Children’s Metafilm

This chapter shifts attention to examples and techniques of children’s metafilm, to show how the ‘meta’ level works on film and the many techniques such films effectively employ for youth audiences. This chapter describes major types of children’s metafilms and a ‘grammar’ of select self-reflexive devices to generate metalepsis, using examples both from adaptations and otherwise. This chapter discusses metafilm as both medium-specific equivalence of metafiction, and as a paradoxical equivalence as it replaces the medium in the mirror for another. The chapter concludes with a close comparative study of Inkheart and of The Spiderwick Chronicles focusing on both narratives’ character development from reader to author in the source texts and how this is represented in their metafilmic adaptations.