ABSTRACT
Since the very beginnings of cinema, literature has provided an extraordinary range of source materials for film texts. Writing about this relationship has been fundamentally preoccupied with the ways in which ‘the word’ — something you read — becomes ‘the image’ — something you see — raising issues about the very nature and effect of ‘adaptation’ itself, as a narrative moves from the primacy of the literary text into the realms of the visual (see Aycock and Schoenecke 1988; Klein and Parker 1981; Peary and Shatzkin 1978; Sinyard 1986). Generally, many writers on adaptation either suggest that nothing can usurp the literary source, or merely evaluate the various merits or drawbacks of cinematic versions. Moreover, most of this writing relates to how a novel, play or short story has become a live-action film, while comparatively little attention has been given to the literary adaptations in animation. Animation is, after all, a distinctive film-form which offers to the adaptation process a unique vocabulary of expression unavailable to the live-action film-maker. The following discussion seeks to partially redress this imbalance and raise some issues concerning the specific ways that animation, and its particular production processes, impact upon the interpretation of literary fictions, and text/screen debates.
