Sources: Anne Phillips, 785-532-2167, annek@k-state.edu;
and Philip Nel, 785-532-2165, philnel@k-state.edu
http://www.k-state.edu/english/nelp/index.html
News release prepared by: Andy Badeker, 785-532-6415, abadeker@k-state.edu
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
K-STATE PROFESSORS EXAMINE PERILS OF ADAPTING CHILDREN'S LITERATURE TO FILM
MANHATTAN -- Nancy Drew has had many adventures in her perennially teenage career, but she never strutted her retro style along Beverly Hills' Rodeo Drive. Until now.
Alterations such as those in the current "Nancy Drew" movie are inevitable when classic children's books become films, says Anne Phillips. She is an associate professor of English at Kansas State University, where she will teach a graduate seminar this fall on the hazards of adapting children's literature.
Phillips might question the movie's L.A. location or its logic of having Nancy's dead mother motivate the girl's sleuthing. But she likes that the film Nancy still "rights wrongs about differences in economic status."
"That's the thing that's most true to the series," Phillips said. "In the film, she and her father actually talk about how important it is to help people."
Also true to books is the discovery of a secret passage behind a door hidden in the paneling. "My 7-year-old turned to me in the theater and said, 'This is what I really like,'" Phillips said.
Children enjoy the possibility "that adventure is just waiting right there for you," she said.
But a film can remain too true to its source, according to Philip Nel, an associate professor of English who has studied the Harry Potter phenomenon. In an as-yet-unpublished paper, "Lost in Translation? Harry Potter, From Page to Screen," Nel criticizes director Chris Columbus' versions of the first two tomes, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets."
"The attempt to be completely faithful hampers those first two films," Nel writes. "Recognition of the impossibility of being completely faithful liberates the second two," which were directed by Alfonso Cuaron and Mike Newell.
The later directors "seem keenly aware of the impossibility of fidelity," Nel writes. "Each director's willingness to bring his own creative vision to the project makes 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban' and 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire' more successful adaptations than either of their predecessors."
Phillips finds herself most sensitive to Hollywood's tendency to enlarge adult roles in stories about and for children.
"The problem is, when you're making a big-budget movie and you cast Maggie Smith in 'The Secret Garden,' you give her a much bigger role than she had in the book," Phillips said.
Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 book is about a spoiled, sickly girl, Mary Lennox, and Mrs. Medlock is just one of many characters she encounters. Until Smith became Mrs. Medlock in the 1993 film.
"You privilege the adult world over the kids' world," Phillips said.
Nel's paper compares adaptation to translation: The job is to preserve the intent of the original, not necessarily its events.
That's why Phillips was a bit irritated during her recent trip to the multiplex.
"In the movie, Nancy's father tells her to stop solving mysteries," Phillips said. "That couldn't be more wrong. Carson Drew in the books would never ask her to not solve a mystery."
Because he and his daughter have such a close connection, he's always very proud and supportive of Nancy's sleuthing in the books, Phillips said.
But her irritation was mild. Phillips points out that film adaptations aren't the only culprits when it comes to diluting the appeal of an original.
Nancy Drew lost some of her spunk in 1950s reissues of the books, Phillips said. For example, instead of piloting her own roadster to pursue the villains of "The Secret of the Old Clock," as she did in the 1930 first edition, an older and more ladylike Nancy scoots over and lets the nice highway patrolman do the driving.