Without the inspiration provided by the series of bestselling books written by Terry Deary, Dominic Brigstocke's Horrible Histories: The Movie simply wouldn't be made. So, to celebrate the enduring link between the page and the screen, Cinema Paradiso presents a special three-part holiday survey of the best films to have been made from children's books. Having covered a range of swashbucklers and period sagas in Children's Books On Screen: Best Adventure Films we now turn to those films that have been adapted from novels that either fire the reader's imagination or play on their worst fears.
From the moment the first moving images flickered on to a screen in 1895, pioneer film-makers in Europe and the United States started seeking ways to capture more than mere everyday reality. As a professional magician, Georges Méliès recognised that cinema could create illusions to enchant and excite the audience and began experimenting with camera techniques like substitution cuts, double exposures and undercranking to fashion trick effects for the féeries or 'fairy plays' that were an extension of the fantastical literature that had already been in vogue for several decades.
Curiouser and Curiouser
It will come as no surprise, therefore, to learn that Méliès was the first to adapt Jonathan Swift's masterly satire, Gulliver's Travels (1726), in the form of Gulliver's Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants (1902). Like so many books that have become essential reading for all children, the account of Lemuel Gulliver's misadventures wasn't intended for young eyes. But, ever since Walt Disney made Gulliver Mickey in 1934, the majority of screen adaptations have been for family viewing. No one has yet surpassed the exquisite renderings of Dave Fleischer's 1939 animated record of the brewing feud between Lilliput and Blefiscu. But there is much to enjoy in the live-action trio of Jack Sher's The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960), Charles Sturridge's Gulliver's Travels (1996) and Rob Letterman's Gulliver's Travels (2010), which respectively star Kerwin Matthews, Ted Danson and Jack Black.
Curiously, Méliès was pipped to the post when it came to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871), as Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow produced cinema's first take on Alice in Wonderland in 1903, with Mabel Clark in the title role. Taking its visual cues from Sir John Tenniel's original illustrations and running for around 12 minutes, this was the longest film produced in Britain to that point and it can be viewed on the BFI's edition of the BBC's 1966 production (see below).
Gavin Millar explored how the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson came to write the books in Dreamchild (1985), which stars Ian Holm as the Oxford academic whose fixation with the dean of Christ Church's daughter, Alice Liddell (Amelia Shankley), would haunt the now Alice Hargreaves (Coral Browne) into old age. Those interested in the genesis of the novel should also check out a couple of documentaries, Philip Gardiner's The Initiation of Alice in Wonderland and WW Young's Alice: A Look into Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (both 2010).
Of the many subsequent screen excursions into Wonderland, the most peculiar is probably Norman Z. McLeod's 1933 version, which saw Charlotte Henry encounter Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, Gary Cooper as the White Knight and WC Fields as Humpty Dumpty. Opinion is divided over the calibre of Clyde Geronimi's 1951 Disney animation, while some cavil at the surreality of Jonathan Miller's aforementioned 1966 BBC interpretation, in which Anne-Marie Mallick's somewhat sombre Alice deals peevishly with Peter Sellers as the King of Hearts and the director's former Beyond the Fringe colleagues Peter Cook and Alan Bennett as the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse.
Fiona Fullerton took the lead in William Sterling's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972), which won BAFTAs for its cinematography and costumes and featured Spike Milligan as the Gryphon, Dudley Moore as the Dormouse, Ralph Richardson as the Caterpillar, Peter Sellers as the March Hare and Flora Robson as the Queen of Hearts. Monty Python animator Terry Gilliam mined Through the Looking Glass for his first solo outing as a director, Jabberwocky (1977), in which barrel maker Dennis Cooper (Michael Palin) finds himself jousting with the eponymous monster in the hope of marrying a princess.
Czech animator Jan Švankmajer was also inspired by the tale and his distinctive take on Jabberwocky (1971) can be found on the BFI's Jan Švankmajer: The Complete Short Films. In 1988, he also released Alice (1988), a dazzlingly original and magnificently eccentric stop-motion interpretation of Carroll's ideas that stars Kristýna Kohoutová alongside a stuffed White Rabbit, who keeps having to pause to recover the sawdust leaking from a hole in his fur. The Prague Chamber Ballet has also tackled Alice in Wonderland: A Dance Fantasy (1993), while Cinema Paradiso also offers Jonathan Haswell's take on Christopher Wheedon's ballet, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (2011). But it will take some time before anybody makes more innovative use of CGI than in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010), which cast Mia Wasikowska in the lead and Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. They reprised their roles in James Bobin's Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016), which Burton produced for Disney, although purists may prefer John Henderson's 1998 version, in which Kate Beckinsale's Alice is confronted by the Red and the White Queens, played by Sian Phillips and Penelope Wilton.
L. Frank Baum also sent his heroine to a faraway land in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), which was adapted as a Broadway musical within two years of its publication. There had been eight screen interpretations before Oliver Hardy played the Tin Man in slapstick clown Larry Semon's 1925 silent version of The Wizard of Oz, which saw Dorothy Dwan play Dorothy Gale. However, the role will always be associated with Judy Garland, even though MGM chief Louis B. Mayer felt she was too old and tried to borrow Shirley Temple from 20th Century-Fox. Directed by Victor Fleming, The Wizard of Oz (1939) remains Technicolor's masterpiece and it still tops such subsequent variations as Sidney Lumet's The Wiz (1978), Walter Murch's Return to Oz (1985), Kirk Thatcher's The Muppets' Wizard of Oz (2005), Spike Brandt's Tom and Jerry: Wizard of Oz (2011) and Tom and Jerry: Back to Oz (2016), Leigh Scott's The Witches of Oz (2011), Will Finn and Daniel St Pierre's Legends of Oz: Dorothy Returns, and Sam Raimi's Oz: The Great and Powerful (both 2013).
The adventure begins in their own back garden for the characters in Edith Nesbit's Five Children and It (1902), which was adapted by Marilyn Fox for the BBC in 1991 and for the big screen in 2004 by John Stephenson (with the help of a little bit of Henson puppet magic) to show how Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane and a baby brother called The Lamb relocate from London to rural Kent during the Great War and make the acquaintance of a temperamental Psammead sand-fairy (Eddie Izzard), who has the power to grant wishes.
Second Star on the Right
Following on from Rodney Bennett's Ian Holm vehicle, The Lost Boys (1978), and starring Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet, Marc Foster's Finding Neverland (2004) reveals how JM Barrie came to write the 1904 play, Peter Pan, which would be followed by the 1911 novel, Peter and Wendy. Betty Bronson first played the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up on-screen in Herbert Brenon's silent Peter Pan (1924). But, for many years, the staple telling was Disney's 1953 animated feature until Steven Spielberg gave the tale a live-action jolt with Hook (1991), which saw a grown-up Peter (Robin Williams) return to Neverland to confront his nemesis, Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman).
PJ Hogan put his own spin on the story in Peter Pan (2003), with Jeremy Sumpter, Rachel Hurd-Wood and Jason Isaacs as Peter, Wendy and Hook. Charlie Rowe played Peter opposite Rhys Ifans as James Hook in Nick Willing's revisionist 2011 mini-series, Neverland, which also boasted the voice of Keira Knightley as Tinker Bell (who has fronted seven animated features between 2008-15). Most recently, Joe Wright re-imagined the origin story in Pan (2015), which showed 12 year-old Peter (Levi Miller) being whisked away from a London orphanage during the Second World War to help Captain Hook (Garrett Hedlund) and Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara) defeat the ruthless Blackbeard the Pirate (Hugh Jackman).
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford when he started writing The Hobbit (1937), in which a wizard named Gandalf the Grey sends Bilbo Baggins on a quest across Middle Earth to recover the treasure stashed in Lonely Mountain by Smaug the dragon. Following Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass's 1977 animated version, New Zealander Peter Jackson put his inimitable spin on the text, with Martin Freeman and Ian McKellen playing Bilbo and Gandalf in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014), which drew seven Academy Award nominations between them.
Jackson had, of course, already created Oscar history with his adaptation of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which was a sequel to The Hobbit that had been written in stages between 1937-49. Once again, there had been an animated adaptation, which was directed by Ralph Bakshi in 1978 after Tolkien had refused to give permission for The Beatles to make their own version in the late 1960s. But nothing could match Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003), which racked up 30 Oscar nominations between them, with the concluding part of the trilogy equalling the record of 11 wins set by William Wyler's Ben-Hur (1959) and James Cameron's Titanic (1997). In total, the extended editions contain 3420 effects shots, which explains why the project took eight years to complete at a cost of $281 million. However, audiences were transfixed by the exploits of Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) and his companions, as they seek to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom, where it had been forged by the Dark Lord Sauron.
Another Oxford don, Clive Staples Lewis - who was played by Anthony Hopkins in Shadowlands (1993), Richard Attenborough's account of Lewis's romance with Joy Gresham (Debra Winger) - created his own imaginary kingdom in The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56), whose volumes have been adapted for television and the cinema. Barbara Kellerman played the White Witch challenging Aslan the Lion and the four Pevensie children for supremacy in the BBC version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1988), which was followed by Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1989), which sees the land of Narnia (which is accessible through the back of a wardrobe) under threat from King Miraz (Robert Lang).
Director Alex Kirby also adapted The Silver Chair (1990), in which Eustace Clarence Scrubb (David Thwaites) and Jill Pole (Camilla Power) join forces with Puddleglum (Tom Baker) to find the missing Prince Rilian (Richard Henders). But the series ended without The Magician's Nephew, The Horse and His Boy or The Last Battle being adapted, and the big-screen series has similarly stalled. Tilda Swinton assumed the role of the White Witch in Andrew Adamson's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), with Liam Neeson voicing Aslan. Ben Barnes took the title role in Adamson's Prince Caspian (2008), but Michael Apted's take on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010) proved a disappointment, despite Barnes reprising his role and Simon Pegg doing sterling work as the voice of Reepicheep the swashbuckling mouse. An adaptation of The Silver Chair has been in the works since 2014, but it has yet to materialise.
Flights of Fancy
Having been translated into 300 languages and dialects and having sold over 140 million copies, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince (1943) has a good claim to be the best French book of the 20th century. Charting an encounter in the Sahara between a stranded pilot (Richard Kiley) and a stranger with a habit of asking awkward questions (Steven Warner), the enticing story was filmed by Stanley Donen in 1974 with songs by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. In 2015, an all-star cast led by Jeff Bridges as The Aviator voiced Mark Osborne's animated account, which dispenses with the songs and heeds more to the spirit of De Saint-Exupéry's tome than the letter.
Elizabeth Goudge's The Little White Horse (1946) sat on the shelf for some while before Gábor Csupó dusted it down for The Secret of Moonacre (2009), which sees Maria Merryweather (Dakota Blue Richards) learn about the family's feud with the De Noirs when she is orphaned and goes to live in a crumbling manor with her uncle, Sir Benjamin (Ioan Gruffudd). Despite the visual challenges it poses, Mary Norton's The Borrowers (1952) has proved much more popular with film-makers. It centres on the tiny Clock family, who live under the floorboards in a house owned by the Big People they call 'Human Beans'. Adapted by Jay Presson Allen for Walter C. Miller's, the 1973 tele-adaptation won an Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Children's Programming and it has since been followed by John Henderson's 1992 BBC version, with Ian Holm and Penelope Wilson as Pod and Homily Clock, Peter Hewitt's 1997 feature, with Jim Broadbent and Celia Imrie as the Clocks, and Tom Harper's 2011 take, with Christopher Eccleston and Sharon Horgan trying to prevent daughter Aisling Loftus from straying upstairs.
Norton was also responsible for The Magic Bed Knob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons (1943) and Bonfires and Broomsticks (1945), which inspired Robert Stevenson's Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), a typically ingenious Disney blend of animation and live-action that sees apprentice witch Miss Eglantine Price (Angela Lansbury) take three children evacuated from the London blitz to Pepperinge Eye and, thence, to the magic island of Naboombu.
The winner of the prestigious Carnegie Medal, Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden (1958) is a modern classic that has been serialised by the BBC on three separate occasions. Christine Secombe's 1989 version sends Tom Long (Jeremy Rampling) to the country for the summer, where he encounters Hatty (Caroline Waldron) in the garden that appears behind the converted mansion where his aunt and uncle live whenever the grandfather clock in the hallway strikes 13. Anthony Way and Florence Hoath took over the roles for Willard Carroll's 1998 feature adaptation, which co-starred Greta Scacchi and James Wilby as Aunt Gwen and Uncle Alan.
Maurice Sendak's much-treasured picture book, Where the Wild Things Are (1963), came on the Disney radar in the early 1980s. But the nascent forms of computer-generated animation couldn't do justice to Sendak's fantasy world and it took until 2009 for Spike Jonze to find the right blend of live-action and CGI to join the eight year-old wolf-costumed Max (Max Records) on his journey to the island home of Carol (James Gandolfini) and his fellow monsters.
Equally inventive, Michael Ende's The Neverending Story (1979) was adapted by Wolfgang Petersen in 1984 and sees 10 year-old bibliophile Bastian Balthazar Bux (Barrett Oliver) become hooked on a book about a realm called Fantasia and the efforts of a warrior named Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) to find a cure for its ailing Childlike Empress (Tami Stronach). The role of the bookworm passed to Mark Rendall for the TV series, Tales From the Neverending Story (2002).
Published in 1980, Lynne Reid Banks's The Indian in the Cupboard attracted the dual interest of Melissa Mathison (who has scripted Steven Spielberg's ET the Extraterrestrial, 1982) and Muppeteer-turned-director Frank Oz for a 1995 retelling that sees nine year-old Omri (Hal Scardino) embark upon a series of adventures after the plastic Native American he receives as a birthday present comes to life and reveals himself to be an 18th-century Iroquois warrior named Little Bear (Litefoot).
Also animating the inanimate, Chris Van Allsburg's Jumanji (1981) has had a couple of screen incarnations. In Joe Johnston's 1995 take, Judy (Kirsten Dunst) and Peter (Bradley Pierce) help Alan Parrish (Robin Williams) and his friend Sarah (Bonnie Hunt) confound the possessed board game that had sucked him into its jungle world a quarter of a century earlier. The game has mutated into video version in Jake Kasdan's Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017), which challenges four teenagers to survive its perils in the guise of avatars who closely resemble Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart and Karen Gillan.
Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic (1995) reached the screen three years after it was published, with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman headlining Griffin Dunne's film as Sally and Gillian Owens, who have been raised as witches under a curse that spells doom for anyone who falls in love with them. The first novel in the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy, Philip Pullman's Northern Lights (1996), seemed destined to become a box-office smash when Chris Weitz adapted it as The Golden Compass (2007). But all plans to convert The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000) were shelved when the critics accorded a lukewarm welcome to this account of the titanic battle between Mrs Coulter (Nicole Kidman) and Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards), an orphan who lives in Jordan College in Oxford with her academic uncle, Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig).
Perhaps the greatest publishing phenomenon of recent times, JK Rowling's Harry Potter series (1997-2007) was always going to be translated to the big screen and the inspired casting of Daniel Radcliffe as Harry, Emma Watson as Hermione Granger and Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley gave a generation of young moviegoers a triumvirate to root for, as they completed their education at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The phalanx of exceptional British character actors also did their bit to create plenty of box-office history with Chris Columbus's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), Mike Newell's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) and David Yates's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 (2010) and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 (2011).
As all Potter fans know, Newt Scamander proved a huge influence on Harry's education and Eddie Redmayne steps into his shoes for an adventure in 1920s New York in David Yates's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016). Director and star rejoined forces for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018), in which Hogwarts professor Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) seeks Newt's help to prevent Dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) from having pure-blood wizards rule over all non-magical beings. One wonders what Tim Burton would do with one of JK Rowling's stories, as he continues to produce cinematic magic with the likes of Big Fish (2003), an adaptation of Daniel Wallace's Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions (1998) which sees Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney share the role of Edward Bloom, the spinner of tall tales that prompt son William (Billy Crudup) to discover where the truth really lies.
Neil Gaiman's Stardust (1999) similarly brings out the best in a fine cast in Matthew Vaughn's 2007 adaptation, as Tristan Thorn (Charlie Cox) finds himself having to protect the beautiful Yvaine (Claire Danes) from covetous witch Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer) after promising to catch a falling star to impress the girl of his dreams, Victoria Forester (Sienna Miller). Cornelia Funke's Inkheart (2003) was also made for the CGI era and Iain Softley's 2009 adaptation makes splendid use of special effects to enable the characters to leap off the page whenever Mortimer Folchart (Brendan Fraser) and his wife Teresa (Sienna Guillory) read to their daughter, Meggie (Eliza Bennett).
The five novels in Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black's series, The Spiderwick Chronicles (2003-09), have only produced one film to date, but there's charm to spare in Mark Waters's 2008 interpretation, which follows Jared and Simon Grace (both Freddie Highmore) and their older sister, Mallory (Sarah Bolger), to a new home, where they soon learn the secret of a book entitled Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide. By contrast, Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson & the Olympians pentalogy (2005-09) has been responsible for two features, Chris Columbus's Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (2010) and Thor Freudenthal's Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013), in which the eponymous hero (played by Logan Lerman) respectively discovers he's the son of Poseidon and is accused of stealing Zeus's lightning bolt and goes in search of the Golden Fleece to help clear his name.
Things That Go Bump
The screen history of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1819) provides an object lesson in how scary screen stories have gradually replaced spooks with shocks. Nobody needed to cover their eyes back in 1922, when Will Rogers starred as Ichabod Crane in Edward D. Venturini's The Headless Horseman and there's still no need to hide behind the sofa while listening to Basil Rathbone narrating the story in James Algar's Disneyfied retelling, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad (1949). But there's a reason the BBFC went with a 15 certificate when Tim Burton put his distinctive stamp on the tale in Sleepy Hollow (1999), which sets the action in 1799 and sends New York policeman Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) to an upstate Dutch settlement with a decapitation problem.
There are more chuckles than shivers in Robert Stevenson's 1968 Disney take on Ben Stahl's Blackbeard's Ghost (1965), which stars Peter Ustinov as legendary pirate Captain Edward Teach, whose spirit is forced to wander abroad until he performs a good deed. His chance comes when Godolphin College coach Dean Jones needs help with his athletics team. But there's a genuinely unsettling atmosphere in The Amazing Mr Blunden (1972), Lionel Jeffries's admirable adaptation of Antonia Barber's The Ghosts (1969), which features Laurence Naismith as the mysterious old man who offers Great War widow Dorothy Tutin a new home in a derelict country manor, where children Lynne Frederick and Garry Miller make the acquaintance of the similarly aged Rosalyn Landor and Marc Granger, only to discover that they had lived in the house a century earlier. Relocation also brings problems in The Watcher in the Woods (1980), John Hough's Disney rendition of Florence Engel Randall's A Watcher in the Woods (1976), which follows American teenager Jan Curtis (Lynn-Holly Johnson) to England with her parents, as they move into a rural manor, whose elderly owner, Mrs Aylwood (Bette Davis), detects Jan's resemblance to the daughter who mysteriously disappeared in an abandoned chapel in the woods.
A decade after its publication, Annette Curtis Klause's 1997 novel became Katja von Garnier's Blood and Chocolate, which stars Agnes Bruckner as a teenage girl forced to choose between artist Hugh Dancy and her werewolf heritage. Two years later, Darren Shan's Cirque du Freak (2000) was adapted by Paul Weitz as Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, with Chris Massoglia as Darren Shan, the teenager bitten by Larten Crepsley (John C. Reilly), whose creepy entourage includes Madame Truska (Salma Hayek) and Gavner Purl (Willem Dafoe).
Mention teenage vampires and werewolves, however, and most people will think of Stephanie Meyer's bestselling Twilight series (2004-08), which has sold over 120 million copies worldwide. Naturally, Hollywood couldn't resist such a money-spinning franchise and cast Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan encountering the brooding Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) when she moves to the small town of Forke, Washington in Catherine Hardwicke's Twilight (2008). However, their relationship is complicated by Bella's growing fascination with Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) in Chris Weitz's The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) and the battle for her soul and the titanic struggle between vampires and werewolves continues into David Slade's The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010) and Bill Condon's The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 (2011) and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 (2012).
Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy (2007) gave Zoey Deutch and Lucy Fry roles to sink their teeth into when Mark Waters cast them in his 2014 adaptation, as Rose Hathaway and Vasilisa Dragomir, the classmates at St Vladimir's Academy who are respectively a half-human Dhampir and an undead Moroi. There's more spooky schooling on offer in Scott Hicks's 2016 version of Lauren Kate's Fallen (2009), which sees Addison Timlin play Lucinda Price, whose arrival at the Sword and Cross Academy for troubled teenagers piques the interest of religious studies teacher Sophia Bliss (Joely Richardson) and classmate Cameron Briel (Harrison Gilbertson).
In 2013, Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl's Beautiful Creatures (2009) was filmed by Richard Lagravanese with Ethan Waite (Alden Ehrenreich) as the teenager who literally gets to meet the girl of his dreams, Lena Duchannes (Alice Englert), the Caster with magical powers who has to decide whether to embrace the Light or the Dark side. Three years later, Patrick Ness's 2011 fantasy novel, A Monster Calls, was adapted by JA Bayona, with Liam Neeson voicing 'The Monster' who helps 12 year-old Conor O'Malley (Lewis MacDougall) deal with his nightmares, as he is cared for by his strict grandmother, Mrs Clayton (Sigourney Weaver), while mother Lizzie (Felicity Jones) battles a life-threatening illness.
Plenty of science fiction aimed at youthful readers has made the jaunt to the silver screen, with Disney putting new life into Donald G. Payne's The Lost Ones (1961) by invoking the spirit of Jules Verne and HG Wells in Robert Stevenson's The Island At the Top of the World (1974), which heads north with Sir Anthony Ross (Donald Sinden) and his party, where they encounter a community of 10th-century Vikings while searching for Ross's missing son. Published around the same time, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (1962) has been filmed twice by Disney since the turn of the millennium. In John Kent Harrison's 2003 TV version, Mrs Whatsit (Alfre Woodard), Mrs Who (Alison Elliott) and Mrs Which (Kate Nelligan) guide siblings Meg (Katie Stuart) and Charles Wallace Murry (David Dorfman) when they travel to a distant planet to locate their missing astrophysicist father. When Ava DuVernay took the reins in 2018, the astrals were played by Oprah Winfrey (Which), Reese Witherspoon (Whatsit) and Mindy Kaling (Who), while Storm Reid and Deric McCabe essayed the kids seeking the missing Chris Pine.
Alexander Key's Escape to Witch Mountain (1968) has spawned three Disney movies, with dastardly millionaire Ray Milland seeking to exploit the clairvoyant powers of Tony and Tia Malone (Ike Eisenmann and Kim Richards) in John Hough's Escape to Witch Mountain (1975). The orphans were targetted by scientist Christopher Lee and assistant Bette Davis in Hough's Return from Witch Mountain (1978), although three decades were to pass before Andy Fickman entrusted telekinetic siblings AnnaSophia Robb and Alexander Ludwig into the care of Las Vegas cabby Dwayne Johnson in Race to Witch Mountain (2009).
In 2013, Gavin Hood stuck closely to the source in taking on Orson Scott Card's Enders Game (1985), which stars Asa Butterfield as Ender Wiggin, who is trained by Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford) to prepare for an invasion by the alien race called the Formics. The apocalypse has already happened by the time Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges co-star for the first time in Philip Noyce's 2014 adaptation of Lois Lowry's 1993 YA novel The Giver, which sees Brenton Thwaites ready himself to become the next Receiver of Memory in a community still coming to terms with a catastrophe known as The Ruin.
In addition to penning Jumanji and The Polar Express (which was filmed by Robert Zemeckis in 2004), Chris Van Allsburg has also written Zathura (2002), which was adapted in 2005 by Jon Favreau, with Josh Hutcherson and Jonah Bobo as bickering brothers Walter and Danny Budwing, who transport themselves and older sister Lisa (Kristen Stewart) into outer space after playing a game they find in the basement of the old house belonging to their divorced father (Tim Robbins). Jeanne DuPrau's City of Ember (2003) was adapted in 2008 for producer Tom Hanks by Gil Kenan, who brought to life the underground metropolis whose fading power supply sends Saoirse Ronan and Harry Treadway on a perilous quest.
Also published in 2003, Christopher Paolini's Eragon was adapted by Stefen Fangmeier in 2006 to pit Eragon (Ed Speleers) and the last dragon, Saphira, against the wicked King Galbatorix (John Malkovich). Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments series (2007-13) sparked Harald Zwart's The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (2013), which centres on the bond that forms between Brooklyn teenager Clary Fray (Lily Collins) and Jace (Jamie Campbell Bower), a Shadowhunter determined to rid the city of demons.
Another franchise to find film favour is Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games (2008-10), which helped Jennifer Lawrence become a major star, as she displayed pluck and ingenuity as Katniss Everdeen in seeking to return to District 12 by surviving the ordeals sanctioned by President Coriolanus Shaw (Donald Sutherland) in Gary Ross's The Hunger Games (2012) and its unflinching sequels, Francis Lawrence's The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (2014) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015). Likewise, James Dashner The Maze Runner series (2009-16) has given rise to three features by Wes Ball. In The Maze Runner (2014), Thomas (Dylan O'Brien) wakes in a large maze known as The Glade, with no knowledge of the outside world. His attempts to escape and keep out of the clutches of the menacing nocturnal beings called Grievers are chronicled in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015) and Maze Runner: The Death Cure (2018).
A year after the publication of Pittacus Lore's I Am Number Four (2010), it was filmed by DJ Caruso to star Alex Pettyfer as an alien from the planet Lorien, who is masquerading on Earth under the name John Smith in order to avoid detection by the deadly Mogadorians. In the first two of the films adapted from Veronica Roth's Divergent series (2011-13) - Neil Burger's Divergent (2014) and Robert Schwentke's Insurgent (2015) - Beatrice 'Tris' Prior (Shailene Woodley) puts her trust in Tobias 'Four' Eaton (Theo James) to withstand the plotting of faction leader Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet). In Schwentke's Allegiant (2016), the pair seek to escape from the city to help ensure its future, but the concluding episode, Ascendant, was cancelled to leave Tris and Four in cine-limbo.
In 2016, Tim Burton latched on to Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs's ingenious 2011 YA blend of text and photograph, to send 16 year-old Jake Portman (Asa Butterfield) to Cairnholm Island in Wales to discover the meaning of 'the loop of 3 September 1943' and protect such 'peculiar' children with special powers as the levitating Emma (Ella Purnell), the pyrokinetic Olive (Lauren McCrostie) and the invisible Millard (Cameron King). The reviews were mixed and not everyone felt that Steven Spielberg nailed his 2018 adaptation of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One (2011), in which people in 2045 seek an escape from daily life through the virtual reality entertainment universe known as the Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation. But the tension is ratcheted up as Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) and Samantha Cook (Olivia Cooke) join the others gunters searching for the Golden Easter Egg that will enable them to control OASIS.
Nicola Yoon's Everything, Everything (2015) was brought to the screen in 2017 by Stella Meghie to chart the unconventional romance between boy next door Nick Robinson and Amandla Stenberg, who suffers from Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Disorder and can't risk leaving her home or interacting with strangers. The following year saw Jennifer Yuh Nelson film Alexandra Bracken's The Darkest Minds (2012) in order to follow the government's efforts to control the survivors who have acquired special powers after recovering from a disease known as Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration.
The fantasy genre is a wide one and most often results in sequels, as most of the novels come in series, so there's plenty to see and choose from. But there are also some great standalone films and if you want a recommendation just check out Family Sci-Fi & Fantasy section for the most popular releases.
