One of the main things I really appreciate about adaptations is changing but still being able to keep the essence alive. One of the other main things I like about adaption would be the influence, inspiration and imagination behind it. I feel like its a main part of a successful adaptation.
Adaptations about “friends”.
I had thought about an adaptation for the sitcom “Friends” which mainly focused on one character Phoebe Buffay.
The sitcom was based on 6 good friends. The basic theory was that all the characters are mainly seen in a coffee shop “Central Perk” and phoebe was sat outside the coffee shop doped up on crack staring into the window looking at the group (chandler, joey, Rachel, Monica and ross) and dreaming about being in that friendship group.
Friends was a live action sitcom that lasted for 10 years. It was based in Manhatten New York.
Puss In Boots.
One of the other adaptations I could think of off the top of my head was “Puss In Boots”. That its self is an adaptation from the Shrek franchise but when looking into the film I saw classic fairy tale characters such as Hansel and Gretel `and humpty dumpty and many more.
I mean from the film poster alone you can see that there’s a reference to jack and the beanstalk and you can see humpty dumpty in the bottom right hand corner.
Puss in Boots was released in 2011
Peter and the Wolf.
One of a not so famous one is Peter and the wolf – Serge Prokofiev https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcisCR3-OFU
“Peter, a Young Pioneer, lives at his grandfather’s home in a forest clearing. One day, Peter goes out into the clearing, leaving the garden gate open, and the duck that lives in the yard takes the opportunity to go swimming in a pond nearby. The duck starts arguing with a little bird (“What kind of bird are you if you can’t fly?” – “What kind of bird are you if you can’t swim?”). Peter’s pet cat stalks them quietly, and the bird—warned by Peter—flies to safety in a tall tree while the duck swims to safety in the middle of the pond.
Peter’s grandfather scolds him for being outside in the meadow alone (“Suppose a wolf came out of the forest?”), and, when he defies him, saying: “Boys like me are not afraid of wolves”, his grandfather takes him back into the house and locks the gate. Soon afterwards “a big, grey wolf” does indeed come out of the forest. The cat quickly climbs into a tree, but the duck, who has jumped out of the pond, is chased, overtaken, and swallowed by the wolf.
Peter fetches a rope and climbs over the garden wall into the tree. He asks the bird to fly around the wolf’s head to distract him, while he lowers a noose and catches the wolf by his tail. The wolf struggles to get free, but Peter ties the rope to the tree and the noose only gets tighter.
Some hunters, who have been tracking the wolf, come out of the forest ready to shoot, but Peter gets them to help him take the wolf to a zoo in a victory parade (the piece was first performed for an audience of Young Pioneers during May Day celebrations) that includes himself, the bird, the hunters leading the wolf, the cat, and grumpy grumbling Grandfather (“What if Peter hadn’t caught the wolf? What then?”)
In the story’s ending, the listener is told: “If you listen very carefully, you’ll hear the duck quacking inside the wolf’s belly, because the wolf in his hurry had swallowed her alive.”.
Wife of Bath.
This tale was a reflection of attitudes, characters and social values of the day. The tales are told by a group of pilgrims riding from London to Canterbury and are told to each other to entertain them on the journey.
The wife of Bath is a tale amongst other 24 stories which appear in the “The Canterbury Tales” by Geoffrey Chaucer. Before the Wife of Bath tells her tale, she offers in a long prologue a condemnation of celibacy and a lusty account of her five marriages. It is for this prologue that her tale is perhaps best known.
The basic run down is as follows:
A knight is accused of rape and when in court in front of the Queen he is given a plea, that his life would be spared in a year if he is able to find out what women desire the most. So of he goes to find out and during his time searching he comes across 24 dancing beautiful young ladies which disappear and an old ugly hag witch is left there instead who promises him the answer to save his life if he does the first thing that she askes of him. The answer is that is “Maistrie” or sovereignty over men.
When the time came for the knight to appear back in court he gives his answer which appears to be true and hence forth his life is saved but still has to keep his promise. When the witch confronts the knight with the demand to be wed to him. As the story proceeds the knight and the witch are wed but when in bed she asked him if he would wish her ugly yet faithful or beautiful and faithless. In which he insisted that the choice would be hers. This concession of her mastery restores her youth and beauty and then they lived happily ever after.
The story is a version of the Arthurian romance “The wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell” and is similar to one of the tales in the 14th-century “Confessio amantis” by John Gower.
The film was adapted and drawn by Joanna Quinn. The style of the animation is beyond beautiful, the flow of the art and the illustrations just feed the story. It maintains the plot throughout and even skips some of the dialogue and changes it into a visual representation but overall it is a powerful film that portrays the story brilliantly and beautifully.
Disney.
I am not going to go into details as much as I would like because I would like to try and step away from it. But one thing I will say is that, MAJORITY if not ALL of Disney’s films are an adaptation of something:
- Mulan- Chinese Legend
- The little mermaid- Hans Christian Andersen
- Cinderella- An old folks tale told from back in ancient Greece (Obviously with the timeline being different) the story had changed and been adapted into the different historical periods and lifestyles.
- Aladdin- The thief and the cobbler
And they are only a few. Even the lesser known films such as “The black cauldron” are an adaptation of Welsh mythology.
Disney even went to the effort of adapting their own films into tv shows.
The little mermaid is one that I remember clearly, that was turned into a tv show, Beauty and the beast was changed into a live action with Belle telling stories to children.
Franz Kafka.
This one isn’t really a massive adaption but it is an animation based of his documented life which he wrote about in his diary.
Poitr Dumala represented by his short film Franz Kafka and his biography of the famous Czech writer who was based in the 20th century.
“To recreate the figure of the Czech author, the Polish animator uses what is usually called in literature lateral narration, in which so skilled were Conrad and Faulkner. A technique that consists of avoiding the most striking aspects of history, those in which bad writers would fall preoccupied with attracting the public’s easy applause, and entertaining themselves in the secondary and apparently banal aspects, but with that look away, get increase realism, since we, in our daily experience, often ignore what is happening around us, thus increasing the reader’s interest, forcing him to compose the complete picture with incomplete and even erroneous data.
Dumala structures his short in small pictures, in which a temporary introduces a scene, whose meaning is not explained to us, whose vision is hindered by interposed objects, as if we were spies of the intimacy of the protagonists, and that end without reaching a conclusion, but among those who, fleetingly, interspersed images that refer to the stories and novels that, arriving at a conclusion, but among those who, fleetingly, interspersed images that refer to the stories and novels that, supposedly, should be writing Kaffa, in that period. A thematic approach that requires the viewer to have a prior knowledge of the life and work of Kafka, in order to discover the many hidden references, but that does not alienate the not very informed viewer, thanks to its formal rigor.
In effect, that way of narrating without narrating is intriguing enough for a spectator to ask himself or herself about the writer and investigate his work, a process in which he will find that the climate represented in the short is a recreation of the oppressive and disturbing atmosphere of the stories and novels by Kafka. A world ruled by rules foreign to the viewer and the protagonist, but whose absurdity is assumed without problems by the rest of the human beings who populate it, who never question their validity or justice. A vital absurdity, which is reflected in the disconnection and inconclusivity of the presented scenes, reinforced by the black and white asphyxiating that dominates the short film, from which the profiles of the characters that wander through their spaces, always on the verge of disappearing, hardly emerge. and vanish in him.
An oppressive atmosphere that is also a product of the technique used, Dumala’s personal invention and another way to note in a way, such as animation, in which its creators seem to compete to find new modes of expression. It is simply that the Polish animator uses one of the forms of destructive animation, in this case modeling on plaster and modifying that base in each plane, in order to create the movement while destroying the support in which it is embodied”
https://encirculos.blogspot.com/2011/01/100-as-xliv-franz-kafka-1991-piotr.html
The Old man and the Sea.
The Old Man and the Sea was a short story created by Ernest Hemingway and it was THE last major piece of work for him.
The story is simple, it is about an old man who sets of to catch a fish and catches a giant one instead. The fish as caught in the Cuban waters, only to have the fish devoured by sharks. The man feels defeated and heads on home with the fish’s skeleton attached to the boat.
I found out that this animation is made by using oil paint on glass. It was created by a guy called Alexander Petrov.
The construction of the film and the way the visuals are portrayed are fantastic. The way that the animation tells the story is fantastic. It keeps the essence of the story (I had watched the film without sound and it gave me goosebumps) I still have to watch the film with music on to be able to get a full feel for the story. But for now I think that this is a brilliant adaption and a very beautiful animation.
“I started early…”
I started early is a poem written by Emily Dickinson. and the full poem is below.
The Haunting of Hill House.
The haunting of Hill House is a 1953 gothic horror book written by Shirley Jackson which has also been adapted into a 10 part series on Netflix which has been directed by Mike Flanagan (oculus and Ouija: origins of evil). However the Netflix version is the 3rd live action attempt at the book and to say that this one has actually done a good job at it.
The adaptation had been praised by the king of horror himself Stephen King.
2nd Year Animation 