March 2010 saw the release of not one but two new movies based on children’s books: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, based on Jeff Kinney’s book series of the same name.
Of course, kids’ books have been made into movies for, well, a really long time. There was The Wizard of Oz in 1939, and that probably wasn’t even the first. Some adaptations are great and some are terrible, and some are – well, different. Ian Fleming’s novel Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is not a romance; Mary Poppins the book character bears no resemblance to Julie Andrews; in print, there are no psychologically significant family backstories for Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or for Max in Where the Wild Things Are.
We adults – especially those of us in the fields of education and literacy – sometimes complain that all the screens in kids’ lives are taking them away from print. And yet every now and then there’s a ray of hope that it can actually work the other way. I recently saw a couple of grade-school kids who usually ask me for books about race cars, or mummies, or Star Wars – books with cool pictures and text that, I suspect, they generally blithely ignore. This time, though, they all wanted Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
Incidentally: I don’t think the recent film version of Alice in Wonderland is going to create a new generation of Lewis Carroll fans. But Christopher Myers’s altogether original, fabulous version of Jabberwocky just might …
The most important thing that I liked in this book is the design of cover page. It is so attractive in the red color.