Tag Archives: Hand-Drawn Dreamworks | theadaptationstation.com
Tag Archives: Disney Anim-Anthology Movies | theadaptationstation.com
Warning: I’m having some trouble with images on my blog. But it seems to be only on my laptop that some are not appearing and even there only on Microsoft Edge. If you’re not seeing them, I encourage you to try a different browser since this series I’m starting is very image-driven. Thank you.| The Adaptation Station.com
The 1995 made-for-television animated movie of The Wind in the Willows was my introduction to Kenneth Grahame’s book as a kid. Looking back, I can see that in many ways it was a better introduction to it than the average adaptation would have been, but in one crucial way it was much worse.[1]I’m probably exaggerating by calling it the worst in this post’s title. I haven’t seen it, but from what I’ve heard, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride (1996) is basically a Monty … Continue reading| The Adaptation Station.com
Yearly Archives: 2025 | theadaptationstation.com
“Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark.”-Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux I really don’t envy any Hollywood screenwriter faced with the task of adapting one of Kate DiCamillo’s books. That’s not to say her books … Continue reading →| The Adaptation Station.com
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) is actually a compilation of three previously released animated featurettes (e.g. twenty-five-minute length cartoons that would originally appear before full length movies in theaters) with some (entertaining) bridging material and an epilogue added.[1]If it sounds like I’m criticizing this thing for being a cash grab, I’m not. There’s something to be said for fans being able to watch all three featurettes together. When the first of these f...| The Adaptation Station.com
It’s no secret that the Walt Disney company has been relying on remakes of their more popular older movies a lot lately. 2019 saw not one, not two, but four of them! (Aladdin, The Lion King, Dumbo and Lady and the Tramp.) These are typically referred to as live action remakes since the original movies being remade were animated, but considering how much CGI they use, it’s more accurate to describe them as photorealistic remakes. Actually, that’s not the best label either as many of the ...| The Adaptation Station.com
Yearly Archives: 2023 | theadaptationstation.com
Monthly Archives: July 2022 | theadaptationstation.com
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (2002) | The Adaptation Station.com
When I first heard a Jane Austen movie called Love and Friendship was being made, I was thrilled. Love and Friendship is the title of a short novel Austen wrote as a teenager,[1]Actually, she titled it Love and Freindship, but I don’t feel obliged to replicate her typos. which was only published after her death when she was famous and there were people who wanted to read every last thing she wrote. It’s actually my favorite thing by her. It’s pretty different from the typical Austen wor...| The Adaptation Station.com
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside his skin and walk around in it.” Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird| The Adaptation Station.com
For the last part of this series on the 2012 Les Misérables, I want to finally talk about it as an adaptation, and the way it uses elements of both Boublil and Schonberg’s musical and Victor Hugo’s novel. This is an aspect of the movie for which Tom Hooper and screenwriter, William Nicholson, don’t get nearly enough credit, I think. When something has become a beloved institution like Les Mis, the thought of making changes to it makes fans nervous. (For the record, I was a fan of the ...| The Adaptation Station.com
Yearly Archives: 2022 | theadaptationstation.com
I first came up with the Animation Station series because I realized there were movies and shows about which I wanted to blog, but which weren’t adaptations. Well, that’s not quite true. Many of them were adaptations of preexisting material … Continue reading →| theadaptationstation.com
Monthly Archives: May 2021 | theadaptationstation.com
Monthly Archives: July 2025 | theadaptationstation.com
The Chronicles of Prydain are a series of children’s fantasy adventure novels from the 1960s by Lloyd Alexander. They are beloved largely because of their characterizations. The Black Cauldron (1985) is an animated movie adaptation of the first two books … Continue reading →| The Adaptation Station.com
Waste not, want not, I suppose. Scott Cramer, a YouTuber whom I like[1]Partially because we’re both North Dakotans., once did a video about ideas he had for YouTube videos which he ultimately never made for various reasons. This allowed him to make use of some of the best lines he would have used in those videos and give fans an interesting look at the behind-the-scenes process. I thought it’d be fun to do a blog post like that, so here are some concepts for blog posts that I’ve relucta...| The Adaptation Station.com
Peanuts is awesome. Not only does it have a unique and extremely funny sense of humor, but its characters and images are like mythic archetypes that sum up aspects of the human experience. Do Sisyphus and his boulder represent the inevitability of failure better than Charlie Brown and Lucy’s football? Does Viola’s speech in Twelfth Night about “Patience on a monument” describe the pain of unrequited love, unexpressed unrequited love in particular, better than the little red-haired gir...| The Adaptation Station.com
Monthly Archives: April 2023 | theadaptationstation.com
This isn’t exactly the most controversial choice for the best of Disney’s recent (and seemingly unending) line of remakes and updates of old material. I believe it was one of the better received ones. But it’s not a totally safe movie to praise either. Feminist accusations against it range from that it fetishizes the hourglass figure to that its heroine’s personality just amounts to “nice” to that said heroine’s salvation comes from marrying a man.[1]I don’t get why Jane Auste...| The Adaptation Station.com
OK, I’ll cut to the chase. I find Will Smith’s Genie funnier than Robin Williams’s Genie. | The Adaptation Station.com
I first saw Hallmark Entertainment’s Snow White: The Fairest of Them All (2001) before I was ten years old. It would be a long time before I got to watch it again, so it loomed large in my childhood imagination. … Continue reading →| The Adaptation Station.com
This is a continuation of Part 1. If you haven’t read it already and you want to understand this, you’d better do so. CCC 3: The Movie is Anti-Man/Anti-Romance I can’t blame people for expecting this since Rachel Zegler’s infamous … Continue reading →| The Adaptation Station.com
I never wanted this to be a Disney blog. I mean, I always wanted to do some blog posts about Disney movies since I’m a fan of fairy tales and classic children’s fantasies, many of which they’ve adapted, and I consider animation to be a fascinating medium. But it seemed to me that there were enough blogs about Disney movies and Disney-related things in general. I’d rather have more posts about my more niche interests. But I don’t have that many ideas for blog posts about those intere...| The Adaptation Station.com
Back when I did a series on Peter Pan movies, in this blog’s early days, I only wrote about the three theatrically released ones and the various TV versions of the musical by Mark Charlap and Carolyn Leigh. Now I’d like to do two less iconic TV movie adaptations. To call them “less iconic” isn’t to say that no one has ever seen them or liked them. They each won an Emmy after all. Still, compared to some other Peter Pans, I don’t hear many people talking about them. As you’ve dou...| theadaptationstation.com
Remember how at the end of Part 4, I wrote that we’d reached a place where I felt the movie’s quality, the quality of its writing anyway, started to go downhill? Well, I’m happy to report that we’ve now reached a point where it starts going uphill again. I’m not sure if it’s as consistently great as it was before, at least from an adaptation standpoint, but I find it closer than it was during that middle section we just went through, maybe because the characters whose dialogue I e...| The Adaptation Station.com
Yearly Archives: 2024 | theadaptationstation.com
Monthly Archives: July 2024 | theadaptationstation.com
Tag Archives: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe | theadaptationstation.com
OK, I’m cheating a little bit with the title. 2003 isn’t what I’d call modern, but The Modern Movie sounds more exciting than The Most Recent Movie and a lot of the changes made by this adaptation do reflect a modern sensibility as opposed to the old fashioned spirit of the original and other adaptations.| The Adaptation Station.com
Back when I did a series on Peter Pan movies, in this blog’s early days, I only wrote about the three theatrically released ones and the various TV versions of the musical by Mark Charlap and Carolyn Leigh. Now I’d … Continue reading →| The Adaptation Station.com
That Mother’s Day post got me in the mood to blog about Peter Pan adaptations, ones I haven’t really covered here in detail before. Technically, the movie I’ll be discussing in this post is a sequel to Peter Pan (1953), but it does take a number of things from the original source material by J. M. Barrie so it kind of counts as an adaptation.| The Adaptation Station.com
This post is going to be a bit different from my usual. I’m going to be discussing a certain kind of adaptation, which I’ll call “the adaptation as commentary,” its advantages and disadvantages. As examples, I’ll be using two movies I’ve written about in the past. Hopefully, it’s been long enough that my regular readers won’t groan and say, “not this again!” While there will be some overlap with my past discussions, I will be looking at the films from a different angle. Th...| The Adaptation Station.com
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may have guessed that I’m interested in the art of animation. This month rather than blogging about adaptations, I’m going to be blogging about a series of animated movies, some of which will be adaptations, some not. Since only my loyal family members read this blog, I trust they’ll be fine with me breaking the rules I set for myself. | The Adaptation Station.com
I’d like to celebrate the first anniversary of my blog by writing about something that interests me, scriptwriting. I’d better make some things clear about the following list.| The Adaptation Station.com
Tag Archives: Animation Station | theadaptationstation.com
It sounds crazy to say this now, so many decades since Disney’s 1953 animated movie of Peter Pan, especially when the character of TinkerBell has become such a Disney icon, but J. M. Barrie’s book and play don’t lend themselves to a Disney movie that well. Disney animated movies tend to have very clear cut good guys and bad guys, or at least they did in the 50s.[1]Modern Disney animated movies tend to be a bit more morally complex. For example, while repressing emotion is portrayed as u...| The Adaptation Station.com
In honor of Mother’s Day this year, I’m doing a post looking back on some of my favorite mom characters from adaptations this blog has covered. It shouldn’t be a surprise that parents pop up in so many stories, even … Continue reading →| The Adaptation Station.com
Didn’t I just say I regretted that most posts in my Animation Station feature were about Disney stuff when there are so many other animation studios out there? Yes, I did. Yet here I am doing one about Lady and the Tramp (1955), not only an animated Disney movie but quite a mainstream classic. I usually prefer to write about more obscure animated movies even when they’re from famous studios like Disney or Dreamworks. It’s not that I think those obscure movies are always better than famo...| The Adaptation Station.com
Today is the two-year anniversary of The Adaptation Station.com! I wanted to do something special to commemorate it. My first idea was a post about my top ten adaptations about which I’ve blogged. My second was a post that was like an Oscars ceremony where I gave awards for best actors, best costumes, best director, etc. I polled my readers and the second, more creative idea was declared the best.[1]I’m still going to do the Top Ten List later this month though because I feel like doing it.| The Adaptation Station.com
Tag Archives: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader | theadaptationstation.com
Category Archives: Uncategorized | theadaptationstation.com
Author Archives: stationmaster | theadaptationstation.com
We get a montage of life onboard the Dawn Treader as it sails eastward set to audio of one of Eustace’s diary entries. Those entries are a great source of humor in the book with the delusional way Eustace presents himself as a perpetual victim and everyone else as a villain. The movie actually makes them even funnier. “Dear diary,” Eustace writes, “there’s been an extraordinary turn of events. I’ve been abducted by my cousins and set adrift in uncharted waters in some ridiculous l...| The Adaptation Station.com
“We’ll use longboats,” says Caspian, “Drinian pick some men and come ashore.” Two longboats enter the harbor, leaving the Dawn Treader behind. Among the sailors in them are Caspian, Edmund, Lucy, Eustace and Reepicheep. “Onward!” cries the last one. “The thrill of the unknown lies ahead!” That’s kind of an odd thing to say at this point since the Lone Islands are technically part of Narnia though not one that any of the characters have visited recently, making them somewha...| The Adaptation Station.com
When we last left Lucy, Edmund and Eustace, they had resurfaced to find that they were no longer at Cambridge but in the open sea with the sailing vessel from the painting looming over them. I’m pleased to report the ship, the Dawn Treader, looks much as the book describes.| The Adaptation Station.com
I’m filing this post under Animation Station because it’s about an animated movie that’s not an adaptation of anything-two movies like that actually. But I will be writing about themes and messages they have in common with the works of Charles Dickens, adaptations of whose books I cover on this blog semi-regularly. It’s a weird post, I grant you, but no one else is going to blog about the thematic links between Pixar’s Inside Out films and Charles Dickens if I don’t do it.| The Adaptation Station.com
As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, not one but two movie adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma came out in 1996. This makes them rather a pain to talk about since while both follow the book’s plot fairly closely, they take very different approaches, and you don’t want to get them mixed up. Since one was made for cinemas by Miramax and the other for television by the BBC, I could call them Cinema Emma 1996 and TV Emma 1996 or Miramax Emma 1996 and BBC Emma 1996, but that strikes me as ...| The Adaptation Station.com
Both Charles Dickens’ novel, Little Dorrit, and Andrew Davies’ 2008 miniseries adaptation of it tell the story of Arthur Clennam (Matthew Macfadyen), who returns to England after two decades of exile, working on the family business in China. He tells his stern mother (Judy Parfitt), a sort of proto-Miss Havisham, bitterly secluded in her home, that his father has died, burdened by some terrible guilt. Clennam wants to know what this guilt was, so that he can make any amends he can. But hi...| The Adaptation Station.com
Tag Archives: The Chronicles of Narnia | theadaptationstation.com
I was delighted to hear that there would be a new movie adaptation of Barbara Robinson’s 1972 novel The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. It’s a book that resonates greatly with those of us who have grown up in the American Midwest where mothers force their kids to be in church Christmas pageants every year and force their husbands to attend. The marketing for the movie looked fairly promising though I had some reservations. Mainly, I was worried that it would sentimentalize the six Herdman ki...| The Adaptation Station.com
I first came up with the Animation Station series because I realized there were movies and shows about which I wanted to blog, but which weren’t adaptations. Well, that’s not quite true. Many of them were adaptations of preexisting material but I didn’t want that to be the main focus of my blog posts about them. What they did have in common was being animated. Now I’m really stretching that label to write about what I wish. The…thing described in this post is barely animated at all....| The Adaptation Station.com
Remember that vast stretch of whiteness at the end of the last scene? It turns out to be a sea with lilies[1]Or lily-like flowers as Eustace the stickler for scientific accuracy insists. growing in it like a giant garden pool. In the book, C. S. Lewis describes the wonders of the Last Sea before the End of the World at some length. How the sun is so bright the sailors can’t bear it until they drink the sweet water. How the water is so clear they can see the shadow of the Dawn Treader at the...| The Adaptation Station.com
It’s a gray, chilly morning and the Dawn Treader is sailing towards Dark Island.| The Adaptation Station.com
As the sun rises over the shore, MLG stirs from her sleep and sees something. She eagerly awakens Lucy and points out to her the elusive Blue Star hanging just above the horizon.| The Adaptation Station.com
Drinian orders all hands on deck and tells the archers to ready themselves against the threat that’s soaring across the water, from the island to the ship. It’s a dragon. | The Adaptation Station.com
The sun rises and the Dawn Treader arrives at another island. “I doubt the lords stopped here, my liege,” says Reepicheep as he and other crewmembers head towards the shore in one of two longboats. “There’s no sign of anything living.” Indeed, this island has a very dry, rocky climate. It’s actually a combination of two islands from the book, neither of which were described that way. I sympathize with the change though. The last island we saw was quite lush and it’s nice to have...| The Adaptation Station.com
Does anyone else remember my series about the 2014 movie Maleficent? Probably not. It didn’t get an enthusiastic reader response, but it was one of my favorite things to write, so for what will likely be my last Halloween-themed blog post, I’m writing about its sequel.| The Adaptation Station.com
We transition from the magical map to the actual sea. There’s a storm brewing and within the Dawn Treader, Eustace is writing in his diary again. “For reasons beyond my comprehension,” he gripes, “we’ve taken the advice of a senile old coot who doesn’t possess a razor and dawdles around in a dressing gown.” I love that there’s a character in the movie who feels the same way about that last scene that I do. “So we’re back in this tub and lost in a tempest. Brilliant.” We ...| The Adaptation Station.com
As the sun rises over the beach, Caspian and Edmund awake to find giant footprints in the sand and no Lucy. Drinian notices this too and rouses the rest of the crew so they can follow the prints. Well, not all the rest of the crew. Eustace is left snoring on the shore. For some reason, Reepicheep isn’t among them. I guess he remained on the ship which is odd. Didn’t he say there was honor in turning away from adventure recently?| The Adaptation Station.com
In a nice transition, we cut from the sound of Caspian blowing the horn to the sound of an automobile horn in our world as our old friend, Lucy Pevensie (Georgie Henley), runs across a London street, wearing a school uniform and carrying suitcases. The car’s (uncredited) driver yells at her to watch where she’s going, and she apologizes as she hurries off. For the first time in this movie, we hear a musical theme from the last film’s the soundtrack. The movie reuses a lot of musical the...| The Adaptation Station.com
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Jane Austen fandom is one of the hardest groups to please as fans of the 2005 movie adaptation of Pride and Prejudice will attest in exasperation. Critics enthusiastically praised the film’s beautiful cinematography, its use of visual symbolism, its cast, particularly Keira Knightley in the lead role of Elizabeth Bennet, and generally found it to be a delightful and highly emotional viewing experience. It also was nominated for multiple awards...| The Adaptation Station.com
