POPULAR CULTURE wonderland
Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” is just one of the latest classic childhood tales to be given a grown-up twist.
Childhood: The Sequel story by DENISE WRIGHT photograph courtesy of WALT DISNEY PICTURES
T
he Lovely Bones” left us feeling uncomfortable both in its book form and on the big screen. We’ve seen every hero from Spiderman to Optimus Prime come to life via film magic (also known as CGI). But are film adaptations of cartoons, books and even films we came to love during our childhood and teenage years just an easy escape from our own lives? Emeritus journalism professor Robert West, who teaches film classes at Kent State, thinks there’s a lot to be said for our fascination with films based on childhood tales. West says our society is lacking real-life heroes, and we tend to find them instead in the comic book characters that Hollywood brings to the silver screen. “Comic books are nothing new,” West says. “They emerged around the Great Depression — a time when they needed heroes.” He says although the nation’s youth have certainly changed since then, the need for heroes remains. “We need heroes to look up to, depend on and idolize,” he says. “We want to see people win for us when we’re not capable of it. There are echoes of that in our time.” Our real-life heroes have definitely changed
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THE BURR SPRING 2010
over the years. Social and political figures of the 1960s like Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. have been replaced with sports figures of the 2000s like Michael Phelps and LeBron James. But Superman and G.I. Joe have always been there, providing us with power when we feel like we have none. And for some, seeing that power translated to the big screen is just as powerful as reading the comic books as a child. “The most powerless people in the world are children,” West says. “These heroes are like them. They have common human characteristics and flaws, but they also have powers that are magical and unrealistic. Even as adults, we have a hard time dealing with realism. They don’t call Hollywood the ‘Dream Factory’ for nothing. We want good dreams. We may be intrigued by the realism, but we don’t want to see it.” French writer Marcel Proust once said, “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.” If books had such an impact on us as children, wouldn’t we feel strongly about them when they return in our adulthood? Do we find comfort in nostalgia’s embrace? Are we bitter because this or that character was different in the movie than they were in the book? Yes. Mandy Hofstetter, a senior computer design animation major, loved “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” as a child. And even though it has
been about 15 years, she says she still considers herself a fan. Hofstetter was 7 years old when she read the book. She was finally able to watch the story come to life in September 2009 at age 22. Hofstetter says although the film strayed from the book she’d connected with as a child, she was still content with the way it turned out. “In the movie, they tried to explain the food falling from the sky with this machine that converted water into food; it wasn’t just some island where it happened to rain food,” she says, explaining the plot differences. “But they (the writers and animators at Sony Pictures) had the challenge of turning a 30-page book into a full-length film, so they did pretty good.” On the other hand, Hofstetter says “Where the Wild Things Are” was one of those books that shouldn’t have been turned into a movie. “That wasn’t a good call,” she says. “The movie was dark, it was sad, and it made you hate Max because he was being such a brat.” But Hofstetter thinks some adaptations may help increase understanding of the books. “I loved the (‘Chronicles of Narnia’) movies because they weren’t as wordy and complex as the books,” she says. “I could overlook some of the holes in the movies because it helped the plot move a lot faster.” Justin Marquis, a sophomore music composi-