Alexandra and Cristina have dealt with theoretical issues concerning remediation and its relevance to the cinematic field. But what perhaps most textbooks and scholars fail to do is to account for the world’s unceasing fascination with our older stories. Throughout history, people have kept ‘borrowing’ the content of existing stories and refashioning them to fit other media as well. Recent years have seen a tidal wave of adaptations, rewritings and remediations of literally anything ranging from classic novels to fairytales, paintings, and Biblical scenes, and, as new technologies develop, they are instantly employed to accommodate the same old stories to newer media, which allow us to experience them in significantly different ways. What this old practice has to show us, therefore, is that the stories we’ve created are renewable sources of creative energy, whose full potential is yet to be explored.
Let us take a concrete example. The Walt Disney Company – the world’s largest media and entertainment company – has produced a great number of cartoons, live-action and animated films, many of which are screen adaptations of classical stories such as those written by the brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen. The success of such adaptations has been huge and one needs only look at the reception of a recent Disney production like Tangled to see that we still love our dear old stories.
Tangled marked the studio’s 50th animated motion picture. As such, the filmmakers wanted to create, as John Lasseter, chief creative officer for Disney and Pixar, explains, “a unique world and story that evoke the rich, dramatic feeling that is classically Disney, but is also fresh and humorous, and that gives the audience something it has never seen before in computer animation.” And Rapunzel provided just the type of timeless story that the studio could use to put their distinctive mark on, confirming perhaps Linda Hutcheon’s theory that “part of the pleasure of adaptations comes from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise” (4).
But why should we watch our stories instead of reading them? In other words, what is it that makes remediation such a popular practice, even though, as Linda Hutcheon illustrates in her A Theory of Adaptation, contemporary adaptations are often discredited as “secondary”, “derivative” or “culturally inferior” (2)? Drawing on Bolter and Grusin’s view, Alexandra brought into discussion the issue of immediacy and its effects upon the audience. Indeed, experiencing a story both visually and aurally helps the public engage with it in a way that the written word will most likely fail to do. Characters are assigned distinctive voices, and key scenes are complemented by inspiredly chosen music. What is more, due to variations in perspective and other film effects, the viewer can at times get the feeling that they are living and walking in the character’s shoes, as in this scene from Tangled where Rapunzel gazes at the sky lit with flying lanterns. The public is given the chance to behold the fictional world from Rapunzel’s point of view, which considerably diminishes the distance between viewer and character, and consequently between reality and the world unfolding on the screen.
Also, the fact that there is no overt reference to the original story written by the brothers Grimm helps maintain the illusion of continuity and immediacy that viewers expect, for they want to watch the film in the same seamless way that they read the story. However, there are allusions to other stories in the film. For example, in the library scene, two of the books that can be seen resting on the floor or on other piles of books are Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid – a wonderful trick which is aimed at enhancing the impression that the fictional universe of Tangled stands as a distinct world in its own right and should not be regarded as a mere story from a children’s book.
Rapunzel’s story was not the only thing that the creators of Tangled tried to appropriate by means of remediation. It was the medium itself. The filmmakers wanted to bring back the painterly touch of old Disney classics, although the film was made using computer-generated imagery (CGI). Keane Glen and his animators drew their inspiration from a painting by French Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing, which Keane describes as “romantic” and “lush”: "There’s no photoreal hair. I want luscious hair, and we are inventing new ways of doing that. I want to bring the warmth and intuitive feel of hand-drawn to CGI."
Animating Rapunzel’s hair actually represented the biggest challenge for the filmmakers. In Tangled, Rapunzel’s hair is almost a central character that has a life and will of its own. In order to bring Rapunzel and her golden locks to life, the team had to create a whole new piece of software. As animation supervisor Clay Kaytis explains: “No studio has ever had to do 70 feet of hair before. You’ve seen computer-animated hair, and most of the time, it’s pretty passive. Characters don’t usually interact with it; they don’t throw it around or whip it into chairs. This is the first time anyone’s ever done this kind of work.” And it was worth the effort. Thanks to the animators’ skill and the ‘perks’ of technology, the long waterfall of shiny magical locks is an image that viewers are very unlikely to be able to forget.
Works Cited:
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006
http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Tangled
http://movies.about.com/od/rapunzel/a/making-of-tangled.htm
Article Author: Madalina Bunget
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