The way a piece of literature is presented greatly effects the way it is interpreted and the way that it received. A movie may receive higher publicity than a book, but if the book is the original way the story was meant to be shared, then it is usually the better one to look into. This is evidentiary true with the book, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
A Christmas Carol has been made into so many movies, musicals, and plays that it is hard to count them all. All of them have a slightly different approach to the story line, which affects the way it is received. For example, Disney came out with a movie version of the book in 2009 called, A Christmas Carol when that version is compared to the book there are some major differences that stand out.
In this film adaptation and most others, there is artistic freedom that is took to make this version stand out from the others. These spouts of artistic freedom vary from movie to movie, which is to be expected. In this specific version, the artistic freedom takes place in the form of the way the changed Scrooge is portrayed. As the audio stays very close to that of the books, the visual portrayal of the changed Scrooge is different. The changed Scrooge in the 2009 version is quite more animated then the way the book has him. In the movie, he slides across rooftops, dances with the housekeeper, and slides down the street holding on to the back of a carriage was all fabricated and was created to make the movie more appealing to the audience. This effects the telling of the story by giving the reader an already implied idea of what Scrooge was like as a changed man, even though the book does not specifically tell us it exactly.
The 1992 version of A Christmas Carol- The Muppet Christmas Carol, takes artistic freedom by making the movie a musical and adding a comedic twist to the original plot. These twist from the movie effect the telling of the story because they are adding into what Charles Dickens originally wrote and slowly are going away from what he intended the readers to understand.
When something is presented in a different medium then what is was intended things are perceived differently. Charles Dickens wrote the story as a book and in the book was all the content that you need to interpret the story for yourself. When a book is transformed into a movie, the interpretation is done for you and there is not much left for you to analyze and make your own realizations and theories. The movie directors and writers do that for you, which is why most people tend to like to watch a movie rather than read a book because watching a movie requires a less substantial amount of thinking and analyzing when compared to reading. When you are reading you are free to make your own ideas about a character without anyone else’s preset notions about what they think who the character is, whereas in a movie you have someone else visual portrayal in front of you and that normally clouds your own thinking because they have already done that. In both movie versions of A Christmas Carol Scrooge is shown for you, but in the book, you have no visual, physical picture of what Charles Dickens was thinking when he wrote it, rather it is up to you to picture Ebenezer Scrooge for yourself with only the facts that Mr. Dickens gives us.
The way that a story is presented truly affects the way the story is told and the way it is received. Do you agree? Leave a Comment with your thoughts
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