Gulliver's Travels Movie versus Book
It is common in today's media-driven society to reach into the past for inspiration and ideas. A trend has developed where original works are transformed into other mediums. For example: books are turned into movies and/or plays, movies are turned into weekly sitcoms, and cartoons will spawn empires (Disney). These things happen so often that an audience rarely stops to question the level of authenticity that remains after these conversions. Perhaps it is only when a project is not well received that people begin to think of the difficulties involved with changing a work's genre. Using Gulliver's Travels as an example, discrepancies and additions in the movie can be contrasted with Jonathan Swift's original text. It can be assumed that one of the biggest challenges in making a movie from a book lies in the time constraints that movies have, especially those that are intended for TV, as was Gulliver's Travels. Swift talks about Gulliver's time in Laputa for almost forty pages, where as the movie only spends a small portion of its three hours focusing on this kingdom. One of the largest additions to Swift's tale occurs during the movie's portrayal of this third part of
It appears as though this scene was added to depict an inner struggle that Gulliver is having. He purports to want to go home, but yet hates the society that he supposedly desires to rejoin. This is a challenging depiction, since much of Gulliver/Swift's cutting satire about English society is lost (perhaps purposely) in the transformation into a movie. The television audience (assuming they haven't read the book) is then left to wonder why, if Gulliver knows how to get home, he does not. They are not given the opportunity to experience the satire that Swift uses to call English society into question and are, therefore, not able to realize the authentic character of Gulliver. The movie version of this story portrays Gulliver as a travel that has been gone for eight consecutive years and had been searching for his way home the entire time. He merely falls into unfortunate circumstances that prevent this return. In the book, however, it is less clear that Gulliver desires to be home at all. He very rarely speaks of his family and seems to have little emotion at being reunited with them after each journey or when he leaves them again. The movie's alternate portrayal
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Approximate Word count = 796
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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