The common wisdom that “the book is usually better than the film” is as true of children’s literature as of its adult counterpart: cinema is stacked with adaptations of children’s classics that may be perfectly proficient, but haven’t the inspired individuality of the works at their source.
Devotees of Roald Dahl have learned this a lot over the years. His offbeat humour and offhand storytelling style, so irresistible to kids, rarely translates all the way to screen — it’s thwarted such titans as Steven Spielberg, who whiffed with The BFG (Netflix), though Wes Anderson’s droll Fantastic Mr Fox succeeded by inventing eccentricities of its own. Best of all, Nicolas Roeg’s very adult sense of the macabre proved a delicious fit for The Witches (Amazon Prime), notwithstanding a simplified, studio-mandated happy ending.
