Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood: Transforming Children’s Literature into Film by Robyn McCallum (review)

Robyn McCallum’s monograph Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood: Transforming Children’s Literature into Film is an exciting contribution to the area of adaptation studies. Although, as McCallum notes in her introduction, “texts produced for children and teenagers are late to arrive to the ballroom of film and adaptation studies” (3), the twenty-first century nevertheless has witnessed an increasing number of excellent studies of film adaptations of children’s literature. To this end, McCallum’s book productively calls attention to how film adaptations variously remain faithful to, distort, or resist the themes and underpinnings of both classic and lesser-known works of children’s literature. The focus of her book, then, is how key elements of ideology, such as gender politics, culture wars, and notions of childhood, migrate to the new medium of film and undergo changes that are imposed by different social factors such as dominant “Hollywood aesthetic” and national identity.

The book’s opening chapter recounts the historical development of adaptation studies by calling attention to the pioneering works of Linda Hutcheon, Brian McFarlane, Robert Stam, Thomas Leitch, James Naremore, and other scholars. It serves as an illuminating introduction for any reader who wants to explore adaptation studies in general and film adaptations in particular. Following the trend toward cultural and ideological contexts of adaptation away from fidelity debates, as proposed by the above scholars, McCallum’s interests encompass the way concepts of childhood are constructed and mediated in the new media and the “signifying practices through which viewers and readers are positioned” (22). The following chapters are organized around key literary and film genres: classic texts, carnivalesque texts, radically intertextual and/or experimental texts, fantasy and magic realism, and cross-cultural adaptations. They explore the subtleties of film adaptation of children’s literature in its rich historical, social, and especially political contexts.

McCallum’s second chapter examines film adaptations of three classic novels that span the first two golden ages of children’s literature: Treasure Island and Chronicles of Narnia. Citing Marah Gubar’s contention that Treasure Island can be read as an anti-adventure and anti-imperialist text, McCallum focuses on the ambivalences and ambiguities within Stevenson’s novel and how they are dealt with in various film adaptations, such as the 1972 Treasure Island (directed by John Hough and Andrew White), the 1999 Treasure Island (directed by Peter Rowe), and the 2011 television series Treasure Island (directed by Steve Barron). In Stevenson’s novel, there is a double-voice between the retrospective, older and wiser narrator Jim and the experiencing focalizer Jim (more naïve), which creates a central ambivalence. Besides, the “gentleman/pirate” hierarchy remains ambiguous and is finally inverted. Most of the film versions are rather conservative, choosing to oversimplify “the classist, imperialist and anti-imperialist metanarratives underpinning that story”(48), but some have kept and even highlighted the complexities and ambiguities of the novel, such as the 2011 Baron version and the 2011 BBC production.

Also featuring children protagonists displaced into an “adult” world where they must take on adult roles, the Narnia series poses very different challenges to directors inasmuch the novels are often under-plotted and under-characterized, making it difficult to conform to film audience’s expectations of large-scale spectacular and epic aesthetic. Besides, the novels are metafictive in that the Narnia world and the frame fictional “real” world have different degrees of “reality,” which draws the readers’/audience’s attention to their status as fiction and artifice. The novels are also rich in their historical meanings, alluding to the Cold War context of a post–World War II Britain. However, the Disney film series adaptations directed by Andrew Adamson are aimed more at commercial success and are live-action-oriented and blockbuster in style. Adamson adds long action sequences and plots to “pad-out” the thin narrative, diluting what McCallum calls “Lewis’ pervasive and unquestioning sense of morality and allegorical emphasis...