized lens covers retract from it—less eyelid than camera shutter. In the final scene when Klaus burns the marriage certificate Olaf is holding aloft, he does so by deliberately angling a window shaped like an eye (see Figure 5.4). The prevalence of references to lensed vision in the series, coupled with this created scene in the film in which Klaus manipulates the lens by two handles on either side of it, creates a network of inherently selfreflexive cinematographic references. The scene includes a wide angle shot showing the light refracting down a series of ‘lenses’ inside the tower and projecting out from behind Klaus to strike the paper in Olaf ’s hand. To help foreground the metafilmic nature of this moment, it significantly

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Figure 5.4  Klaus angles the lens (Source: Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events).

contrasts the novel’s plot solution whereby Violet thwarts Olaf by signing the certificate with her left, non-dominant, hand (and thus not ‘in her own hand’). It is worth noting that the film uses a shot showing specifically that Violet is signing with her right hand; those familiar with the novel and who will be watching for a known resolution are left for a time in suspense at how the film will instead undo the legality of this marriage which must fail. Finally, the film achieves epitextual moments of reflexivity in DVD format. The root menu lists common features (Play, Set Up, Special Features, and Sorrowful Scenes), but selecting a feature reveals a direct address warning annotated beside it. When selecting ‘Play,’ for example, the DVD titles insert ‘Please don’t’ in front of the word Play. In the case of ‘Set Up’ the warning reads: ‘A TRAP! Otherwise Known As A’ with an arrow pointing to ‘Set Up.’ The interplay thus extends a metafictional feature of the novels’ narration into the cinematic experience through epitextual features as well. The Nickelodeon film closely adapts the novels’ thematic metafiction and adapts the interactivity with the reader to interactivity with the viewer through medium-specific metafilmic elements. By foregrounding the intermedial aspects of the novels (Olaf ’s acting, for example) the film ‘flips the script’ so that the film is a recognizable ‘meta’ adaptation of metafiction. Both media, textual and filmic, are held up as a feature of the film adaptation: their properties are addressed and held up to view diegetically as well as extra-diegetically. Yet adaptation from one to the other is not overtly thematized; the film is an implicit meta-adaptation.

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Explicit Meta-Adaptation: Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017) The long-form, streaming television adaptation whose first season adapts the first four novels of the series (one more than the 2004 film) over eight episodes does many of the same things the prior film does, adapting metafictional elements using medium-specific, filmic equivalents. Sunny’s speech is rendered in subtitles, for example, and the narrator speaks directly to the viewer on screen; these are standard (if overt and very high profile) strategies of metafilm. The series also has the narrator self-reflexively discuss the medium, referring to flashbacks and so on, and discussing television executives and their concerns about the show. But the series goes one important step further by distinguishing itself as streaming television rather than as cinema, and in one episode having Count Olaf discuss the intermedial rivalries between cinema and television. While the series does not explicitly reference its adaptation from novels, nevertheless the series crosses into explicit meta-adaptation by virtue of these comparative references to the relative merits of rival screen media. Additionally, the opening credits of the episodes reference the novels by including the typewritten dedication (occurring on screen, with typewriter sound effects) that are particular paratexts belonging to the novels and their extended conceit that they are authored by the narrator, Lemony Snicket. It is those specific aspects of the series which will be discussed here rather than the cinematic devices used to adapt the novels where they share strong points of contact with the film already discussed. A significant feature of the Netflix series is the treatment of the onscreen narrator, Lemony Snicket. Unlike the film adaptation, which does depict Snicket but never shows him looking at or speaking to the camera (as distinct from his voiceover narration), the television series foregrounds its narrator in several entertaining ways. The actor, Patrick Warburton, is a well-known face and voice from other films, television series (live action and animated), and video games, many of these for the children’s and youth markets. In A Series of Unfortunate Events, he speaks to the camera directly, repeatedly, and at length; he wears exaggerated costumes depending on the setting of the scene in which he appears (such as a men’s one-piece bathing suit as he sits in a lifeguard tower on the beach, or overalls and straw hat in a field); and he appears in scenes with characters who don’t see him and who are sometimes frozen in place while he speaks. The novels’ repeated refrain to stop reading the terrible narrative in the Netflix series instead becomes direct address encouragement to stop

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watching. Lemony Snicket says at the opening of one episode: ‘If I were you, I would look away before viewing any of the horrible and horrifying events that comprise this ghastly new episode of the Baudelaires’ unfortunate lives.’ This refrain is repeated in the series’ theme song, whose lyrics change depending on the particulars of the novel comprising two episodes a piece, but whose chorus remains consistent: ‘Look Away, Look Away . . .’ However, while Lemony Snicket is the most prominent and obvious character to engage in direct address, he is not the only one. At one point, Olaf (as Stephano, in episode 3) comments on his preference for longform streaming television over traditional cinema and shifts his gaze to the camera as he mentions home viewing, then grins slyly. At another point, as Lemony Snicket is narrating the children getting on a boat in the middle of a hurricane on Lake Lachrymose, he comments that concerned citizens and television executives are worried about the copycat effect on young viewers. When Violet takes three life jackets, she speaks to the camera for the first time: ‘We’re stealing these, too!’ The scene is edited in a series of highly visible cross cuts, alternating the narrator’s commentary with depictions of what the orphans are doing so that they appear to be in dialogue. When Lemony Snicket tells the viewer, ‘Do not take a sailboat that does not belong to you,’ Violet announces (to nobody in particular), ‘We’re just borrowing it. We’ll bring it back. Nobody will even know what we’re doing.’ Yet the existence of this onscreen narrator, while it effectively transmediates the omnipresent narrator of the metafictional source novels, also becomes an important vehicle for the meta-adaptation elements of this television series. Snicket refers to concerned citizens and television executives and his need to provide warnings to young viewers so as to avoid liability. Additionally, he extends explanations of screen devices which correlate to instruction on visual literacy. In one example, he discusses a flashback: ‘The scene you see behind me is called a “flashback.” That is a word which here means “taken place during the events of the last episode”’ (see Figure 5.5). At another point during episode 8, Snicket introduces another flashback: ‘Like most scenes from the past, it’s best seen in black and white.’ The following scene is then shown without color. Finally, meta-adaptation in the Netflix series occurs in an interesting way during the opening of each episode. First, old-fashioned film intertitles are presented accompanied by the sound of a film projector running, for example: The Reptile Room: Part One. This shot is followed by one of the series’ dedications by ‘Lemony Snicket’ to his lost love, Beatrice. These are provided in typed letters (appearing individually onscreen and accompanied by the sound of a typewriter typing and a carriage return).

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Figure 5.5  The narrator teaches film (Source: Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, with closed captions).

As an original content programmer, Netflix harnessed its marketing campaign for the series—which debuted on 13 January, to echo the unlucky number that dominates the number of books in the series and chapters in each book—in a self-reflexive way as well. Netflix subscribers received emails from Lemony Snicket: Please forgive this intrusive message, but I thought email was the best way to send you a dire warning about Netflix’s dreadful new show, A Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s not something you ought to view, even for a second, as you can see below. (Netflix, Personal communication 2016)

Advertisements on the Netflix site followed the same trend: ‘Dear Viewer, The world is vast and full of wonders. So, on Friday the 13th of January, please . . . watch something else.’ But, as mentioned, the Netflix series goes one step further in its selfreflexive filmicity and throws down the gauntlet to traditional cinema as well. As a relative newcomer to the world of content production, Netflix is likewise a newcomer in the awards circuit, where its early entries have won awards in various categories, bringing the rivalry between traditional cinema and new media to the fore as well. This rivalry plays out in particular during the Reptile Room episode (3), as Uncle Monty takes the children to the movies. While in The Reptile Room, the trip to the cinema with Uncle Monty (and Stephano—Count Olaf—in tow) is incidental to the plot, it is provided as a positive outing. The orphans have had an enjoyable week living with Uncle Monty before Count Olaf appeared, pretending to be the assistant Uncle Monty was expecting. The outing to see Zombies in the Snow is presented as something Monty simply wishes to do. The trip

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should have been ‘pleasant,’ and the film itself ‘was a fine film’ (80), but the siblings ‘were in no mood for cinematic entertainment’ (79–80). Stephano/Olaf ‘hogged the popcorn’ (80), and the narrator indicates that at each stage of the plot the siblings were too worried about what they could do to avert whatever Olaf was planning to enjoy themselves, or even to have a proper (final) conversation with their uncle, as Violet later realizes (95). The incident seems to serve two purposes: one to indicate that life with Uncle Monty would have been pleasant, and the other to contrast the generic simplicity of the plot of the film with the plot of the orphans’ struggles. The film follows a traditional trajectory: zombies aggress villagers; villagers find a solution; villagers and zombies celebrate May Day together in the end (81). By contrast, the novel’s final (thirteenth) chapter begins: ‘If this were a book written to entertain small children, you would know what would happen next’ (175), followed by just such a simplistic plot trajectory. The orphans’ story, by definition, does not follow this fortunate course. However, the Netflix series (episode 3) uses the cinema outing to Zombies in the Snow as part of Uncle Monty seeking coded messages in the film’s subtitles, using a spyglass/decoder to read them, indicating his participation in a secret society which is attempting to help him evade villains. At the same time, Olaf is the anti-traditional-cinema mouthpiece. When they discuss going to the movies, Olaf says: ‘In all honesty, I prefer long-form television to the movies. It’s so much more convenient to consume entertainment from the comfort of your own home.’ On a phone call to a henchman he reiterates: ‘Yes, a movie theater. Where they show movies. Yes of course it’s more convenient to watch from the comfort of your own home.’ Waiting in the car, he says: ‘Hurry up. Tick tock. Don’t want to miss the previews. And all of the excessive commercials . . .’ and then rolls his eyes. But he is not alone in presenting the negative side of traditional cinematic film viewing. At the theater there is an older woman buying her ticket who announces to the ticket seller that she is treating herself, as she needs more exciting things in her life, because her life is boring. She makes a similar comment at the snack counter: ‘I decided to buy myself some popcorn, because there is nothing exciting happening in my life at all.’ She then sits behind the group, constantly shushing them. Uncle Monty, on the other hand, indicates that ‘there’s more to a movie than the movie,’ equating it to a book that can be used in more than one way: ‘Just like a book can contain crucial secrets about the world of snakes, or it can be used to prop open a refrigerator door when you’re airing it out.’ Olaf misses the code entirely (‘Subtitles? This movie is boring already’). Klaus notices that the film is in English with subtitles

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chil dre n’s me ta - a dap t a t i o n 175 also in English, to which Monty replies ‘All the best movies have subtitles.’ The orphans are bemused by the film itself, noting ‘It was unusual,’ but the outing comprises the bulk of the third episode and brings multiple aspects of moviegoing to the foreground. The ‘Netflix versus traditional cinema’ controversy recently extended to the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, where some vociferously argued that the two Netflix films accepted for the festival should not have been given that they had not had cinematic releases in France, and the Netflix logo was booed by some audiences (Tartaglione 2017; McAlone 2017). The controversy occasioned a rule change effective 2018 that requires that—for now—films accepted for the festival must have a French release in theaters. In response to the controversy, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings referred to the company as ‘the insurgents’: ‘Sometimes the establishment is clumsy when it tries to shut out the insurgent; and then the insurgent’s role is to play that up, which we did’ (quoted in Tiffany 2017). Netflix and its defenders in the Cannes Festival debate go out of their way not to defame the genre itself—Netflix produces films, after all, and carries films by numerous other studios on their service. Instead, Netflix inserts itself into the broader debate about cinematicity, and Hastings notes he doesn’t draw a ‘firm line’ between Netflix’s original serialized television and original films, but rather: ‘we look at them more fluidly.’ As an apt expression of that fluidity, the first season of the Netflix series adaptation A Series of Unfortunate Events engages in a three-way conversation between the known source novels and the prior film, and between film as a medium generally and this adaptation’s status as long-form streaming television both similar to and distinct from feature cinematic film. That the conversation occurs in diverse ways on screen for the viewer to enjoy not only draws on the self-reflexive nature of the metafictional source novels, but also foregrounds the transmedial adaptation process; it is perhaps the quintessential confirmation of Catherine Grant’s comment that ‘There is no such thing . . . as a “secret” adaptation’ (quoted in Geraghty 2008: 3). Another way to view Netflix as an ‘insurgent,’ as Hastings calls the company, is in the subversive way in which they inject reflexivity into children’s media such as this series. Exposing the codes and conventions governing the medium’s production and reception to young audiences from within the medium itself, and from within the heart of American screen entertainment by one of the very ‘huge corporations that control the majority of American media,’ undercuts the sinister apathy ascribed to such media corporations by Timothy Shary (2005: 109) and furthers the more sophisticated work of teaching the multi-literacies required of youth in the twenty-first century.

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Notes  1. I prefer and use the more self-evident term meta-adaptation rather than Voigts-Virchow’s rather clunky if clever portmanteau and its related neologisms (‘“metadaptionist” films’ [sic, 2008: 149], for example) but this study is nevertheless indebted to his article.   2. Hajnal Király suggests something similar in a different context in his chapter ‘The Medium Strikes Back’: ‘I propose using “adaptation” for the films solving merely technical, narrative issues and “remediation” for those connecting the literary text into the actual visual tradition, both in a respectful and subversive manner, and at the same time revealing the workings of the film as medium’ (2013: 180–81). Király concludes by describing what I am arguing for meta-adaptation: ‘The curse of the impossible adaptation is lifted by the new theoretical paradigm of the medium and intermediality: The medium is no longer something to hide (by making the “sutures” invisible), but the “other” as “object of desire” and a constant source of fascination’ (Ibid.: 197).   3. A similar case is made by Christine Geraghty, who analyzes the foregrounding of media—textual and cinematic—in the film Atonement (2007) to argue it is ‘an adaptation which draws attention to its status as an adaptation by foregrounding the use of different media’ ([2009] 2014: 371). Furthermore, it is that foregrounding which makes the adaptation: ‘it is the film’s foregrounding of different media which creates the knowing audience and establishes the film’s status as an adaptation’ (Ibid.: 371).  4. In ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Film Adaptation and Media Convergence for Children,’ Karin Beeler writes that ‘The Diary of a Wimpy Kid films break the fourth wall by not only having the character address the audience but also by including a veiled reference to the adaptation process: “I always figured they’d make a movie about my life, but I didn’t think they’d start the movie here”’ (2015: 93). In my analysis, this would be simultaneously an example of breaking the fourth wall (in using direct address) and the fifth (in referencing the adaptation process).   5. Selznick further contrasts traditional book illustration with his experimental technique in Hugo as follows: ‘While some of the art IS there to illuminate the text, most of it is there to actually TELL the story’ (Selznick 2008b: 61, original emphasis). Selznick has employed this technique in later works as well; Wonderstruck (2011), in which two narratives are presented, one pictorially and the other textually, and are interwoven; and The Marvels (2015) in which two standalone stories are presented—ostensibly unconnected at the narrative level.   6. Selznick (2008b: 58): ‘The book . . . involves the history of magic and most importantly, the early history of cinema.’   7. Hugo’s appreciation for cinema is manifested by a ‘gaze of wonderment’ (North 2015: 107). As a fixer (of a broken automaton), Hugo’s restoration

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work aligns with Scorsese’s advocacy for cinema restoration and ‘cineliteracy’ (Ibid.: 98), and his arc of development is to ‘becom[e] a good observer/ spectator’ (106): ‘Hugo’s perceptual framework for viewing the world becomes how the spectator is invited to view it, too, and thus is established a sympathetic link between Hugo and spectator’ (Ibid.). The plot reunites forgotten filmmaker Méliès with his audience (Ibid.); and so too the film restores Méliès and a number of early films to a new generation and audience (Duckett 2014: 33).   8. In addition to Richardson’s descriptions of new rigs created for this film, he notes that in order to make 3-D work to meet Scorsese’s needs the team were ‘questioning old rules, finding new solutions and incorporating the cinematographer’s style into the depth space’ (quoted in Hope-Jones 2011: 58).   9. Duckett (2014: 34). Duckett lists the many films referenced in Hugo as well (Ibid.: 35). 10. He also notes the need for a ‘special binding that opens flat on every page’ (2008b: 61). 11. In ‘Beyond Words’ (2008); the author of the article is anonymous. It is a good example of the language of cinema carrying over into discussion of the novel, however, particularly as the publishing journal of this article is Reading Today. 12. Selznick (2008b: 61): ‘The French movies I watched became an important influence on the pictures in the book.’ 13. A form of the following analysis of A Series of Unfortunate Events in adaptation was previously published as a chapter in the collection Where is Adaptation? Mapping Cultures, Texts, and Contexts, edited by Casie Hermansson and Janet Zepernick (2018). 14. Russell (2010: 40n.) quoting McCallum, ‘Very Advanced Texts: Metafictions and Experimental Work’ in Understanding Children’s Literature, Peter Hunt (ed.), New York: Routledge, 1999: 138–50. 15. Butt comments that ‘it is the narrative rather than the content of their message that is . . . the appeal’ (2003: 285). 16. The series’ author, Daniel Handler, was involved in the screenwriting process of the 2004 film at an early stage before a replacement was hired. He provided commentary on the DVD with the film director Brad Silberling. He is also one of the Executive Producers of the Netflix series, provides a cameo on screen in one episode, and is credited with some of the music. The author thus has a demonstrated relationship with both adaptations. 17. Kümmerling-Meibauer’s dual theses in her article on this phenomenon are that metafilmic awareness is an important skill in young viewers for multiple literacies, and that it has not been sufficiently studied to-date.

Epilogue

This study ends where it began, with the particularities of the children’s context when it comes to considering metafiction, transmediation of metafiction 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. All metafiction reflects on itself: the medium and its methods, and renders the reading process opaque. All metafiction requires (at least) double reading. One of the many paradoxes of this in the context of children’s literature is that it presupposes a level of literacy and literateness often not accorded to the developing reader. While the strategies and devices of children’s metafiction have almost everything in common with metafiction for adult readers, yet the child reader presupposed by such texts revolutionizes the picture. Children’s genres have particular historical associations with metafictional genres, which in turn have strong associations with the pedagogy of literacy. The child reader is not only presupposed by metafiction but constructed by it: metafiction is didactic and prescriptive as much as it is playful and empowering. The revelatory and liberating purpose of children’s metafiction is inherently radical. In Christine Wilkie-Stibbs’ words, ‘It brings to them a gradual understanding of how they are being (and have been) textually constructed in and by this intertextual playground’ (2005: 177). And while the effects of such liberation might be fleeting or illusory—the self-actualized reader is still at the mercy of the powerful text and its (adult) author—yet the invitation to readers to become literate and even to assume the mantle of authorship and their own power persists. Such is the genre of sourcetext for the adaptations considered here. Children’s screen media themselves share many of the same tensions and paradoxes as children’s literature, as well as some of the same latent or overt prejudices against them. Issues of definition complicate ­understanding.

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e pilo gue 179 They are riven by the same paradoxes of production and reception: they prescribe even as they presuppose the young viewer; they are generated by adults and adults often serve as gatekeepers to the reception of the media as well. In large part due to these varied contexts which are both unique and central to children’s media, expectations for screen adaptations of children’s metafictions have their own particular characteristics as well. There is demonstrably a greater expectation of fidelity—a close and even ‘faithful’ adaptation of the original work—in such transmediations. Pedagogical expectations for metafiction and their bookish features come to bear on the adaptation as well; there is a sense that such films should laud or even teach the books they adapt. Long-standing skepticism toward screen media as rivals for literary texts is also heightened in the children’s contexts. ‘Moral panic’ exerts a strong influence on adaptation contexts with fears that a rise in screen media correlates to a decline in textual literacies. And yet there is a head-on collision in these cases of adaptation of children’s metafictions between pressures to close (and faithful) adaptation, and strong challenges to transmediating the meta-referential form that defines the sourcetext. Metafiction reflects on itself. In transmediation, the closest ‘equivalent’ is metafilm. Yet, paradoxically, metafilm by reflecting on the medium and processes of film actually may function in opposition to equivalence, furthering the rivalry between the media. Metafilm teaches visual literacy and film literateness; it features similar didactic, subversive, and empowering features but does so by focusing instead on screen media. By examining the interpretant of a film adaptation in relation to books and bookishness in general, as well as to the sourcetext it adapts in particular, the stance of a film toward the medium it adapts can be inferred. By adapting a meta-referential work, the adaptation perforce engages in a heightened transmedial dialogue. In addition to the commonplace intermedial dialogue between adaptation and source, the media themselves are now part of the conversation. I have identified three main ways in which these adaptations transmediate children’s metafiction. In the first, they film the diegesis, or story, alone. Since children’s metafictions often feature bookishness in a variety of forms—reader and writer characters, libraries and bookstores as settings, and books as important plot drivers—the results are often very ‘bookish’ films. There is a stable grammar of film types—from characters in original films that clearly derive from this tradition to the very grammar of shots and editing used to show transitions between diegetic levels—that emerges through these films. Young viewers develop a lexicon of the ways film tells a ‘book story’ whether the film is an adaptation or not.

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The second way, often in combination with the first, is to adapt the ‘meta-referential’ level of the sourcetext as well. In this way, a film adaptation performs an equivalence of the double reception experience of metafiction: the film and the viewing experience are rendered opaque for the young viewer. Examples of metafilm—not limited to adaptations, or to adaptations of metafiction—also abound in children’s film and follow similar patterns as metafiction. Either the film thematizes filmicity and spectatorship or it draws attention to some aspect of its style, or both. Children’s metafilms evince similar sophistication and variety as do children’s metafictions. In the third way, which is also not mutually exclusive to the previous two, children’s film adaptations may self-referentially perform metaadaptation. By virtue of foregrounding the intermedial relationship or by referencing adaptation or its own adapted status, such meta-adaptations implicitly or explicitly reflect on transmediation itself. As such, metaadaptation may not be an obvious equivalent for metafiction (such as metafilm is) but may extrapolate some of the prized features of metafiction for adaptation. Meta-adaptations teach media and multi-literacies; they render transmediation opaque. Adaptation is integral to how stories may be played with, changed, and retold. Linda Hutcheon notes that ‘Children’s literature is, in a way, all about adaptation’ (2008: 174) and that may be why it has ‘even a special relationship with adaptation, . . . which may explain why it is so frequently [remediated]’ (Ibid.: 172). The many ascribed benefits to the child reader of metafiction—empowerment, agency, enhanced literacy and literateness, code switching and deconstruction—may all be ascribed also to meta-adaptation. The best adapted expression of children’s metafiction may not be children’s metafilm, a medium-specific ‘equivalent,’ but rather meta-adaptation: a transcendent revelation of the adaptive processes at work. In the context of adaptations, particularly children’s adaptations, and interactivity, Kyle Meikle asks ‘what [can] adaptations do that other texts can’t’? and ‘What sorts of invitations do adaptations, as a particular kind of text, extend to their audiences?’ (2017: 545). One thing adaptations do that other texts can’t is to reflect on themselves—to function as metaadaptations. And in the case of all meta-referential works, and children’s in particular, the invitation thereby extended is to play—with didactic purpose. The prime lesson of all metafiction is that texts are constructed using codes and conventions that are infinitely plural and recombinable. Adaptations contain within themselves the potentiality for their own future adaptation as well. Poushali Bhadury writes that ‘metaleptic literary texts’

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as the metafictions discussed in this study have been, ‘position themselves in a certain way so as to encapsulate and reflect, even within the way their narratives are structured, the possibility of later forms of remediation.’1 As Robyn McCallum says of fairy tale retellings: ‘Such engagement may potentially expand an audience’s knowledge of what stories are like, how they work, and how they might be played with, changed, and retold, and potentially how new stories might be written’ (2008: 191). Similarly, Don Philpot says of children’s metafiction: ‘When readers understand how meaning is made, they themselves become conscious meaning-makers capable of transforming not only their views of the world but the world itself ’ (2005: 156–57). Meta-referential media for children play a vital role in teaching medium literacy. It seems that select adaptations of children’s metafictions extend this role to multi-media literacy, and to the creative and subversive potentialities of adaptation. And the invitation to children to adapt—existing works, themselves, and the world around them—is perhaps the most ­profound of all.

Note 1. Bhadury (2013: np) in the context of Inkheart, and The Neverending Story.

Works Cited

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Index

A Was an Archer, 18 abecedaria, 18, 28, 37 Abbott, H. Porter, 57 Abbott, Tony, 29–30, 32 Academy Award, 156, 162; see also Motion Picture Academy Association (MPAA) Alice in Wonderland (1933), 70 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 19, 25, 59 Alphabet of Thorn, 32 Amelia’s Notebook, 31n Andersen, Hans Christian, 159 Antsey, Michèle, 34–5 appropriation, 26, 66, 70, 126, 139, 140 Atkinson, Paul, 8 Atwood, Margaret, 42–3 Austin, Sara, 165 Babington, Bruce, 52n, 53 Bacchilega, Cristina, 12 Barbe Bleue (Blue beard, 1901), 56 Barrie, J. M., 25, 59, 77–8, 83 Barshaw, Ruth McNally, 30 Barthes, Roland, 40 Baum, Frank L., 85 Bayer, Gerd, 69n Beauty and the Beast (1991), 95–7, 101, 103, 159 Beauty and the Beast (2017), 96–7, 103 Beja, Morris, 14 bildungsroman, 9, 29, 30, 84 Black, Holly, 5, 145, 146 Blackford, Holly, 105n, 109–10, 114n Blue Beard see Barbe bleue Bluestone, George, ix, 19n, 58 Boehm, Beth Ann, 18, 22–3, 34, 39 Bolt, 124, 128–9 Book of Lost Things, The, 41–2

Book Thief, The, 8, 29 bookishness, 3, 4–5, 9, 13, 30, 63–4, 70, 76–7, 82, 95–6, 98, 104, 115, 147, 159–60, 163–4, 166, 179–80 Boundin’, 132–3 Bradford, Clare, 45 Breakfast Club, The, 131 Brown, Noel, 52, 53 Buchbinder, David, 60 Buckley, Michael, 32n Bullen, Elizabeth E., 165 Bunce, Elizabeth C., 32n Cahir, Linda Costanzo, 69 Caldecott Medal, 155, 157, 162 Captain Underpants, 11, 37 Carle, Eric, 28 Carroll, Lewis, 59, 70 Cartmell, Deborah, 58, 59, 60, 70, 58n, 106n, 126n Cendrillon (1899), 56 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 58 Charlotte’s Web, 65 Chatman, Seymour, 75n Child, Lauren, 28 Choose Your Own Adventure, 25 Chronicles of Narnia, The, 63–4; see also The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Cinderella, 33, 85; see also Cendrillon cinematicity, 68, 71, 148, 156, 161–2, 173, 175, 180 Citizen Kane, 136 Clüver, Claus, 64n Coats, Karen, 40 Cock and Bull Story, A, 152 Cohn, Dorrit, 19–20 Colfer, Chris, 32n

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inde x 201 Collins, Suzanne, 55 Comenius, John Amos, 18 Connolly, John, 41–2 Cornell, Julian, 54–5 Cracked Classics series, 29, 32 Curse Dark as Gold, A, 32n Dahl, Roald, 58, 82–3 Dällenbach, Lucien, ix–x Darton, F. J. Harvey, 37n David Copperfield, 160 Derrida, Jacques, 31 Diary of a Wimpy Kid, 30, 32n, 176 DiCamillo, Kate, 29, 32 Dickens, Charles, 44 Diehl, Karen, 61n Disney, 52, 59n, 70, 81, 83, 92, 95–6, 130–1, 134–5, 159 ‘Disney on Disney,’ 128–9, 154 DiTerlizzi, Tony, 5, 145–7 Divergent series, 55 Dora the Explorer, 78 Dork Diaries series, 30–1, 32n Doughty, Amie, 9–12, 21n, 42, 149 Dragon in the Library, The, 32 DreamWorks, 132 Dresang, Eliza, 34, 44–5 Driscoll, Catherine, 52n Duane, Diane, 32 Eager, Edward, 33 early readers, 27–9 Easy A, 131 Ebert, Roger, 122, 166–7 Eidsvik, Charles, 8, 59 ekphrasis, 4, 6, 12–13, 61, 64–9, 77, 86, 102–4, 124, 126, 150, 153, 154–5, 156 Ella Enchanted, 33 Ellie McDoodle Diaries series, 30 Elliott, Kamilla, 12–13 Ende, Michael, 32, 93 Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library, 32 Exorcist, The, 131n Fahrenheit 451, 142 family film, 52–3, 55–6, 125

Fantastic Mr. Fox, 82–3 Farrell, Maureen A., 12, 144 Fellowship of the Ring, The (2001), 135–6 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 131–2 filmicity see cinematicity Frindle, 24–5 Funke, Cornelia, 5, 11, 29, 32, 33, 76n, 91n, 141–5 Gaiman, Neil, 30 Gass, William, H. 17, 71 Genette, Gérard, x, 19–20 Geraghty, Christine, 51, 67, 153n, 175 Giver, The, 32, 99–100 Goldilocks, 28 Goldman, William, 33, 55n, 103–4 Goldstone, Bette, 24, 44 gothic, 94 Goudge, Elizabeth, 66–7 Grabenstein, Chris, 32, 32n Grant, Catherine, 68, 175 Graveyard Book, The, 30 Great Train Robbery, The, 78n Grenby, M. O., 18n, 56 Handmaid’s Tale, The, 42–3 Handler, Daniel, 83–4, 101, 137, 155, 163, 165, 166n Hansel and Gretel, 85 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 5, 88, 97–8, 100–1, 105–20 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 89, 105n Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, 5, 34, 105–5, 114–20 Hauthal, Janine, 64n, 69, 70–1 Havoc, 33 Hermansson, Casie, 57n, 77n Hintz, Carrie, 89 Hobbit, or There and Back Again, The, 12, 99 Holiday Romance, 44 Hollywood, 52, 128, 131n ‘Hollywood on Hollywood,’ 124, 154 Hoodwinked!, 32n, 131, 136, 154 Hugo, 6–7, 140–1, 154–62; see also The Invention of Hugo Cabret Hunger Games, The, series 55, 131

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Hunt, Peter, 7 Hunt for the Wilderpeople, The, 80, 82, 135–6; see also Wild Pork and Watercress Hurst, Rochelle, 162 Hutcheon, Linda Narcissistic Narrative, 17–19, 22, 25n, 29, 40, 41 Theory of Adaptation, 51, 59n, 180 iCarly, 131 Igraine the Brave, 33 Inkdeath, 11, 142 Inkheart, 4, 5, 6, 11–12, 32, 33, 39, 66, 76, 85, 86–8, 90, 91–2, 94, 101–2, 104, 126, 138, 140, 141–5 Inkspell, 142 intermediality as adaptation conversation 4, 5, 52n, 58, 154–5, 157, 161, 179 foregrounding 7, 65, 140, 153n, 162, 170, 180 hybridity and 147, 156, 162 reversed in transmediation 64–5, 148, 155–7, 166–7, 170 tensions in 2–3, 5, 126, 139, 141, 145, 171 interpretant, 3–4, 5, 6–7, 65–68, 76, 102–3, 126, 140, 153, 159–60, 161, 162, 179 intramediality reversed in transmediation 64–5, 155–7, 167 self-reflexivity of 6, 148, 150, 161, 166 Invention of Hugo Cabret, The, 6, 8, 140–1, 154–62 Jackson, Peter, 135 Jane Eyre, 20, 32, 55 Jungle Book, The (1967), 81, 92 Kane Chronicles series, 10 Kinney, Jeff, 31 Király, Hajnal, 64, 153n Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina, 52n, 54, 168 kunstlerroman, 5, 103–4, 126, 140

Land of Stories series, 32n Last Action Hero, 56, 125, 130–1 Lefebvre, Benjamin, 59n Leitch, Thomas, 1, 2, 3, 14, 64n Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), 154, 162–3, 166–70; see also A Series of Unfortunate Events Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017–), 154, 162–3, 171–5; see also A Series of Unfortunate Events Levine, Gail Carson, 33, 88n Lewis, C. S., 59, 63–4 Lewis, David, 27, 38, 45 Libyrinth, 32 Life of Brian, 56 Lilo and Stitch, 130 Limoges, Jean-Marc, 69n Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The, 20, 59, 63–4, 69 Lion King, 128–30, 131 Little Pretty Pocket Book Intended for the Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly, 36–7 Little Red Riding Hood, 32n, 104, 131, 154 Little White Horse, 66–7 Little Women, 59, 95n Lord of the Rings, The, 143 Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), 135–6 Lowry, Lois, 32, 99 Lumière, 157 McCallum, Robyn, 34, 42, 45, 181 McFarlane, Brian, 59 Mackey, Margaret, 24n, 34–5, 37, 45, 163 McKillip, Patricia A., 32 McLuhan, Marshall, 58 Magic Treehouse series, 29 Malice, 33 Mallan, Kerry, 45 Man with a Movie Camera, 121 Mayne, Judith S., 13 Meikle, Kyle, 180 Méliès, Georges, 56, 78n, 121, 156–7, 161 metalepsis, 4–5, 19–20, 39, 20n, 70, 80, 82, 84–5, 89, 91–2, 94, 104, 91n, 125, 136–8, 142, 145, 180–1

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inde x 203 Meyer, Stephanie, 55 mise en abyme, 19–20, 26, 89, 125n, 142 mise en scène, 3, 115, 124, 135, 169 Monster at the End of This Book, The, 27 Monsters, Inc., 68 Motion Picture Academy Association (MPAA), 55, 56n Morris, Tim, 54

Princess Bride, The (1973), 8, 33, 55, 58, 66, 89, 103–4, 142 Princess Bride, The (1987), 8, 55, 58, 66, 89, 90, 103–4, 136, 137 Pullman, Philip, 61 Purple Rose of Cairo, The, 125, 130 Pygmalion and Galatea (Pygmalion et Galathée), 78n

Name of this Book is Secret, The, 10 National Book Award, 162 Nel, Philip, 119 Nelson, Claudia, 16, 17, 21, 26, 39, 40, 94 Nesbit, Edith, 44 Netflix, 6, 79, 81, 83–4, 154, 155, 162–3, 166, 171–5 Neverending Story, The, 4, 7, 8, 19, 20, 32, 66, 84, 86–7, 89, 93, 94, 99, 102, 138, 142 Newbery, John, 36–7 Newbery Award (The John Newbery Medal), 99 Nikolajeva, Maria, 7, 13, 43, 44–5 Ninja Librarians series, 32 Nodelman, Perry, 21, 44 North, Pearl, 32 Not Another Teen Movie, 131, 135 Nöth, Winfried, 18n, 124

Radical Change, 35, 44 Rashomon, 136 Richardson, Robert, 156 Riffaterre, Michael, 65–7 Riordan, Rick, 10–11 Rose, Jacqueline, 40, 56 Rowling, J. K., 5, 29, 59, 115, 116–17, 119–20 Rump: The True Story of Rumpelstiltskin, 25, 32n Rumpelstiltskin, 25, 32n Russell, Danielle, 163, 165 Russell, Rachel Renée, 30

Orbis Pictus, 18 Osborne, Mary Pope, 29 Over the Hedge, 132, 136 Pagemaster, The, 9, 32, 85, 89, 98–90 Pantaleo, Sylvia, 23–4, 25–6, 34–5, 45 Parry, Becky, 77, 127, 131 Peirce, Charles, 4, 65 Percy Jackson series, 10 Peter Pan, 77n, 85, 130, 142 Peter and Wendy, 25, 59, 77, 83 Peter Pan (1924), 77–8 Peter Pan (2003), 83, 125, 134–5 Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, 77 Philpot, Don K., 23, 38, 181 picturebooks, 23, 26–9, 30, 34, 40, 41, 43, 45, 58 Pilkey, Dave, 37

Sanders, Joe Sutliff, 10–11, 38–9, 40, 42 Sanders, Julie, 66, 126, 140 Scary Movie, 131 Scieszka, Jon, 27n Scorsese, Martin, 6, 154, 156–7, 158–9, 161–2 Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, 30 Secret Garden, 60n Secret of Moonacre, 20, 66–7, 88, 89, 93, 102 Secret series, The, 163 Selznick, Brian, 6, 8, 155–9, 161–2 Semenza, Greg Colón, 125, 153 Series of Unfortunate Events, A, 155, 162–75 Bad Beginning, The, 101–2, 163, 164 Miserable Mill, The, 163, 164 Reptile Room, The, 137, 164, 169, 172, 173–4 Wide Window, The, 164, 169 Sesame Street, 27 Seven-Day Magic, 33 Shary, Timothy, 51, 52, 54, 55n, 56, 61n, 153, 175 Sherlock Jr., 78n

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Shrek, 12, 32n, 81–2, 131 Simon’s Book, 27–8 Siska, William C., 19n, 131n Sisters Grimm series, 32n Snow White, 131 So You Want to be a Wizard, 32, 33 Spiderwick Chronicles, The, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 30, 33–4, 85–6, 88, 89, 90–1, 93, 99, 101, 102, 126, 140, 141, 145–50 Stahl, John Daniel, 50n Stam, Robert, 19n, 66, 69n, 76n, 124, 126, 136 Stewart, Garrett, 13, 94 Story of the Treasure Seekers, The, 44 Street, Douglas, 51, 53, 56–7, 59 Sutherland-Smith, Wendy, 35, 44–5 Sutton, Roger, 43 Tale of Despereaux, The, 4, 12, 29, 32, 84, 89, 99, 101, 103, 133–4 Teen Beach Movie, 131n Tolkien, J. R. R., 12, 98–9 Tom Sawyer, 142 Tosi, Laura, 37 Townsend, Sue, 30 Toy Story, 56, 131n, 132 Train Arrives in the Station, 157 Trapped in Transylvania: The Adventures of Dracula, 30–1 Tribunella, Eric L., 89

Trip to the Moon, 161 Trites, Roberta Seelinger, 40–1 Truman Show, The, 128 Twilight series, 55 Very Hungry Caterpillar, The, 28 Voigts-Virchow, Eckart, 51, 152 Waititi, Taika, 80, 135 Waugh Patricia, 17, 18, 24, 38–40 Welles, Orson, 136 Whelehan, Imelda, 70, 106n, 126n Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, 68 Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Book?, 28 Wild Pork and Watercress, 80 Willems, Mo, 28–9 Wilkie-Stibbs, Christine, 178 Winnie the Pooh, 142 Wizard of Oz, The, 85 Wizard’s Hall, 33 Wojcik-Andrews, Ian, 53, 56, 127, 131n Wolf, Werner, 69n, 124 Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 62 Wonderstruck, 156n Wooding, Chris, 33 Yolen, Jane, 33 Zipes, Jack, 12, 106 Zusak, Markus, 29