Just saw Stardust, the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman's illustrated book of the same name. Lots of fun, certain to be the sort of film people buy for their DVD collections and watch on cold winter days. I haven't read the book, though the film was intriguing enough that I might give it a go. A sweet, satisfying story, with good performances and nice production design.
With Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and most of Grimm's Fairy Tales fully claimed by the film industry, newer tales like Gaiman's are Hollywood's only chance to bring fantasy fables to the big screen. Stardust doesn't lend itself to sequels, so new stories must be found. The best of these newer fairy tales for many years was the horrific "Pan's Labyrinth", but Pan aside, the pickings, I fear, are slim. I'd like to see an art-film version of "A Brief History of the Dead" (one of my favorite recent books), but it's unlikely to be blockbuster
material, and IMDB shows no current plans for such a film. Instead, it appears, we are faced with the tiger in the inflatable raft. I must confess, I have not read the book about the tiger in the inflatable raft. I'm not sure I ever will. But a full-length feature film? Gimme a lifejacket, I'll swim from here...
A big fantasy narrative is hard to pull off without borrowing from the past; Gaiman is no different. The hero-falls in love-with a star-in human form-is an old construction. C.S. Lewis uses it in his best book of the Narnia series, "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader", in which Caspian meets the daughter of a star at the end of the world and eventually marries her. Other details in Stardust are openly borrowed from a variety of ancient tales.
Years ago I wrote a juvenile fiction novel, which for various reasons I have not yet attempted to publish, that takes place in a fantasy realm. Throughout the writing process I was acutely aware of how difficult--perhaps impossible--it is to write fantasy that doesn't pull from many of these earlier epic and fairy tales but also has a compelling narrative and a sense of a larger story. If you don't use the fantasy symbols and archetypes so well established throughout western literature, you have to build from scratch, and that's tough going.
Anyhow, that's enough musing for tonight. Enjoy the frog.
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