The Comparison of the Movie and the Book Series of Harry Potter - Assignment Example

Expository Essay Between the Movie and the Harry Potter Book Series A whole generation of children grew up reading the J.K. Rowling “Harry Potter” book series. During my childhood, the tales of Harry and the half breed giant Hagrid and their friends Hermione and Ron were the adventures that most children heard about just before falling asleep. The writing style of J.K. Rowling was truly magical and imaginative. So much so that her words seemed to leap across the pages of her books, resting in the minds imagination as only a childs mind could conjure it to be. The book series by J.K. Rowling were the bible of every child who grew up in the early 2000s. It was the first book most of them read and was their first teacher in a way, when it came to handling the travails and tribulations of childhood and adolescence. Harry was the poster boy for the oppressed kids who had a tremendous amount of inner strength. Their adventures were metaphors for the real world problems that even adults had to deal with from time. In effect, the Harry Potter Book series helped shape the psyche of a generation of young adults. While the book series had such a profound effect on the lives of children, there were a number of people who wondered if the magic on the page could transfer seamlessly onto the silver screen. While some of its contemporaries managed to successfully translate their stories from book to film, the Harry Potter series was unable to do the same. The film transfer was choppy and wanting in more ways than one. Some say that a seamless translation to film for the book series was doomed from the very start. After all, the world that J.K. Rowling imagined was highly complex and dealt with very complicated characters on the page. Let us not even add the fact that each book would translate to more than 6 hours of film at a time if the director and writer were to remain true to the book. It is because of all of the complexities of the book world of Harry Potter that the films became poor renditions of the creative talent that J.K. Rowling placed into every book. The writers of the movie admitted that creating concise screenplays for the movie version was next to impossible because of the length of the books and the number of characters involved in every story. Then there was the problem posed by the intricate computer graphic images necessary for most parts of the film. Taking all of those requirements into account, it became easy to understand why the movie lacked in a number of ways. By collating certain characters from the book into the role of one person in the film, by merging 2 chapters from the book into one scene in the movie, and by cutting out certain characters and plots that readers felt were most important to the story, the movie version of the book series have become stand alone for the most part. Since the movie deviates so much from the original story telling in the book that it is almost a different novel altogether. The movies for the most part have a difficult time making clear sense of the theme and stories contained in every Harry Potter book because it must limit itself to a 3 hour viewing period for the moviegoers. The thickness alone of the book dictates that it needs more than 3 hours to be able to tell a decent version of the book on film. This is where the trouble lies for the film makers. By merging certain aspects of the book in order to facilitate story time, they break from the canon of the book series and thus leave a trail of disgruntled book fans in their wake. These Harry Potter fans enter the theater with an idea of what they would like to see in the film and most of the time, the director fails to deliver due to existing time and budget constraints. It is important to note that J.K. Rowling did have story approval for the movie version of the book series. She fought long and hard to get the studio to stay within canon but, as she learned from experience, there are just some compromises that need to be met in order to deliver the product by a given date. That is also where the big difference between the book and the movie lies. While Ms. Rowling had unlimited pages with which to build up her story and characters in situations that could take place over a number of chapters, the movie needed to get the chapter told in a matter of minutes using as little of the budget as possible for any necessary creative effects. Although the movie tended to dazzle the moviegoers with the special effects, the stories that they told, even though based on the book, were tepid presentations of the lively book version at best. There are actually two factions that exist in the Harry Potter world. Those who adore and admire the stories as told in the movies, and the purists, who feel that the movie not only bastardized the original books, but did the fans a disservice by doing abridged versions of the story. In fact, one will be hard pressed to find a person who adored the book series and also liked the movies. The Harry Potter books and movies exist on a separate plane for these people and they rarely find themselves in agreement about anything when it comes to the books and movies. The book series allowed its readers to keep their own ideas of how the characters looked, felt, and acted on the almost interactive pages of the book. Although the movies did its best to portray the same on film, it became more and more difficult for the producers to do so since the actors were actually aging in real life and they needed to reflect the physical changes in the actors that were not existent in the characters of the book. However different the Harry Potter book series is from the movie series, there is one thing that remains constant between the two. That is the story of survival, friendship, and strength in numbers that the characters in the book learned about over their seven years of adventures together. And those qualities, are clearly where the true enjoyment of both the movie and book format comes from for the fans. Minimum Word Count: 1000 Total Word Count: 1078 Read More