Wednesday, May 16, 2012
The Guy CAN Write
I finished reading _The Hunch Back of Notre Dame_ by Victor Hugo this week for the first time straight though since last spring. There are so many interesting aspects to the novel I could bring up. But the one I noticed since the beginning is the contrast between how the landscape is presented in the Disney version vs. the printed version. From page 1 to 8 there is no dialogue--page after page of detailed scenery in the same monotonous tone. I realized this is because the Disney version was already visual it did not need to take so much time describing every corner of every building. We see those spectacular drawn images in a second. There is also the fact that the movie is an adaptation and turned the novel into a fairy tale which it is not; thereby, restricting and expanding the information given to us. Those 8 pages are not the only time Hugo goes into great length describing scenery. It gave me real appreciation of how much work and effort this writer did to authentically show the landscape, and it is a facet I did not appreciate nor stand out when I saw the Disney version many years ago in the theater with my mom.
Are there any works of literature where you found an aspect of one version was so spectacularly different from another?
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I've never read The Hunch Back of Notre Dame or seen the Disney movie. Disney doesn't get much right, though, does it?
ReplyDeleteLiterature with grossly different film adaptations... There's V for Vendetta. The moral of the book is that overthrowing your evil government doesn't necessarily result in a better government taking its place; the moral of the movie is that violence is noble and that blowing things up and replacing evil governments with the government you want is good.
And there's I Am Legend. The book is called I Am Legend--SPOILER--because the protagonist is the last human alive. He's a menace to the civilized vampire community that's emerged from the zombie-vampire apocalypse that destroyed the world as he knew it. Thus, the title: I Am Legend. But in the movie, he's not the last human. He gets rescued by some chick and the movie ends with all the vampires as evil and zombie-maniacal as ever. The title makes no sense with the movie's conclusion. They should have just called it Will Smith In a Zombie Movie.