"I think this ending is much better": Four Film Adaptations of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet for Children
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The paper will discuss four film versions of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet for children, namely the two episodes of BBC’s 1990s cycle Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (dir. by Robert Saakiants and Efim Gamburg respectively), and two loose adaptations of the Shakespeare stories, namely El Sueno de una noche de San Juan (2005, dir. by Ángel de la Cruz and Manolo Gómez) and Gnomeo and Juliet (2011, dir. by Kelly Asbury). Using the tradition of literary retellings of the Shakespeare plays for children as a parallel, the presentation will focus on how the film versions are appropriated for children, chiefly examining three aspects of the films: 1) how they deal with the complexity of the original plots; 2) to what extend and how they censor the bawdy language and, implicit and explicit, eroticism of the originals; and 3) how they deal with death and violence, present in both stories. The aim of the paper will be to define and present the specific strategies which the film adaptations, as opposed to literary ones, can use to handle these sensitive issues in order to present the originally adult stories to children audiences. |