BOOKS INTO FILMS

Never before have so many children’s books been translated for the big screen as now. With even dusty old classics like Nurse Matilda being given a new injection of life this month as Emma Thompson’s Nanny McFee, and The Brothers Grimm being turned into a romping, star-studded fairytale adventure, this year is working up to a frenzy of adaptation with the fourth Harry Potter and the first of CS Lewis’s Narnia stories both released next month. Following the success of Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series, the remake of Charlie & the Chocolate Factory and the brilliant anime film of Diana Wynne Jones’s novel, Howl’s Moving Castle, Hollywood studios are scouring children’s fiction as never before.

What, though, should they be buying? For many children, there is no greater compliment they can pay a book than to say it would make a great film. We all long to see the impossible happen, and the kind of audience once happy to see Peter Pan fly about on wires on stage can now see utterly convincing Quidditch matches, dragons, mermaids and talking lions thanks to computer-generated effects. For others, seeing someone else’s imagination intrude on your own private envisioning of, say, Narnia, is to lose part of its magic. Film, as fans of Harry Potter have discovered, has to speed up the action and cut enjoyable details. It can also take liberties with what characters look like and say. There have already been complaints about Tilda Swinton’s hair as the White Witch being white, not black; Tolkien fans had to buy the director’s cut of Lord of the Rings to get something approaching the full story, drastically abridged in the theatrical release to make way for endless battle scenes.

Computer generated effects are both the boon and the bane of great children’s books. On the one hand, they can flesh out all kinds of details of a magical world in a most satisfying manner, whether these be the moving staircases at Hogwarts or the precise mechanisms of an orc attack. The sigh of anticipation that goes up in cinemas every time the trailer for the new Harry Potter film showed a dragon was remarkable: we have all got our own idea of what mythical beasts might look like, but our appetite for seeing them remains keen. On the other hand, these effects can come at the expense of character development and plot-line – the third part of Lord of the Rings being a case in point.

There’s no question that having seen the film of the book turns many children onto reading the book itself. Where many people, rightly, resent and reject the bland Disney bowdlerisations of fairy-tales such as Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, modern film directors tend to be more respectful of the original, even when, as in the case of Howl’s Moving Castle, the director inserts preoccupations of their own.

At present, the fate of a number of modern children’s classics hangs in the balance. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, after a troubled start, is undergoing a $4 million development by New Line (who made Lord of the Rings) and the director Anand Tucker, but the decision whether or not to “green light” it will not happen until January. Eion Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series, Jonathan Stroud’s The Amulet of Samarkand, Corenlia Funke’s Inkheart and Lian Hearn’s Across the Nightingale Floor have all been bought by big studios but are also in development limbo, with scripts at various stages and no stars attached. Much as children yearn to see them made, they can yet fall foul of the Byzantine process of getting sufficient backing. As one talent scout for Miramax told me, “You have as much chance, statistically, of being struck by lightning as of actually having your novel made into a film.” Yet as studios have discovered, a good children’s film makes money like nothing else.

Nick Marston, the film agent for Curtis Brown points out, “Studios are obsessed with making their product as inclusive as possible. Hence adult 'dramas' (that's everything that's not a genre film) are considered the riskiest bet. If they can a film that can play well to a 5 year old and their parents (or even grandparents!) and all in between, then obviously that's the ideal.

“ The problem is that, for children’s films to work, it does seem that you have to spend huge sums. The budget on CHARLIE AND THE Chocolate Factory went enormous (much bigger than they originally thought). This means that 'indie' childrens' films don't really work. British attempts to do originals (THUNDERPANTS) or adaptations (FIVE CHILDREN AND IT) without the studio backing haven't recently worked.”

Antony Harwood, also an agent and the son of the Oscar-winning scriptwriter Ronald Harwood, says
“ I don’t believe the boom in interest has anything much to do with a shift in taste or demographics or CG technology. Films aimed at children, at families, have always done good business – look at the top twenty highest-grossing films of all time and all but four or five are in the ‘family viewing’ category. Families, after all, make great consumers: they not only go to the cinema but also buy DVDs and the merchandising.”

It’s a shrewd point. Yet studios can and do pour millions into merchandise and still find it fails to fire any enthusiasm in the audience they want to reach. What is interesting about children’s films now compared with, say, the Disney hits of a decade ago, is that they seem to be being driven from the bottom up. Anthony Horowitz’s best-selling Alex Rider series about a reluctant teenaged James Bond had been stuck in development for years – signed up to be directed by Chris Columbus, the first Harry Potter director, then dropped after Spy Kids. But when Black’s Ultimate Book Guide published its list of the top five books kids most wanted to see filmed, and Horowitz’s Stormbreaker came out as no. 1, the last doubts fell away. Stormbreaker, starring Alex Pettyfer, has at last been filmed. It is the most expensive children’s film ($40 million) ever made in Britain, but its success next summer is pretty much guaranteed. Whether kids will feel the same appetite for Charlie Higson’s Young Bond series remains to be seen.

One effect of the Harry Potter phenomenon is that children seem much more aware of the power they have to make things happen in Hollywood, rather than being seen as passive consumers. I asked Roger Mortimer, Head of English at Highgate School in North London, and himself a children’s author, to get 96 pupils in Year 6,7 and 8 (from 10-13) to say what books they would most like to see become films. The answers were intriguing (see below.) The only established children’s classic to feature at all was The Hobbit, which tied with Michelle Paver’s Wolf Brother in second place. The horror-writer Darren Shan was overwhelmingly popular, as was Eoin Colfer, whose Artemis Fowl series tied in first place. Anthony Horowitz’s other novels were on almost everyone’s wish-list, as was Christopher Paolini’s sub-Tolkien fantasy about a boy and his dragon, Eragon, and Nancy Farmer’s Viking adventure, Sea of Trolls. All of these feature magic, and would benefit from special effects. The surprises were Caroline Lawrence’s Roman Mysteries, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident and Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses - more thoughtful, measured dramas which challenge the way we see the world.

There are, in fact, a number of great children’s novels which it is hard to envision working on screen. Philippa Pearce’s A Dog so Small, David Almond’s Skellig and Lucy M Boston’s Green Knowe series all feature dramatic events, yet the drama is so internalised that each would require child actors of genius to convey them. Big bucks demand big bangs, and if too many adult writers trying to break into the children’s market now make the mistake of writing film-scripts rather than novels, it is worth remembering that some of the great classics, which will outlast the immediately fashionable hits, will always be best on the page.

Highgate School’s Top Ten:

1. Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl and anything by Darren Shan,
2. Michelle Paver, Wolf Brother and Tolkien, The Hobbit
3. Anthony Horowitz, The Diamond Brothers/ Raven’s Gate
4. Christopher Paolini, Eragon
5. Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
6. Caroline Lawrence, The Roman Mysteries
7. Malorie Blackman, Noughts & Crosses
8. Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials Nancy Farmer, Sea of Trolls
9. Lian Hearn, Across the Nightingale Floor
10. Nancy Farmer, Sea of Trolls

The Times, November 5, 2005