Issues in Adapting Children’s Metafiction to Film

Abstract

This chapter defines and discusses the genre of children’s film, situating the genre within its plural contexts, many of which are shared with children’s literature (dual audience, paradoxes between actual children and the child constructed by the work, anxiety about what youth view, visual literacy and ‘new’ media, and for adaptations, their pedagogical value in teaching literary source texts). The remainder of the chapter focuses on adaptation issues specific to children’s metafiction in screen adaptation, such as fidelity expectations, the paradox of medium-specific equivalence in this case, and the issue of intermedial tensions. The chapter introduces the idea of an ‘interpretant’ (from Michael Riffaterre) for reading the particular stance of these films as adaptations with respect to their source text and to the medium of literature. The ‘interpretant’ is an expression of the adaptation’s ideology – its governing principles and priorities in adapting the metafictional source.