Children's Literature on Film: Through the Audiovisual Era to the Age of Telecommunications

Storytelling, a tradition that may be as old as humanity, has slowly evolved from an oral art into a primarily visual one. The late medieval invention of movable type allowed written stories to reach large audiences through printed books. With the twentieth-century development of offset lithography, new literary and graphic techniques enabled writers to tell their stories through a sophisticated interaction of text and pictures. Storytelling through motion pictures, filmstrips, recordings, and other audiovisual media represents simply the most recent refinements in the tradition. And yet the use of film to tell children's stories has received widespread pedagogical attention and has recently generated controversy among child psychologists.

The history of filmed adaptations of children's books in America effectively began in 1950. By that date Disney Studios had adapted as short motion pictures three outstanding picture books for children: Little House by Virginia Lee Burton, Hardie Gramatky's Little Toot, and Robert Lawson's Ferdinand the Bull. These films, intended for audiences of adults as well as children and destined for commercial theaters, bore an unmistakable Disney stamp; they consistently altered the story lines and distorted the imaginative focus of the original picture books.

The first effort to transpose literature for children to the screen with fidelity both to the written text and the illustrations came in 1952, when United Productions of America filmed Ludwig Bemelman's Madeline. Although it was an artistic success, this film failed to earn the profits necessary in the commercial theater. Hence, no sustained production program developed from this initial effort.

More by accident than by design, my work in the early 1950s developed in a different direction. Like many young filmmakers in those days, I had cut my teeth making short pedagogical films. These inexpensive films could get by on useful content in spite of obvious technological deficiencies. However, they required live action; the astronomical cost of animation ruled out its use except for theatrical films or high-budget, commercially sponsored productions.

Intrigued by the idea of creating storytelling films for children, I was forced to find a new format. Unlike my West Coast predecessors, I wanted to use my skill as a filmmaker primarily to communicate the contents of books to children, rather than using the books as the starting point for my own creations. Educators had led me to picture books as source material, admonishing me to keep the film like the original so that youngsters would recognize and enjoy the book again once they had seen the film. While searching for appropriate books, I studied the pictures and read the texts aloud to hear how the language would sound as a voice track for film. Though I had not previously been a dramatic reader, I found myself caught up in this activity, and I resolved to preserve the integrity of the books by remaining as faithful to the texts as possible in my films.

After months of trial and error, I devised what is called the "iconographic" cinema technique—the method of imparting an illusion of motion to still pictures through camera movement on the pictures, aided by careful juxtaposition of sound. For the first time, a book for three-to-eight-year-old children was adapted into a film for the same age group.

With no established market for such films, I had only the experience of book publishers to rely on. I assumed that motion pictures which faithfully reproduced books like Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey or Millions of Cats by Wanda Gag—both of which had been reissued almost every year since their initial publication—would achieve audience acceptance. And I was right. Despite some scathing attacks by filmmakers, these early iconographie films proved to be successful. Educators praised them for bringing children's books to life, for providing motivation for children to read, and even for creating a new film literature for children. Libraries with circulating collections eagerly bought them. When ample funds became available to schools through the National Defense Education Act in 1960, teachers acquired them to interest...