1/18/10

Why the book is always better then the movie... or something...

Lets face it, film adaptations of books, comics and games are more then often slandered by audiences and critiques alike. To be honest, I am not sure a good game movie has ever been made. Comic books also have a long history of meager film adaptations. Book adaptations, being the oldest of these three genres, seem to have a higher success rate. Perhaps we can attribute this success to the fact that directors have been adapting novels a lot longer then these other mediums. Has Hollywood finally figured out how to properly transpose a book? No, I think what Hollywood has finally figured out is that books, films and comics are all very different things.

What a great discovery.

We're getting ahead of ourselves here. Lets look at the two main reasons why trying to carry a story over to a different medium, then one in which it was composed, is so difficult:

Main reason #1: It is difficult to tell a story that you have not written.

Your job as a "re-story teller" is to convey the same ideas and emotions that were conveyed in the original story. The problem here is that art is so subjective that it often becomes frustrating to discern the same meanings that the original author was trying to convey. Thus, the "re-story teller" must take what he/she can out of the film and present it to the best of his/her ability. Even if you manage to convey the same thoughts as the original author it is almost impossible to get them perfect. In truth, you will never have the same frame of mind that the original author had to work with.

Main Reason #2: It is difficult to tell a story using a medium in which it was not conceived.

Each of these three mediums mentioned carries specific traits that lend it specific strengths and weaknesses. For example, and I think I may have mentioned this before, I would argue that one advantage to the graphic novel genre is that the composer can present multiple ideas, character thoughts and images in a single panel--in a single time frame. You can know what a character is thinking well he is talking. Now at first glance this might seem like a trivial feature but to a master of the medium it becomes an important tool for utilizing the uniqueness of comic book style story telling. One obvious advantage to film, amongst many, is the way the medium employs sound and tone. Tonality is an important aspect of communication and it is far easier to convey in film then any other medium.

What I am trying to get at is that the medium in which a story is composed has influence over the overall structure of the story. It is thus impossible to convey the same ideas in a different medium in the same way. No matter what you do, the copied product will have some differences.

Is this picture relevant to our discussion? Only a little bit.



Some form of conclusion:

Story's written in a specific medium are written to take advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of that medium. When a story is transposed from one medium to another it looses all the prestige associated with the traits of the original medium that make it function so well. In short, books have innate qualities that films do not.

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