Ideological Trends in Film Adaptations of Children\u27s Literature: Children\u27s Books on the Big Screen

In the dissertation entitled “Ideological Trends in Film Adaptations of Children’s Literature: Children\u27s Books on the Big Screen,” Meghann Meeusen identifies a trend in children\u27’s film adaptations, noting the ways that binary systems found in adaptations’ source texts are consistently polarized in feature length film adaptations of children’s novels and picture books. Meeusen traces this pattern across a range of popular and canonical children’s texts, noting that consistently, explicit messages are intensified, which subsequently affects the construction of these films’ implicit ideologies. She argues that when adaptors shape a story’s overt messages to fit the expectations of film, the result frequently involves more dramatic examples of conflict and more polarized binary systems than found in the book. When content moves into a space reflecting greater degrees of opposition, the text presents a worldview that is similarly polarized. She applies this concept to a range of children\u27s and young adult films, including those adapted from picture books and instances of multiple adaptations from a single source text (highlighting Wizard of Oz adaptations as a representative example). In doing so, she seeks to stimulate far–reaching theories of children’s adaptations that move beyond more commonly problematic evaluative comparisons that focus only on film’s fidelity to the source material