[ROOSTER CROWING] LINDSAY ELLIS: Ever since the dawn of cinema, film has been this sort of little brother to the more heady, intellectual medium of novels.
And many film adaptations of literature leave viewers and critics saying, the book was better.
[MUSIC PLAYING] From "The Golden Compass" to "The Great Gatsby, " from "The Hobbit" to "Harry Potter, " and to "The Giver--" oh, "The Giver--" we find ourselves wondering why adaptations of beloved stories tend not to live up to the source material.
To quote literary and film theory professor Thomas Leitch, "The book will always be better than any adaptation because it is always better at being itself." So what makes a good adaptation, especially of a great or popular book?
Can an adaptation ever really live up to the story you formed in your head?
Narrative adaptations, be they passed down through oral tradition or the written word, have a long and rich history that predates film.
Whether it's Goethe's "Faust" or Ovid's "The Metamorphosis, " plays, ballets, and opera became the medium for popular stories to reach the pre-mass literacy masses.
However, film can accomplish what all of these other mediums can do while reaching an even wider audience.
It also frees visual adaptation from needing to stay on one relative plane, like a stage, for example.
But adaptation isn't just about changing the story.
