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Radio, Television, Film, Audio and Video
Michael Rosen
Children’s reading is now integrated into a multimedia world. That is to say, systems of
communication other than books have a great bearing on what, how and why children
read. Looked at in terms of flow, various routes to the child with a book in its hand can
be discerned. Book (for example, a children’s classic like The Secret Garden (1911)) →
film script → film (1949, 1993) → child in the cinema → child with the book and/or
adaptation; script → television series (for example, Bernard Ashley’s Running Scared
(1986)) → watched by child → Ashley simultaneously writes a book (1986) → child with
the book; book (for example, Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth (1954)) → radio
adaptation (1955) → child as listener → child with book...and so on. To take a classic
example, Collodi’s Pinocchio (1883) was adapted by Disney (1940) and made into the
cartoon film that millions of people go to see, some of whom read the various Disney
Corporation’s book versions or some other edition of Collodi. The reading of Pinocchio by
any one child is thus embedded in other processes, for example film scripting, the
Disney publicity machine, social film going, video hire, family and peer-group discussion
of ‘what’s on’, family and peer-group discussion of the film, comparisons made by
critics, teachers, family and friends between the book and the film and so on. So when a
child approaches a librarian and asks for dinosaur books/love stories/horror books and
so on it will be in part because that area of interest has made itself felt on the child
through the multimedia world. The simple opposition of one electronic form and
children’s literature will not bear close examination.
It can also be argued that this integration of books within other media has now come
to affect all children’s reading, no matter whether a specific book has or has not been
adapted and presented in another media. Traces of this can be found in the visual,
linguistic and stylistic aspects of children’s literature. In several of her picture books,
Fiona French uses a cinematic intertextuality, in particular her Snow White in New York
(1986) that evokes 1930s musicals. Jon Scieszka takes the traditional tale of the Three
Little Pigs, re-writes it from the point of view of the wolf, investing him with the voice of
gangster movies and television series (The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! by A.Wolf
(1989)). Robert Cormier, with such books as The Chocolate War (1974), and After the
First Death (1979) uses a cinematic style of writing in short scenes with little digression.
The Australian children’s writer Morris Gleitzman has said (in interview on BBC Radio’s
Treasure Islands (1993)) that he follows the scriptwriter’s rule: always begin a scene as
late as you possibly can; meaning that if one can avoid scene setting, plot
recapitulation, narrative commentary, then avoid it! This approach can be found both in