Intergenerational Solidarity, Poetry Animation & Holistic Fragmentation in Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet A Master's Thesis by Rawan Ibrahim Gharib Mohamed School of Education University of Glasgow July 2021 In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, MEDIA & CULTURE This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) 1 ‫‪Abstract‬‬ ‫‪This thesis follows the elaborate and complex adaptation process of Kahlil Gibran's‬‬ ‫‪classical The Prophet into the 2014 animated feature film Kahlil Gibran's The‬‬ ‫‪Prophet. I closely examine how and why this collection of prose poems covering a‬‬ ‫‪wide range of human experience has worked out as an animation film for a dual‬‬ ‫‪audience of children and adults. My analysis looks into the reasons and the context of‬‬ ‫‪producing the film, the sourcetext as a classical literary work, as well as the medium‬‬ ‫‪of animation itself, both representational and abstract. My argument introduces Kahlil‬‬ ‫‪Gibran's The Prophet as a unique case of 'holistic fragmentation', in which various‬‬ ‫‪styles, types and techniques of animation are harmonised and orchestrated.‬‬ ‫‪Furthermore, I explore the possible links Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet highlights‬‬ ‫‪between children's poetry and poetry animation and I discuss this filmic adaptation as‬‬ ‫‪a site of intergenerational relations and practices. I carry out my analysis with the‬‬ ‫‪theoretical framework of adaptation criticism, children's poetry, animation aesthetics‬‬ ‫‪as connected to literary devices, and intergenerational relations.‬‬ ‫ملخ‪:‬ص‪:‬‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫تناق) هذ& األطروحمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ةةالمعالجمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة المعقدمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ةيكيسالكل ةكباشتملاو ة والمتشابكمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة لكالسيكيمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة جبرامليف يف "يبنلا" ن خليمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ل جبرامليف يف "يبنلا" ن "النبمليف ي" فمليف ي فيلم‬ ‫الرسو م المتحركمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة الطويمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ل لعا م ‪ .2014‬يتعمنم ةعومجملا هذه رثأ دادتما بابسأو ةيفيك يف ليلحتلا ق التحليمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ل فمليف ي كيفيمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة وأسبانم ةعومجملا هذه رثأ دادتما ب امتدانم ةعومجملا هذه رثأ د أثر هذ& المجموعمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة من‬ ‫جمهورا‬ ‫القصائد النثريمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ةةالمعنيمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة بجوان‪ A‬متعدنم ةعومجملا هذه رثأ دمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ةيكيسالكل ةكباشتملاو ة من التجربمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة اإلنسانيمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ةةفمليف ي فيلم رسو م متحركمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة يستهداًروهمج ف‬ ‫ً‬ ‫نم ةعومجملا هذه رثأ دوج ا من األطفا‪ K‬والبالغين‪ .‬تتتبيبدأ لمعك ردصملا صنلاو ‪،‬مليفلا جاتنإ قايسو بابسأ ةحورطألا ع األطروحمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة أسبانم ةعومجملا هذه رثأ دادتما ب وسيايبدأ لمعك ردصملا صنلاو ‪،‬مليفلا جاتنإ ق إنتايبدأ لمعك ردصملا صنلاو ‪،‬مليفلا ج الفيلميبدأ لمعك ردصملا صنلاو ‪ ،‬والن‪:‬ص المصدر كعممليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ل أنم ةعومجملا هذه رثأ دبمليف ي‬ ‫مز ً‬ ‫كالسيكمليف ييبدأ لمعك ردصملا صنلاو ‪ ،‬باإلضافمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة إل‪ P‬جماليامليف ةحورطألا مدقت ‪.‬يبيرجتلاو يليثمتلا هيعونب هسفن كيرحتلا نف ت فن التحريمليف ةحورطألا مدقت ‪.‬يبيرجتلاو يليثمتلا هيعونب هسفن ك نفسمليف ةحورطألا مدقت ‪.‬يبيرجتلاو يليثمتلا ه بنوعيمليف ةحورطألا مدقت ‪.‬يبيرجتلاو يليثمتلا ه التمثيلمليف ي والتجريبمليف ي‪ .‬تقد م األطروحمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة فيلم‬ ‫"النبمليف ي لخليمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ل جبرامليف يف "يبنلا" ن" كحالمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة فريدمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ةيكيسالكل ةكباشتملاو ة من نوعها لة "التجزئمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة الشاململيف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة"يبدأ لمعك ردصملا صنلاو ‪ ،‬تتماهمليف ي وتتسنم ةعومجملا هذه رثأ دادتما بابسأو ةيفيك يف ليلحتلا ق فيها أسالي‪ A‬وأنواعة‬ ‫أيضا الروابنيب ةلمتحملا طةالمحتململيف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة بين‬ ‫معا ميبدأ لمعك ردصملا صنلاو ‪،‬مليفلا جاتنإ قايسو بابسأ ةحورطألا ع االحتفانيب ةلمتحملا طباورلا اًضيأ ليلحتلا فشكتسي ‪.‬اهتيدرفب ظ بفرنم ةعومجملا هذه رثأ ديتها‪ .‬يستكشنيب ةلمتحملا طباورلا اًضيأ ليلحتلا ف التحليمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ل ً‬ ‫وتقنيامليف ةحورطألا مدقت ‪.‬يبيرجتلاو يليثمتلا هيعونب هسفن كيرحتلا نف ت مختلفمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة لفن التحريمليف ةحورطألا مدقت ‪.‬يبيرجتلاو يليثمتلا هيعونب هسفن ك ً‬ ‫شعر األطفا‪ K‬وأفال م التحريمليف ةحورطألا مدقت ‪.‬يبيرجتلاو يليثمتلا هيعونب هسفن ك الشعريمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة التمليف ي تبرزها معالجمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة الن‪:‬صيبدأ لمعك ردصملا صنلاو ‪ ،‬كما يلقمليف ي بالضوةجلاعملا عورشم ىلع ء عل‪ P‬مشروع المعالجمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة‬ ‫كمحفّ ز للعالقامليف ةحورطألا مدقت ‪.‬يبيرجتلاو يليثمتلا هيعونب هسفن كيرحتلا نف ت والممارسامليف ةحورطألا مدقت ‪.‬يبيرجتلاو يليثمتلا هيعونب هسفن كيرحتلا نف ت الثقافيمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة واالجتماعيمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ةةالعابرمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ةيكيسالكل ةكباشتملاو ة لألجيا‪ .K‬يعتمد تحليلمليف ي اإلطار النظردقنل ي لنقد‬ ‫المعالجمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ةيبدأ لمعك ردصملا صنلاو ‪ ،‬وشعر األطفا‪K‬يبدأ لمعك ردصملا صنلاو ‪ ،‬والعالقامليف ةحورطألا مدقت ‪.‬يبيرجتلاو يليثمتلا هيعونب هسفن كيرحتلا نف ت العابرمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ةيكيسالكل ةكباشتملاو ة لألجيا‪K‬يبدأ لمعك ردصملا صنلاو ‪ ،‬وجماليامليف ةحورطألا مدقت ‪.‬يبيرجتلاو يليثمتلا هيعونب هسفن كيرحتلا نف ت فن التحريمليف ةحورطألا مدقت ‪.‬يبيرجتلاو يليثمتلا هيعونب هسفن ك المتصلمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة بالجماليامليف ةحورطألا مدقت ‪.‬يبيرجتلاو يليثمتلا هيعونب هسفن كيرحتلا نف ت األنم ةعومجملا هذه رثأ دبيمليف يف "يبنلا" ناربج ليلخ ناربج ة‪.‬‬ ‫‪2‬‬ Contents List of Figures.........................................................................................................................4 Acknowledgements.................................................................................................................5 Introduction............................................................................................................................6 Chapter One Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet: What Is It in a Poetry-AnimationAdaptation?...........................................................................................................................11 Adaptation Criticism...........................................................................................................11 Adaptation as Intergenerational Solidarity..........................................................................17 Hypothesis of Poetry Animation.........................................................................................22 Children’s Poetry and Poetry Picturebooks Adaptations.....................................................26 Conclusion..........................................................................................................................31 Chapter Two (Adapted) text-to-life Intergenerational Solidarity in Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet...................................................................................................................................32 Not So Disneyfied Family Film..........................................................................................34 Nostalgia and Intergenerational Solidarity in Tandem........................................................39 Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet: The Curriculum Guide........................................................45 Conclusion..........................................................................................................................49 Chapter Three Holistic Fragmentation: Mapping (Children’s) Poetry Animation in Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet...............................................................................................50 The Telling Representational Animation vs. The Showing Abstract Animation.................52 Finding the (Poetic) Voice and the Politics of Silence........................................................55 The Subjective Correlative in KGTP’s Poetry Animation Shorts........................................61 Conclusion..........................................................................................................................67 Conclusions...........................................................................................................................68 Works Cited:.........................................................................................................................70 3 List of Figures 1.1 Still from KGTP’s opening sequence featuring The Prophet’s book cover. 1.2 Still from KGTP’s opening sequence featuring the film title. 1.3 Still from Tomm Moore’s On Love featuring an adaptation of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. 1.4 Still from Michał Socha’s On Freedom featuring intertextual reference to a famous quote from Franz Kafka. 2.1 Still featuring Almitra hiding in Mustafa’s coat 2.2 Still from Mustafa’s and Almitra’s first encounter featuring Almitra as caged. 2.3 Still from Mustafa’s and Almitra’s first encounter featuring their shared love of the wind. 2.4 Photos from Nina Paley’s blog post on her embroidery technique trial. 2.5 Still from Nina Paley’s On Children featuring the Tree of Life embroidery motif. 2.6 Still from Nina Paley’s On Children featuring the beginning of the vector DNA mutation sequence. 2.7 Still from Nina Paley’s On Children featuring the beginning of the tree of life sequence. 2.8 Still from Nina Paley’s On Children featuring the beginning of the mother-bird little hitching into the parent-child sequence. 2.9 Still from Nina Paley’s On Children featuring the beginning of the bow/archer releasing arrows sequence. 3.1 Still from KGTP featuring Almitra carelessly swinging near the Paha’s poster. 3.2 Still from KGTP featuring Almitra running to save Mustafa after locking the officer inside the phone booth. 3.3 Still from KGTP featuring Almitra reciting her first poem to prisoner Mustafa. 3.4 Still from KGTP featuring Almitra talking to Mustafa. 3.5 Sequence from Joan C. Gratz’s On Work demonstrating the metamorphosis through claypainting animation technique. 3.6 Sequence from Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi’s On Death demonstrating the metamorphosis through watercolour styled animation. 3.7 Still from Bill Plympton’s On Eating and Drinking showing the serio-comic effect. 3.8 Sequence from Tomm Moore’s On Love demonstrating animation's metamorphosis through figures’ movement. 4 Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Justyna DeszczTryhubczak for the useful comments, remarks, guidance and engagement through the learning process of this master thesis. Furthermore, I would like to thank my loved ones, who have supported me throughout the entire process of writing this thesis, both emotionally and through thought-provoking conversations that inspired me and put me on the right track. I will always be grateful for your love. 5 Introduction One rarely forgets a bad or a good cinematic adaptation of one’s favourite book. If the adaptation is 'good,' we may describe it as doing justice to the source material. On the other hand, if it turns out 'bad,' we are likely to hold it accountable for ruining our relationship with the text. What makes a filmic adaptation a good or bad one for a viewer, however, is intensely subjective and highly debatable: it involves elements of taste, personal connection to the sourcetext, cultural and historical contexts, the viewing experience, and the viewer's expectations of a specific director or producer. Nevertheless, no matter how 'good' or 'bad' an adaptation is, it will always offer some kind of pleasure. As Linda Hutcheon argues, "adaptation as repetition is [...] not a postponement of pleasure; it is in itself a pleasure; [reminiscent of a] child's delight in hearing the same nursery rhymes or reading the same books over and over. Like a ritual, this kind of repetition brings comfort, a fuller understanding, and the confidence that comes with the sense of knowing what is about to happen next" (114). When I watched the 2014 cinematic adaptation of one of my all-time favourite books, The Prophet, the pleasure of repetition was definitely there, albeit with much more to it than a sense of knowing or familiarity with Gibran's classical poems. Hutcheon's use of the childlike delight with repeated nursery rhymes unintentionally taps into the depth of my watching experience and my interest in examining the animated feature Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet (KGTP, for abbreviation) closely. The above-mentioned analogy establishes a link between the recipient's experience of an adaptation and the child's ongoing rediscovery of the pleasure in the poetic-musical experience of nursery rhymes, which, to a great extent, introduces the focus of my analysis. Indeed, KGTP is an exceptional case of a cinematic feature-length poetry animation adaptation that simultaneously breaks the conventional expectations of poetry animation films to be short and highly abstract and of poetry for adults as unlikely to be accessible for children. As simple an activity as it may seem, the 85-minute experience of watching KGTP 6 interconnectedly operates through three dualist spectra of 1) childhood and adulthood, 2) abstract and representational animation, and 3) narrative and poetry structures. On one level, KGTP is an adaptation of highly philosophical and spiritual adults' poems for children's viewership. On another level, it is an adaptation of a collection of poetry into an animated feature-length that moves back and forth between the framing narrative and the distinctively styled segments of animated poems. Exploring how the two dualities are balanced out through an animated adaptation can be insightful on different levels for interdisciplinary research concerning the various areas of adaptation criticism, children's poetry, poetry animation, intergenerational relations and multimodal pedagogy. The Prophet, written by Lebanese American Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), was initially published in 1923. Readers and critics received the book as a spiritual, philosophical, dogmafree text that stood for a countercultural Bible 1 and became both Gibran's best-known book and a steady seller in more than fifty languages to this date. The book is a collection of twenty-six prose poems recited by the poet Almustafa, who is about to board a ship that will take him home after twelve years of exile in the small town of Orphalese. On his way to the port, he is stopped by groups of people asking for his wisdom on a wide range of topics related to the human condition. In 2014, the eight most popular out of the twenty-six poems ––"On Children", "On Love", "On Marriage", "On Work", "On Eating and Drinking", "On Good and Evil", "On Freedom", and "On Death"–– were adapted into eight animated segments by eight different award-winning independent animators into the feature animated film Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. Former Disney icon Roger Allers (director of The Lion King) developed a framing story that connects these segments through a simple plot of a unique friendship that emerges between poet and artist Mustafa (Liam Neeson) and Almitra (Quvenzhané Wallis), a voiceless child who struggles with navigating her day-to-day world after her father's death. Through their friendship, Mustafa helps Almitra find her voice again 1 See for example Bidler, Philip D., Scriptures for a Generation: What We Were Reading in the ’60s. Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994. 7 through poetry, while she helps him peacefully resign to his inevitable execution by becoming the 'messenger' who saves his writings and paintings before the police authorities destroy them to ashes. Allers' story is loose and simple enough to allow smooth transitions from one poetry segment to another yet engaging through small doses of drama and humour. Mustafa is a political prisoner who is held in "house arrest", staying in a house he cannot leave, with guards keeping him there. The film opens with Almitra performing her daily routine of causing trouble in the market, stealing, almost flying from one building to another with her seagull friend, with whom she communicates in the gull's language that no human can decipher. For the village people, Almitra is a nuisance at best, and a petty thief at worst. This morning is especially chaotic because Mustafa, who is admired by almost everyone in the village except for the Pasha (the station house officer), is receiving an offer to be sent back to his homeland on the condition of never returning to the village. Almitra's mother Kamila (Salma Hayek) is the housekeeper for the house Mustafa is kept in, and so the two main characters get to finally meet when Kamila decides to take Almitra with her to work because she cannot afford the consequences of any more chaos from the girl on this day. Mustafa and Almitra click immediately in a way that eliminates all our conventional beliefs regarding what being a child or an adult entails. Later on, Mustafa finds out that the offer of boarding the ship to his homeland is a trap leading to his execution, which can only be stopped by Mustafa's disavowing of every verse he ever wrote and a pledge to never write or speak poetry again. Mustafa firmly refuses the authorities' conditions, and while he is awaiting his execution, Almitra's voice comes through to change everything. As a classical literary work written by the immigrant, cosmopolitan figure Gibran Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet is a transgenerational joker text with the potential to be tackled through various creative approaches. One of the eye-opening understandings of the adaptation process Hutcheon presents is that it is a "transgenerational phenomenon" (32), a process of the natural evolution of the text which arguably parallels the evolution of the adapter's and the recipient's 8 personal experiences with it. She further explains that the decision and the effort to adapt a particular text is an act of paying homage in its essence; hence, the fidelity discourse regarding the adapter's contesting of different aesthetic or political views may constrain the adaptation analysis rather than facilitate it. From the adapter's perspective, "adaptation is an act of appropriating or salvaging, and this is always a double process of interpreting and then creating something new," regardless of the motives (20). That said, I may align more with Hutcheon's approach when discussing the complex and multilayered cinematic adaptation of The Prophet, which compels us to be more concerned with what an adaptation does to its sourcetext than with measuring its success or failure in evoking the same feelings and reaction towards the sourcetext in its primary form (which is arguably an impossible mission to accomplish anyway). Furthermore, understanding adaptation as a "process of creation and of reception" (15) that forges within a context of aspects, which are "material, public, and economic as much as they are cultural, personal, and aesthetic" (28), necessitates the manifold analysis of KGTP in the three chapters composing this thesis. The first chapter, "Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet: What Is It in A Poetry-AnimationAdaptation?" unfolds the cinematic poetry adaptation by providing a broader context for the adaptation project in terms of its process, final product, and the audience's reception, while relating the adaptation project to my theoretical framework and methodology for the analysis in the following two chapters. I introduce the existent body of literature concerning adaptation criticism, intergenerational solidarity, poetry animation, and children's poetry, as well as the nuances between the key definitions and theories I will be employing in my analysis. The second chapter, “(Adapted) text-to-life Intergenerational Solidarity in Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet”, delves deeper into the intergenerational solidarity aspects of KGTP regarding the intergenerational relations, connecting and shifting childhood and adulthood cultures either through practices of nostalgia or forming a collaborative, progressive world-changing view for older and younger generations to share. Furthermore, the analysis touches upon the pedagogical impulse behind most of the filmic adaptations of classical literary texts as 9 constituting one of the largest markets for students of literature and their teachers who are keen on such adaptations' appeal to the cinematic imaginations of their pupils. Lastly, I dedicate the third chapter, “Holistic Fragmentation: Mapping (Children's) Poetry Animation in Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet” for venn-diagramming the three aforementioned spectra of childhood and adulthood, abstract and representational animation, and narrative and poetry structures. In other words, I attempt a multidimensional framework of adaptations' modes of communication, poetry animation, literary-criticism-based animated adaptation analysis and children's poetry to analyse KGTP as both an artistic whole and fragmented episodes of poetry animation. My analysis is trying to answer the following questions: What is in a poetry animation adaptation? Why and how are further interdisciplinary research approaches to answer this question a must? How can adaptations like KGTP be a rich field of intergenerational solidarity practices, and how do such practices catalyse political and sociocultural change in different spheres where childhood and adulthood intersect and interact, such as school, family, and civil communities of activism movements? And finally, why and how animation and poetry correspond well to one another as mediums? How does KGTP operate as both a multimodal whole and as independent poetry animation shorts? And what does this holistic fragmentation dynamic have to do with the adaptations' telling and showing modes of communication? To address this strongly interconnected set of questions, I draw mainly on Hutcheon's seminal work in A Theory of Adaptation (2012) and Paul Wells' model of the subjective correlative (2007), in which animated adaptations of literary classics are analysed through a tool kit of literary devices and literary criticism theory developed by novelists, poets, and researchers. Furthermore, I employ Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Zoe Jaques' framework of intergenerational solidarity in children's literature and film (2020), along with Svetlana Boym's work on restorative nostalgia and the New London Group's Personal Digital Inquiry framework for multimodal pedagogy (1996), to investigate the intergenerational aspects of KGTP. 10 Chapter One Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet: What Is It in a Poetry-Animation-Adaptation? “For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed. The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.” (The Prophet34) When the adaptation of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet into an animated feature was announced in 2014, I could not help but wonder: How? And why? How would anyone transform a poetry collection for adults into a feature animated film for children? And why The Prophet and not any other book written with a child reader in mind from the beginning? Five years later, during one of the introductory classes of a master’s programme in children’s literature, media, and culture, I learned that adaptation studies were mainly concerned with two questions: how; a question that looks into the rewriting of the adapted text, and why; a question that attempts to understand the reasons for such rewriting and for selecting the text to be adapted in the first place (Leitch, “Where Are We Going” 332). In this chapter I introduce the theoretical frameworks I use in my analysis of the poetry animated filmic adaptation KGTP. I review relevant historical and recent research trends in adaptation criticism, poetry film, poetry animation, children's culture and children's poetry to explain the foundation of my argument in the following two chapters. My analysis will examine the context and the process of adapting Gibran's classical text, the intergenerational aspect of the adaptation, and the possible links the film posits between animation and children's poetry. 11 Adaptation Criticism Unlike the book The Prophet, the film adaptation is a mosaic work of collaboration between ten filmmakers from six different countries (France, Italy, Poland, United Arab of Emirates, Ireland, and the United States) that could have easily turned into an unruly cacophony of artistic voices. On the contrary, Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet was critically acclaimed as a film adaptation that is “visually elegant and finely nuanced” and that successfully conveys the essence of Gibran’s voice (Rihani 286). Almost every critic and viewer review of the film 2, negative or positive, raises questions about its ‘faithfulness’ to Gibran’s text and considers both the final ‘product’ as a whole and the sophisticated ‘process’ of collaging the film through connecting the different segments. This dual-criterion of faithfulness and productprocess pairing brings in a fundamental, endless debate amongst adaptation scholars around dropping the conventional ‘fidelity criticism’ model of adaptation analysis for Linda Hutcheon’s ‘palimpsestuous intertextuality’ view on adaptation as ‘both a product and a process’ (21). The interest in resolving the fidelity discourse goes back to 1980, when it was voiced for the first time by Dudley Andrew in his seminal article “The Well-Worn Muse: Adaptation in Film History and Theory”: Unquestionably, the most frequent and most tiresome discussion of adaptation (and of film and literature relations as well) concerns fidelity and transformation. Here it is assumed that the task of adaptation is the reproduction in cinema of something essential about an original text; here, we have a clear-cut case of a film trying to measure up to a literary work, or of an audience expecting to make such a comparison. (12) Andrew’s call has ever since been echoed and expanded by several scholars who highly doubted the fidelity approach’s potential to take adaptation studies further (Leitch, “Adaptation” 68). They also acknowledged the reductive and exclusive nature of fidelity 2 See for example KGTP’s Rotten Tomatoes page: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_prophet_2014 12 criticism in various ways such as ‘basic and banal’ (Welsh and Lev 14) ‘inchoate’ (Stam 76), and ‘simplistic’ (Sanders 24). This manifold critique is centred around fidelity criticism's failure to correspond to the broader synthesis of textual studies, where literary studies, film studies and adaptation criticism are incorporated to serve analyses of the adapted texts that go beyond authorial valorisation and hierarchical literature-film relations. Recent research on adaptation, specifically regarding filmic adaptation, views adaptations as a cross-cultural, cross-media intertextual mesh (e.g., Coletta ‘When Stories Travel’; Stam, "Beyond Fidelity"; Leitch ‘Adaptation: the Genre’). Such studies engage with the ‘dialogic’ (Stam 2000) nature of adaptation, as opposed to the book-to-film comparative approach of fidelity criticism which, to use Rainer Emig’s definition, “measures the success of an adaptation against the supposed value and meaning of the original” (1). In other words, contemporary adaptation studies have been aligning with adaptation as a phenomenon of ever-evolving, organic interconnection. This tendency parallels a notable broadening in the adaptation analysis scope with a clear orientation toward children’s literature and media. For example, current research trends are brimming with adaptations surfacing across the new media, such as fanfiction, video content on different online platforms, videogames, design fiction, together with picturebooks, graphic novels, popular culture texts, and film remakes. Moreover, employing the palimpsestuous intertextuality model in the recent studies of new media adaptations has significantly contributed to bridging the long-ignored gap between media and adaptation criticism fields, introducing key concepts like franchising, convergence, merchandise, and novelisations. For example, the collection Beyond Adaptation: Essays on Radical Transformations of Original Works (2010), edited by Phyllis Frus and Christy Williams, focuses not only on film adaptations of such classic books as Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan but also discusses digital media and video game narratives. By the same token, Textual Transformations in Children’s Literature: Adaptations, Translations, Reconsiderations (2013), edited by Benjamin Lefebvre, approaches adaptations, abridgments, 13 translations, parodies, and mash-ups that occur internationally in contemporary children’s culture from eye-opening critical perspectives. Surprisingly, in 2011 Dudley Andrew reconsidered the value of fidelity criticism in adaptation studies when integrated into the context of the audience’s demand and reception of adaptations. He solidly built his argument on the importance of inserting into the equation the ‘ordinary viewer’s vernacular’ (“Economies” 27), which relies heavily on the fidelity discourse. Apparently, Andrew’s new stance responded to Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan’s 2010 analysis of the first three Harry Potter films as a case in point of “[fidelity being] the heart of an adaptation event” (21). Further studies, such as 2015 collection of analyses of cinematic adaptations of literature, Adaptations: Some Journeys from Words to Visuals, edited by Shri Krishan Rai and Anugamini Rai, attempt at combining the two approaches of fidelity criticism and intertextuality to examine the aesthetical aspects of culturally and historically contextualised adaptation of Indian and world literature. To move beyond fidelity, Hutcheon stressed the adequacy of using the word adaptation to refer to both the process and the final product, taking this fact as a point of departure to introduce three different yet interrelated perspectives to define adaptation. The first perspective views adaptation as a proclaimed final product of the transposition of particular work or works. This transposition can entail a shift of medium or genre, telling the story from a new point of view or a change in the nature of the work, for example, from the real to the fictional, or from a historical account or biography to a fictionalized narrative. The second perspective defines adaptation as a creative process that “always involves both (re-)interpretation and then (re-)creation” (8). On the other hand, the third perspective reflects how the ‘right’ audience receives the adaptation as palimpsests that trigger intertextuality with other texts of culture. Hutcheon, thus, summarises these three perspectives: In short, adaptation can be described as the following: • An acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works • A creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging 14 • An extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work Therefore, an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary. It is its own palimpsestic thing. (8-9) From the fidelity criticism point of view, the original text of Gibran’s poem remains sacredly untouched in the film. The viewers were introduced to the poems exactly as they were written, albeit through a powerful sensory experience of animation and music. Even the major change of integrating a child character was largely ‘faithful’ to the original through keeping the name of ‘Almitra,’ the seeress who shares a secret language of understanding with AlMustafa in the book. Additionally, Allers goes the extra mile and integrates the debatable metafictional and autobiographical aspects of The Prophet as a text substantially resembles Gibran’s life. For example, in Gibran’s life, women generally, and one woman in particular, Mary Haskell, saved all the writings and paintings Gibran gave to her and then shared them with the world. Accordingly, we see Almitra and her mother saving Mustafa’s manuscripts, writings, and drawings at the end of the film. Furthermore, having the author’s name in the title of a film adaptation or opening with an image of the title page of the book (both are applied in KGTP) imply, according to Robyn McCallum, “an impulse for paying homage […] suggest[ing] a return to a more faithful, ‘authorised’ version of an adapted text, conferring authenticity and respect” (204) (see Fig. 1.1 & Fig. 1.2). Fig. 1.1 15 Fig. 1.2 Applying Hutcheon’s manifold definition to KGTP, on the other hand, one can say that the multi-laminated filmic animated adaptation 1) shifts both medium (poetry to film) and genres (prose poetry into a narrative structure), 2) is a creative and an interpretive act of elaborate appropriating content for adults to a dual audience of adults and children to salvage a canonical text, and 3) tackles various intertextual palimpsests for different groups of ‘right’ audience. For example, the segment On Love (dir. Tomm Moore, Ireland) is brimming with an artistic style reminiscent of Gustav Klimt (see Fig. 1.3), including an adapted animated image of his famous painting The Kiss (circa 1907), while Polish animator Michał Socha’s interpretation of On Freedom is screaming Franz Kafka’s “I am a cage in search for a bird,” alongside Mustafa’s reciting of Gibran’s original poem (see Fig. 1.4). 16 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 17 Adaptation as Intergenerational Solidarity "You may strive to be like [your children] but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday." (The Prophet 10) The main motive behind the adaptation project was to pass on what co-producer Salma Hayek described as “spiritual, philosophical text that unifies people from different religions, generations and parts of the world” (8:31, BUILD series interview) to younger generations without being “pretentious” or “preachy.” Hayek’s idea of introducing a child character provoked free experimentation with and exploration of The Prophet’s intergenerational potential to appeal to a blended audience of children and adults. It was, indeed, Hayek’s personal connection to the book that enabled her to tap into its intergenerational potential. In an interview with Gold Derby, she recollects a childhood memory of the book always being there on her grandfather’s nightstand. After his death, the picture of Almustafa on the cover, also drawn by Gibran, resembled that of Hayek’s Lebanese grandfather in her mind for a long time. Years later, she revisited the text in an experience that she defined as having her grandfather “talking to her and teaching her about life through Gibran’s words” (00:59-1:17). What Hayek describes is, to a great extent, the purpose for the continuous adaptations of classic literary works for children. Texts that stand the test of time and deal with universal themes and emotions prove relevant to multiple generations, which might be one reason why Shakespeare, for example, is the writer who has been adapted the most for the screen worldwide (Young 1999). However, Shakespeare film adaptations have been for a long time culturally criticized from an aetonormative (Nikolajeva 2009) perspective that ties adaptation down to being a process of simplification and “textual cuttings” (Semenza 1). Hutcheon’s approach to adaptation as a creative process of (re-)interpretation and (re-)creation, on the other hand, shifts such reductive attitude into that of intergenerational solidarity, which 18 acknowledges the ‘reanimating’ (Galloway, interviewed by Hutcheon 8) of a particular text to make it accessible for its new audience through a distinct medium. Contemporary adaptors of classics for children and youth are motivated mainly by a desire to preserve texts worth exploring in a first-hand experience that endows younger generations with the agency to process them on their own within their contemporary contexts. Thus, these adaptors can said to strongly identify with Marah Gubar’s kinship model of child-adult relationalities, where “children and adults are akin to one another, […] related, connected, and similar, [yet] without [this] implying homogeneity, uniformity, and equality” (453). One good example that explains how this idea works in practice and also shares a number of similarities with KGTP is the two BBC film series of Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1992-1994). The animation film series was produced for TV with the purpose of educating younger students. Like KGTP, the series was created by a multinational team of Welsh, English, and Russian producers, actors, and animators who employed various animation techniques and styles to retell some of the most popular Shakespeare plays in shortened 30-minute-length filmic adaptations. In his analysis of the series, Gregory M. Colon Semenza critiques the literary cultural criticism flaw of “not [being] medium specific” (Burt qtd. in Semenza 27). He illustrates through his analysis how ignoring the basic grammar of film medium “decrease[s] ambiguity [of the animation film medium], transforming [the series] into what might appear to be overly simplified morality tales” (42). This example reflects the inherent link between the cultural and pedagogical aspects of the kinship model and the adaptation criticism's orientation towards intertextuality. Gubar's kinship model defies cultural and pedagogical endeavours that view young people either as deficiently unable to grasp certain concepts or skills, or as a group categorically separate from adults and whose knowledge is impossible. Therefore, applying the medium specific intertextuality model to adaptations of classical texts can help us unfold their potential as intergenerational solidarity practices when culturally integrated into an adult-child kinship and positive childism. 3 3 Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Zoe Jaques argue that "childism—understood in positive terms as the recognition of children as a social group with its own viewpoints and experiences (Wall 71)—can become a “champion” of intergenerational solidarity as constituting inclusive solidarity" (17) 19 In this regard, the background story Hayek tells, perceived within the context of creating adaptation for a younger generation, can be seen in light of Bee Formentelli’s analysis of Rabindranath Tagore’s Shey as a playful encounter between a poet and his granddaughter. In the book, Tagore employs the help of a man who is called Shey (English: He) to facilitate the exchange of ideas, questions, answers, and creative negotiations around a story-in-the-making between an adult (Dada, the grandfather) and a child (Pupe, the granddaughter). Although the great Bengali poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) wrote Shey primarily for children, he is mostly known as the Nobel Prize winner for his spiritual and highly philosophical poetry. Formentelli, who has also recently published English Translation of Shey4, goes against the stereotypical perception of Tagore and sheds light on his oftendismissed literary attributes of “whimsy and nonsense” (95), especially in his late works, including Shey. The scholar examines Tagore as an infantilist philosopher who is seeking a child’s view of the world as the ultimate. Thus, He, the almost tangible character made entirely of words, can be viewed as a symbol of the creative process of adaptation that connects two different generations, two different realms of adulthood and childhood, without one of them diminishing the other. This encounter summons Hayek’s connection to her grandfather and mirrors Mustafa and Almitra’s friendship in the film. Turning Almitra the seeress in the original text into Almitra the child in the film has created a parallel of the adult's and child's shared interest in pursuing creative endeavours together in Tagore’s Shey. Hence, as an introduction to my analysis, I establish He as a model for KGTP’s “conjunction of interests” to appeal to a ‘dual audience’ of adults and children (Wall, 35-36). It comes as no surprise that the node connecting Gibran to Tagore has been the subject of manifold academic research. As Gibran was a Lebanese immigrant who lived in the United States since 1892 until he died in 1931, his self-fashioning and self-reflection, transparent in his life and works, had always been the focus of identity-based politics analysis. Obviously, 4 For the English translation, see Rabindranath Tagore, He (Shey), trans. Aparna Chaudhuri (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2007). 20 one of the attention-worthy aspects of Gibran's life and works is the affinities he shared with Tagore. In her analysis of the ‘elliptical’ interaction between Gibran and Tagore, Indrani Datta (Chaudhuri) discusses Gibran’s preoccupation with India and the Hindu Scriptures as a transcultural mediation of Tagore’s texts. Presenting examples from The Prophet, Datta avers that Gibran’s weak grasp of key concepts of the Indian philosophical traditions, such as Samsara (the transmigration of the soul), through Tagore’s poetry reflects the immigrant poet’s intuitive attempt to establish a non-geopolitical outlandish space; “one that exists inbetween a writer’s “exilic emplacement” (16) and “diasporic self-fashioning” (16-17). In the film, this aspect is cleverly portrayed in Mustafa’s state as a political prisoner who is under home arrest in a small town that highly resembles Gibran’s town Bsharri in Lebanon, yet it is not Mustafa’s homeland, and ––unlike the source text—it has no name. Interestingly, this outlandish space extends to encompass adaptation itself, being entitled to ‘no country’ when submitted for Toronto Film Festival, and puzzling potential funders as “too artistic to be commercial, and too commercial to be artistic” (Hayek, Toronto Film Festival Interview). On another level, such a concern on the potential funders’ part offers a key to fathoming KGTP, specifically as an animated adaptation of poetry. The concern “too artistic to be commercial, and too commercial to be artistic” infers the animation spectrum from the “representational” animation, best exemplified by Disney, to the “experimental” or “abstract” animation, exemplified by avant-garde animators Oskar Fischinger (Composition in Blue 1935; Allegretto 1936), Len Lye (Kaleidoscope 1935, Rainbow Dance 1936; Colour Cry 1952), and Robert Breer (A Man and His Dog Out for Air 1957; Fuji 1974). These two kinds of animation represent the two ends of the spectrum and are often taken to be extreme opposites, which explains why KGTP was hard to digest for a lot of animators and animation geeks. I extensively elaborate on this dilemma in relation to Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation in Chapter Three. First, however, it is inevitable to tap into the correlation between animation and poetry since poetry animation, together with adaptation theory and practice, substantiates this thesis’s main argument. 21 Hypothesis of Poetry Animation "For the bee a flower is a fountain of life. And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love. And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy." (The Prophet, 46) The majority of scholarly research on animation focuses on its relationship to live-action cinema and the perplexing paradox of realism dominating animation aesthetics. The recent remarkable advent and prevalent use of 3D CGI animation and techniques in the cinema industry provoked the old school of thought asserting animation as the genesis of cinema, that is, cinema having started more as a form of animation. As Alan Cholodenko states: “not only is animation a form of film, film, all film, film “as such,” is a form of animation” (3). The problem about this stance, Donald Crafton explains, lies in its semantic exploitation of the word 'animation': Tracing the etymology of the word 'animation' reveals how it acquired two separate meanings: one to endow with life or to come alive, and the other, to move or be moved. In trade and professional discourses about cinema, 'animation' did not refer to single-frame cinematography or to the class of films using that technique until the early 1910s. The genealogical argument that animation was the ancestor of cinema exploits the semantic serendipity of these two meanings, but the approach distracts from a larger understanding of animation as a film form, genre and social practice. (93) Andre Gaudreault and Philippe Gauthier are also critical of this comparison, albeit from a slightly different perspective, which is more concerned with Cholodenko’s standpoint’s effect of blurring animation’s history as an art form. According to Gaudreault and Gauthier, A major concern for animated film scholars has been to define their own object of study, to distinguish between what should be considered 'animation' and what should not. These attempts at definition rely mostly on an opposition between live-action and 22 animated films and tend to neglect the ontological and historical dimensions of animation per se. (88) Gaudreault and Gauthier's diagnosis of this central issue to animation studies justifies the field's considerably more extensive research on animation aesthetics while neglecting the lack of animation definition. Approaches to analysing animation aesthetics seem to take two distinct but connected paths. One group of academics is more concerned with the influence of production processes on animation aesthetics, while another is more concerned with the visual components of animation. In her book Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics Maureen Furniss, representing the former academic approach, traces the major effects of prevalent industrial practices on animation aesthetics. She investigates how the practices of large studio's mass production marketing and distribution and computer animation techniques affect the poetics of applying colour and line and employing sound, creating the image, the mise-en-scène, and the sense of motion in animated films. Furniss also extends her research to encompass the external elements of the display experience on different kinds of screens and the animated films by-products. The latter group of scholars, on the other hand, focus on how the visual elements of animation produce meaning while corresponding to the animator's aesthetic expression. A number of animation scholars root animation’s aesthetics in its movement. For instance, Robert Benayoun avers that "animation, in principle, has no other plastic imperative than movement" (18). Similarly, Kenny Chow Ka-nin argues that "movement can define the aesthetic of animation," wondering if it could be its essence (79). Vivian Sobchack, on the other hand, focuses on the line and how it operates in animation to produce meaning. For one thing, line has been a "production necessity" in "traditional cel animation" for [animators employed it] in guiding “'inbetweeners' and painters to fill out” (253), while Patrícia CastelloBranco draws attention to forms and their movement as a source of a revolutionary aesthetic experience: [...] use of abstract shapes and of animation techniques as a way of exploring the different potential of speed, different possibilities of relationships between forms, and 23 understanding the role of motion in the construction and dissolution of forms, is quite consistent with the exploration of the effects it produces: a truly perceptive shock in which ordinary speed and ordinary relationships between forms are subverted (31). Most recently, Ryan Pierson has elaborated on the figure and force dynamic in animation aesthetics, combining the aesthetics deriving from line, form and movement all together (2019), which proves useful in my Third Chapter’s mapping of poetry animation in KGTP. The tendency to focus on animation’s aesthetics seem to have led to a liberation for animation as an art form, which in turn, has contributed to building more confidence in associating it directly with poetry and beginning to theorise poetry animation as an independent medium. Historically, poetry animation emerged from an experimental avant-garde trend of poetry films that lasted from the 1920s until the late 1940s. Outstanding examples of poetry animation shorts from this era are Chad Gadjo (1930) by Rudi Klemm & Julius Pinschewer, and Oscar nominee for Best Animated Short Film Tom & Jerry cartoon (dir. William Hanna & Joseph Barbera, 1941), using Clarke Moore’s classic poem Twas the Night Before. (Zandegiacomo Del Bel interviewed by Hannes Rall 294). Because poetry animation is still considered a subgenre of poetry film, it is crucial to define poetry film first. ‘Poetry film,’ ‘film poem,’ ‘film-poem,’ and ‘cinepoem’ are terms that have been coined contradictorily, interchangeably, and confusingly by various filmmakers, critics, writers, and academics throughout the history of cinema and film studies. In his article “Film Poetry: A Historical Analysis”, Fil Ieropoulos traces the historical evolution of the concept in theory and practice to map the multiple definitions of poetry film. He concludes that marking a specific definition as the ultimate is “impossible” because besides the need to contextualize each definition artistically and historically, what the poetry film notion holds is also individualized by the filmmaker’s subjectivity. Therefore, it is essential to clarify that I refer to poetry film in my analysis not from the modernist, purist perspective on poetry in film “as an application of poetic concerns on film [..without] direct literal inclusion of poetic text” 24 (Ieropoulos 31),5 but bearing in mind William Wees’ interest in “the fine line between [poetic] text as word or image” (qtd. in Ieropoulos 32): [Poetry film] expands upon the specific denotations of words and the limited iconic references of images to produce a much broader range of connotations, associations, metaphors. At the same time, it puts limits on the potentially limitless possibilities of meaning in words and images, and directs our responses toward some concretely communicable experience. (109) Parallelly and frequently intersecting with the definitions of film poetry, the term visual poetry has also been employed in word-image interdisciplinary studies to refer to three distinct yet inevitably overlapping concepts. Firstly, visual poetry can refer to a group of poems that manipulate the materiality and the design of the written text (e.g., George Herbert’s poem “Easter Wings,” written in the shape of wings). 6 Secondly, visual poetry, according to Eugene C. McCreary’s explanation of Louis Dullec’s concept, is “the creative act of isolating and stylizing the significant detail [in the film]” (20). Thirdly, visual poetry denotes a category of Visual Text more commonly referred to as videopoetry and videopoems. Watching videopoems, according to Tom Konyves, we may be satisfied to discover a poem or some sequence of words we recognize and/ or enjoy for its own sake, notwithstanding (a) the look, positioning, motion or any other modification to its appearance as text on the screen or (b) any aesthetic properties that the images or soundtrack that accompany the original text may or may not have (1). In my analysis, I rely on Dullec’s concept when I refer to visual poetry, while I stick to the terms videopoetry and videopoems when I bring in this category of Visual Text to compare with KGTP’s eight short animation poetry films. Although film poetry discussions go back to Dziga Vertov 1929’s introductory manifesto sequence of Man with a Movie Camera, it was not until the 1990s that animation and poetry 5 See for example Dziga Vertov 1929, Man Ray 1987, and Germaine Dulac 1987. 6 In his article “Visual Iconicity in Poetry: Replacing the Notion of ‘Visual Poetry’” (2016), Lars Ellestrom urges researchers to avoid confusion by replacing the notion of visuality with iconicity when referring to similar poems. 25 started to become gradually perceived as two aesthetically and critically connected subjects. Most recently, in her practice-based analysis of poetry animation “Animating Poetry: Whose Line Is It Anyway?” (2019), Sussan J. Hannah suggests that poetry and animation share elements of “timing, rhythm, language construction, emotive juxtaposition, simile and metaphor that should make us finally “[consider] poetry animation as a genre or artform in its own right” (2). Similarly, Hannes Rall dedicates full three chapters to discuss some of these shared elements in his recently published book Adaptation for Animation: Transforming Literature Frame by Frame. Both Rall and Hannah draw majorly from Paul Wells’ seminal formulation of the literary-criticism-based animated adaptation analysis model. In his article “Classic Literature and Animation: All Adaptations Are Equal, but Some Are More Equal than Others” (2007), Wells introduces the concept of the “subjective correlative” as a set of tools to analyse an animated adaptation from six angles, building on Sergei Eisenstein’s work on Disney, T. S Eliot’s idea of the ‘objective correlative’ and Arthur Koestler’s work on ‘creativity’ among others. Very briefly, the six angles of Wells’ model focus on: 1 Embracing and re-interpreting textual sources for “plasmatic potential” 2 Enunciating the conflicts and tensions in the “serio-comic” 3 Literally creating the process of interiority/exteriority as an illustrative outcome 4 Using “ambiguity” as a mode of continuity and revelation 5 Adopting an “ideographic logic”: an approach which literally pictorializes its own structure after the fashion of “concrete” poetry 6 Evoking a “self-figurative” perspective as an aesthetic outcome (203) While I use Hutcheon’s model to frame KGTP as a multi-layered adaptation, I dedicate the last chapter to applying the “subjective correlative” set of analysis to KGTP both as a whole and as separate segments, intertwined with the linguistic, psychoanalytical Lacanian approach to children’s poetry theory. 26 Children’s Poetry and Poetry Picturebooks Adaptations “Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights / But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge” (The Prophet 34) A few years ago, I designed a book-based workshop using Sahar Abdallah’s adaptation of Mahmoud Darwish’s classical poem “Think of Others.” As captivating as Abdallh’s illustrations were, I still had my doubts whether the illustrated poem would be accessible to and enjoyable for five to nine-year-old children. I started the session by sharing a copy of the poetry picturebook with each child participant so they could look at the illustrations closely and turn the pages at their own pace. Each double spread contained one verse and an illustration. We started with contemplating the illustration, discussing its details, colours and dimensions, and the emotions it evokes. That discussion led us naturally and effortlessly to the message in the verse. We read the verse, explaining more advanced vocabulary and absorbing poetry with the illustration as a whole experience. Participants were given the opportunity to use the space of a white paper as they wished. Drawings and writings talked about compassion, love and caring for others. Some of them were fixated on a specific verse/illustration spread, while others related to the frequent appearance of a girl character in the illustrations, developing an empathic connection with her. I found the creative transactive responses from the child reader of adult poetry interesting in terms of understanding how adaptations of adult poetry for children function through the illustrations’ foregrounding of literary devices. Foregrounding theory, according to Paul Simpson, entails the idea of literary devices such as metaphor, simile, imagery, alliteration, assonance, repetition of keywords or phrases, rhyme and meter operating as foregrounding elements which contribute to the ‘literariness’ of the texts, thereby making readers linger on them (50). In her two articles “Can Images Transform a Poem? When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer: An Example of a Poetry Picturebook” (2013) and “Children as Implied Readers in Poetry Picturebooks: The Adaptation of Adult Poetry for Young Readers” (2016), María del Rosario Neira Piñeiro delves deeper into the analysis of some Spanish poetry picturebooks for children and young 27 adults readers based on adult poetry. Piñeiro concludes that in poetry picturebook (a kind of texts that should be, like poetry animation, acknowledged in its own right), “poems and pictures are combined to create meaning, with an interaction and interdependence similar to those in narrative picturebooks” (“Can Images Transform a Poem” 29). Her analysis demonstrates how illustrations contribute to the transformation of the original poems and perform several functions in the adaptation of adult poetry for children. These include “providing cohesion (mainly in poetry anthologies), creating a visual style, describing certain elements, providing information about the different voices in the poem, adding new elements, telling a visual story, translating poetic imagery into a visual code or creating a new figurative language, as well as offering a new interpretation of the texts and guiding the reading process” (“Children as Implied Readers” 16). Illustrations therefore transform the original text in several ways, introduce a re-interpretation of the original poems, and create a new implied child reader. Similarly, creating a new implied child viewer in KGTP required translating the poetic imagery in Gibran’s poems into a multimodal system and crafting a visual story to tell through the poems. A comparative, empirical research approach that links poetry picturebooks to poetry animation adaptations of adult poetry for children based on reader/viewer response and cognitive criticism theories may help reframe the mediumspecific critical understanding of these adaptations into the broader contexts of multimodal pedagogy and intersections of adulthood and childhood cultures. As I have indicated earlier, the dynamic, central child character of Almitra is a defining element in the poetry animation film KGTP. Being essentially a poetry adaptation with a key child character who experiences poetry in deep, transforming ways, it would be dismissive to ignore possible links between KGTP and children’s poetry. Therefore, in this part, I introduce the theoretical framework for my analysis of Almitra as a voiceless child who eventually finds her voice through poetry. I triangulate Jacques Lacan’s linguistic psychoanalysis of the child’s entry into language with Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer’s characteristics of the Romantic image of childhood and Karen Coats’ cognitive definition of children’s poetry. 28 Kümmerling-Meibauer’s analysis of the Romantic image of childhood can be summed up in four main features: 1) connectedness to nature and thus also to such qualities as “naivety, respect towards creation, vitality, but also savagery and sensuality” (187); 2) proximity to transcendence, which gives rise not only to “qualities like creativity, imagination, and contemplation,” but also to “isolation, longing, melancholy and premonition of death” (187); 3) association with “immediate experience of nature and contact with the divine,” which means qualities like comprehension, intuition and participation in divine knowledge (187); and finally 4) the individuality and the autonomy of the child (187). All four features are evident in Almitra in a Romantic representation of childhood that ties with Disney’s conventional schema of what being a child means and how children act. However, while the romantic aspects of Almitra outspokenly represent the idea of freedom, her state of voicelessness contradicts this very idea in a way that brings in Sara Pankenier Weld’s metaphor of the unspeaking subject as “a politicized implication of the position of ‘infant/child’—the unspeaking subject lacks the capacity to communicate verbally” (5). Pankenier Weld roots her metaphor in the historical linguistic etymology of the word “infant” that has often associated the child’s state with that of the political subject who is deprived of the right to vote. She further elaborates that “[l]acking the power of expression, the symbolically unspeaking subject cannot express itself, much less convey the alterity of its perspective or portray its interior subjectivity” (5). In that sense, Almitra’s contradictory state of freedom and oppression mirrors Mustafa’s status of a political prisoner whose crime is believing in and promoting freedom through his poetry. This connection between Almitra the unspeaking subject (Lacan7) and Mustafa the silenced poet suggests a deeper look into the politics of silence as a language of resistance and children’s poetry as a set of tools to facilitate the child’s transition into language. From the psychoanalytical perspective, Coats brings in the Lacanian view on the “subject”, stressing the agency-subservience duality the 7 See Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). See also Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 29 psychoanalytic concept holds, while relating it to the child’s entry into language as the Other’s system: But despite the fact that [the child] can now recognize and express himself as a subject in a system of representation, it is still the Other’s system, something external to him that he has taken on. […] The subject is both active and passive; it has agency and responsibility, but at the same time, it is bound by rules and laws outside itself and constrained by its own unconscious processes [… and] beholden to the forces of its environment and in many ways limited by the possibilities of its time and culture, though it has some power to change and expand those possibilities. (Looking Glasses 3) Furthermore, Luce Irigaray's analysis of children’s meaning-making practices links this cognitive process to the body and the senses, arguing that children do not have adults’ tendency to compromise their earliest nature-communicating and embodied coherence for the artifice and trickery of language (2012). Coats touches upon this truth in her cognitive approach to fathoming the meaning of children’s poetry by understanding “what it does” (“The Meaning of Children’s Poetry” 140). In her definition of children’s poetry, Coats affirms the potential of this literary form as a safe transition for the young from their body into the language’s semiotic systems without losing their visceral connection with the world: a children’s poem brings the body into language through strong beats and sounds that evoke their sensory referents. It doesn’t have to make sense in any conceptual way, nor does it need to challenge the adequacy of language to frame reality; rather, its particular task is to create sonorous, kinaesthetic, gestural, and visual links between the heterogeneous realms of what can be said and what can only be felt. (140) In her attempt to establish a new function-wise definition of children’s poetry, Coats marks the underlying issue of the lack of a children’s poetry theory independent of adult poetry in terms of its value, creative process, and meaning. Then, she views the current arguments concerning children and poetry as “expansion and reconceptualization” (131) of the old debate between children’s poets Kenneth Koch and Myra Cohn Livingston. Very Briefly, Koch argues that children’s naturalness affords poetic imaging of the world and an abundance of sensual, creative, free wordplay. On the other hand, Livingston views poetry written for 30 children as a conscious act of responsibility through which children are introduced to life challenges and getting engaged with the language. Such responsibility, in her opinion, is impossible for children to accomplish on their own. Hence, Coats suggests that a new cognitive poetics perspective may help free children’s poetry from the abstraction of “what it is” to the observation of “what it does” (132). The evolution in Almitra’s character helps us observe what children’s poetry does and how it works within a poetry animation adaptation, while establishing a middle ground between the two seemingly contradicting schools of children’s poetry criticism. Conclusion In this chapter I have reviewed the body of research concerning the multiple layers of my thesis's topic and introduced the theoretical framework for my analysis of KGTP as an adaptation of a classical adult text into an intergenerational crossover animated film. To answer my question about what exactly substantiates a poetry animation adaptation, I have attempted to break down the case of KGTP into three main research topics: adaptation criticism, intergenerational solidarity and children's poetry animation. Reviewing the body of literature concerning these topics demonstrated two major research gaps in investigating adaptations of classical literary works for younger generations as intergenerational solidarity practices and in studying animated poetry adaptations. My adaptation criticism analysis in the following two chapters attempts to bridge these two gaps to illustrate the potential interdisciplinary future approaches to animated poetry adaptations. 31 Chapter Two (Adapted) text-to-life Intergenerational Solidarity in Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet Stemming from a grandfather-granddaughter connection through a certain text and highly driven by an urge to share this text with younger generations, KGTP can be considered multifaceted intergenerational solidarity practice. In the introduction to Intergenerational Solidarity in Children's Literature and Film (2021), Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Zoe Jaques indicate essential links between texts for children and young adults and the sociocultural policies and practices of intergenerational solidarity. They do so by reviewing the body of literature concerning intergenerational solidarity and children's culture, integrating it into a contemporary framework that proves useful in understanding how children's literature and film correspond to and transform sociocultural and political spheres of intergenerational relations. I apply this framework, intertwining it with the understating of adaptation as transformative intertextuality and practice of intergenerational solidarity itself, especially when dealing with classical literary texts. According to Maria Amparo Cruz-Saco, the notion of intergenerational solidarity entails individual and societal well-being and security in the intergenerational relationships between generations that share common interests, reciprocal emotional bonds, mutual understanding, and a sense of protection (10). Correspondingly, Donna M. Butts's explanation of the social compact philosophy as rooted in the belief that "generations are bound together in order to survive and thrive" (83) links society's progression or recession to older generations' efforts in passing knowledge and culture forward to next generations. Such efforts manifest in relationships within families and broader communities as multidimensional practices of intergenerational solidarity. Vern L. Bengtson and S. S. Schrader (1982) have attempted to distinguish the conceptual nuances of intergenerational solidarity as follows: 32 1. affectual or affectional solidarity (sense of closeness among family members and the reciprocity of these sentiments); 2. associational solidarity (the structure of contacts and interactions in diverse activities); 3. consensual solidarity (sharing the same worldview and value system among family members); 4. functional solidarity (financial and nonfinancial exchanges among family members); 5. normative solidarity (sense of responsibility and obligation to care or the recognition and adherence to the norms of family solidarity); 6. structural solidarity (crossgenerational contacts enabled by geographic proximity) (Cruz-Saco, 19–21). Hutcheon argues that adaptations, by their very existence, should remind us that "there is no such thing as an autonomous text or an original genius that can transcend history, either public or private" (111). When it comes to adaptations of classical literary texts, in particular, this understanding of adaptation compels us to affirm them as a historical, sociocultural momentum which is inevitably associated with intergenerational relations. Historically, the emergence of the family film trend corresponded to the need for 'educational' films and catalysed the integration of film in school curricula, especially filmic adaptations of literary texts (Noel Brown 8). It comes as no surprise then that the first film responding to the family film market demand, Little Women (1933), was an adaptation of a classical literary text. It can be argued that there is a connection between filmic adaptation of literary texts, their appeal to a double or dual audience, and their potential to be used in pedagogical contexts. In this chapter, I explore KGTP as an example of the vital role film adaptations of classical literary texts play in the reproduction and transformation of children's and adult cultures through analysing the film's multidimensional application of intergenerational solidarity. More precisely, I examine how the intergenerational friendship between Almitra and Mustafa expands to encompass three different intergenerational solidarity practices. Firstly, Hayek's reliving of her meaningful relation to her grandfather; secondly, the family bonding activity of parent or grandparent and the child watching the film together; and thirdly, Journeys in Film developing a KGTP-based curriculum, strongly driven by intergenerational solidarity and a vision of global understanding.8 8 KGTP's Curriculum Guide is available on Journeys in Film website https://journeysinfilm.org/product/the-prophet/ 33 Not So Disneyfied Family Film Director Roger Allers is best known for his work on adapted screenplays of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" and "The Little Matchgirl," as well as for his Hamletinspired hit The Lion King9 (1994) and its by-products, The Lion King 1 1/2 and The Lion King computer game. He can be said to have played a pioneering role in the Disneyfication of classical literary texts. The notion of Disneyfication often holds negative connotations with a process of mechanical reproduction that deprives original texts of their "aura" (Walter Benjamin 1969)10 of authenticity or ultimate essence that infers the historical contexts the literary works themselves experience. This interpretation of Disneyfication is most evident in academic research, whereby a clear line is drawn between two kinds of culture, similar to, but not exactly synonymous with, the distinction between high and low culture, with Disney productions often belonging to the latter. This cultural hierarchy can be viewed as an extension of a medium or genre hierarchy that perceives film adaptations of literature as "lowering [of] a story" (Hutcheon, 3), attacked by academics and reviewers with moralistic evaluations such as "betrayal," "infidelity," and "deformation" (Stam 54). Most importantly, however, this cultural hierarchy parallels adults' negative childist prejudices dominating cultural and pedagogical practices in which children are seen as ill-logical and incompetent (Elisabeth Young-Bruehl 25). On one hand, scholars' resentment against Disney's standardization of taste through its industrialized, mechanistic culture, whose products are based on intensive market research and produced in vast quantities, is justifiable. On the other hand, however, such resentment dismisses adaptation as a process of fluid, transformative 9 Although The Lion King was marketed as Disney’s first original story, producers and animators acknowledged the film as an adaptation of Kimba The White Lion (1966) and Shakespeare’s Hamlet in behind-the-scenes interviews. 10 It is worth the note that Walter Benjamin did not talk about the text aura in terms of the Disneyfication process. It is my deployment of the concept here as an adequate frame for the negative views on Disneyfication. 34 intertextuality and overlooks the intergenerational bond it creates. The Lion King, for example, has been argued to be Disney's first animated feature to appeal to adult and child audiences equally, resonating strongly with the family film concept. Pixar is argued to have skilfully mastered this family film formula, with animated feature films like Toy Story (1995) and Monster's Inc. (2001) becoming mainstream, blockbuster films by offering the intra-age cinematic experience of family viewing. It is also worth noting that Disney-Pixar collaboration resulted in films that offer a broader spectrum of youth-senescence entanglements, family dynamics and dialogue (Jaques 2021), such as Finding Nemo (2003), Up (2007), and Coco (2017). Although the Disneyfication of Shakespeare particularly should indeed be included among the things that ally Shakespeare's work "with the interests of corporate media" (Douglas M. Lanier 166) ––which we must acknowledge particularly in franchised adaptations— the same cannot be said about KGTP simply because it is not a Disney production. The independent, modest 12-million USD production was funded by six different organizations and animation studios (Ventanarosa, FFA Private Bank, Doha Film Institute, Financière Pinault, Participant Media, and Bardel Entertainment) and distributed by GKIDS. All concerns about KGTP's being Disney-oriented were mainly driven by former Disney director Roger Allers' leadership of the project. Although indeed Allers employed several elements of the Disney formula in the framing story, such as the absent father theme and personality animation, KGTP was, by all means, a leap of faith. In an interview with Gold Derby, Allers, a big fan of The Prophet himself, expressed his concerns and caution working on the adaptation project. He said that he had imagined it to be an adult film at the beginning, and so when Hayek proposed the idea of introducing a child character, it was a "challenging" and "tricky" job to accomplish: It really meant that much to me […] I was so eager to do it, but there was a little bit of nervousness. I wanted to do right by the book […] and since my job was to expand the story because there’s very little story in the book, I definitely wanted to do right by Kahlil. I kind of felt like he maybe sort of was sitting on my shoulder while we were doing this thing. […] so, I did lots of research on his life and read some of his 35 other books and got very familiar with him and tried to have him there with me. (3:18-4:57) Allers' concerns here simultaneously reflect the moral and educational responsibility brought into the equation with any film adaptation for children, the book fans' anxiety upon the news of a prospective film adaptation of their favourite book, and the adapter's "tall order" of creating an original second that appeals to adults and children altogether. Drawing on Gunther Kress' understanding of "representation [as] focus[ed] on the [messenger's] interest and communication [as concerned] with the assumed interest of the recipient of the sign" (77), Jennifer Roswell argues that one key concept in film production is "differentiating between representation and communication" (15). When producers, directors, and screenwriters adapt a text to screen, they negotiate their own design agency and aesthetics with those of a certain audience. Naturally, when the audience are children, the adaptation process can be considered an apparatus to the He model of Tagore's Shey, discussed in the previous chapter. Balancing the two main storylines, Almitra's vocalization journey and Mustafa's liberation of an oppressive regime, and how they intertwine with the animated poems segments, Allers can be said to have adequately applied the He model in establishing a playful, creative intergenerational connection. Through their exchanges of poetic thinking and unconventional adult-child conversations, either direct or through Almitra's listening to Mustafa talking to other people, the ineffable experience of the two worlds merging into one another, shuffling the conventional ideas about time, space and identity, is translated into abstract poetry animation about the ultimate human condition. We witness a story about struggling to reclaim freedom from two connected and related perspectives, without this implying uniformity or control of one over the other. Allers tackles this kinship relationality from the moment Almitra enters Mustafa's house. To hide from her mother, Almitra slips into Mustafa's coat and stands in his shoes, which are neither exactly fitting, nor completely ill-matched (Fig. 2.1). 36 Fig. 2.1 From the moment they meet, Almitra and Mustafa immediately develop a reciprocal emotional connection as two prisoners whose free spirits can fly. Mustafa calls Almitra "a mouse in a cage"; he can recognise her voice although it has not come through yet, and he explicitly affirms their bond by saying, "we prisoners have to be sneaky" (Fig. 2.2). While their sense of belonging and relating to one another reflects their affectional solidarity, defined as "the emotional bonds between family members" (Mahne and Huxhold, 227), associational solidarity as the "frequency of contact and shared activities" (227) is evident in their metaphorical-to-literal flying together. They discover that they share a deep love for the wind, symbolising freedom and life-as-movement in all forms (Fig 2.3). Although Almitra and Mustafa's contact lasts for barely one day, there is a clear inference that they will share these bonds forever as Almitra recognises Mustafa's soul floating over the ship after his execution at the end. Moreover, consensual solidarity of "values and beliefs shared across generations" and functional solidarity of "mutual helpfulness across the generations" (227) are transparent in Almitra's realization of Mustafa's art and poetry's significance and carrying it forward in tangible and intangible ways. 37 Zooming out to include the audience experience, the different forms of ties Almitra and Mustafa share are likely to reflect, interpret and inspire countless similar ties between countless adult and child viewers. More precisely, Almitra and Mustafa's friendship establishes Gubar's model of adult-child kinship into a cross-age narrative that adults and children can relate to in meaningful ways, which may evoke a sense of companionship and solidarity. Adaptations of classical literary texts written initially for adults into children or family films adhere to the belief that children and adults are not completely different; that children can relate to a text written for adults just as adults are involved in expressing adult life challenges and concerns through children's text. Seeing Jacqueline Rose's argument about the impossibility of children's literature (1984) from a positive stance, Gubar roots the kinship model premise in the idea "that younger people, like older ones, are involved in various and complex ways with children's literature" (306). In that sense, KGTP is a clear example of how the shift in our understanding of adaptations of classical texts as not reductive or secondary, albeit as directly related to the shift of our perception of children and adults as akin to one another. Fig. 2.2 38 Fig. 2.3 Nostalgia and Intergenerational Solidarity in Tandem Another layer of intergenerational solidarity in KGTP is related to how adaptation here can also be viewed as a process and a product of nostalgia when we take Hayek's personal experience with the text into consideration. I have to stress that Hayek's experience serves as a barometer of all the intergenerational nostalgic connections readers of The Prophet (or any other classical text) might have shared with people, ideas, or memories of prior or later generation through adaptation. To explain how the KGTP adaptation has channelled Hayek’s nostalgic, personal experience into an intergenerational solidarity practice, we have first to distinguish between two ways of processing nostalgia: reflective and restorative. According to Svetlana Boym, the former “lingers in the dreams of another place and another time,” while the latter manifests itself in “total restoration of monuments of the past” (49). The difference between them lies in the way we realise our yearning and in our perception of the object that generates this emotion. In other words, nostalgia surges from our intrinsically experienced 39 relationship with an item, not through the materiality of this item itself. Nevertheless, this should not lead us to consider nostalgia as a personalised emotion only because it also reflects collective memories of a certain generation in a certain historical context; it blurs the boundaries between private and public histories. In the case of the classical text The Prophet, the reflective nostalgia of Hayek's longing for some aspects of her childhood in a Lebanese-Mexican family during the no longer existing Hippie 60s in the USA has inspired the restorative nostalgia project of adapting the text into a family film. Classical texts like The Prophet, to borrow Amin Maalouf's analogy regarding personal identity, are like “a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment;” touching any part of them will trigger the whole history of the text (personal and collective) and their intertextuality to react— “the whole drum will sound” (26). I employ this specific analogy here because it deeply resonates with Hutcheon's understanding of adaptation as palimpsest intertextuality while also clearly conceptualising how nostalgia may naturally incite intergenerational connections. From the audience's perspective, nostalgia can arguably play a role in the adaptation’s pleasure of “repetition with variation” (Hutcheon 116); the emotionally and intellectually stimulating experience of visiting the old in a new form, or meeting the unknown in the known-by-heart. Watching KGTP, older viewers who grew up with the book may feel the comfort of following a text they know well, reviving their intimate experiences and memories with it, albeit in a contemporary format that makes the text accessible to today’s generation. Simultaneously, children and young adult viewers are introduced to a text that inevitably connects them to the older generation’s values and worldviews essentially because canonical adapted works are arguably to trigger “a generally circulated cultural memory” (John Ellis 3). The simple act of members of different generations processing the same text together in different ways in different contexts may catalyse interesting and playful intergenerational dialogue, very much similar to the dialogue between Almitra and Mustafa. This invitation to such intergenerational understanding, obviously and after all, reflects Gibran’s foremost call in his poem “On Children”, which 40 according to Hayek was the hint that Kahlil Gibran’s text could offer younger generations something valuable: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, But seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children As living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, And He bends you with His might That His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies, So He loves also the bow that is stable. (10) The segment On Children follows the sequence of Mustafa and Kamila’s (Almitra’s mother) dialogue on Almitra’s difficult behaviour that is completely beyond Kamila’s control. Animator Nina Paley’s (Sita Sings the Blues 2008; This Land Is Mine 2012) choices of animation style for the On Children adaptation is strongly relevant to the intergenerational solidarity and nostalgia framework. As an animator, she has had a strong personal connection as an artist with the poem long before the adaptation project. In 2008, Paley posted a 41 reflection on Gibran’s “On Children” as a model of artists' relationship with their art. She wrote that “an artist nurtures a work from an invisible little idea into a form that can stand on its own. But eventually they have to let go of it. Letting go is essential for the growth of both the ‘child’ and the ‘parent’” (Paley “Your Children”). Later in 2013, while working on the adaptation of the poem for KGTP, she published two blog posts about integrating her fascination with Embroidermation (embroidery animation) in the process. Although the embrodermation of one of On Children’s main sequences was not rendered in the film because it was too complex to digitise into embroidery patterns, Paley stressed the connection between the sequence and the urge for using the classic, traditional Tree of Life embroidery motif (Fig. 2.4) which ended up being a major step forward in her Embroidermation techniques (Paley “Tree of Life”; “Test 1”). Paley’s restorative nostalgia for the tree of life pattern triggers a long history of religious, literary and cultural references to emerge through intertextuality, while also thoroughly reflecting her artistic and personal history with the pattern and Gibran’s poem. Fig 2.4 42 Fig 2.5 Paley started curating the animation using Damien Rice’s soundtrack that was already finished (Hayek 9:9, Gold Derby interview). Similar to the On Love segment, the poem’s rhythm was adapted first into a song, then the animation followed. Paley has created four sequences: the vector DNA mutation (Fig. 2.6), the tree of life (Fig. 2.5 & 2.7), the mother bird-little hatching into the parent-child (Fig. 2.8), and the bow/archer releasing arrows (Fig. 2.9) in harmony with the four main verses in the song, while employing pre-chorus, chorus and post-chorus parts for weaving two, three and then all the four sequences together in the end. Fig. 2.6 43 Fig. 2.7 Fig. 2.8 44 Fig. 2.9 Another similarity Paley’s On Children shares with Tomm Moore’s On Love is the use of patterns. Paley blurs different patterns that infer different cultural references (Indian, Persian, Latin American and African) in both the background and the foreground elements to evoke a universal feel about the animated poem (Fig. 2.6, 2.8 & 2.9). Furthermore, Paley’s unique individual imprint of keeping the lines dividing the human body parts from the animating process prevails (Fig. 2.8 & 2.9). Indeed, reflective and restorative nostalgia is a valuable framework to analyse the various animation styles in KGTP and how they reflect a highly personalised artistic choice as fostered in collective memory, intertextuality, and a global context11. Further research may as well tap into aspects of restorative nostalgia in teachers and educators' attachment to certain classical texts and how such aspects impact their students’ experience of the same texts through different adaptations of them. Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet: The Curriculum Guide As noted earlier, canonical literature adaptations ––intentionally and unintentionally–– have been attracting teachers and their students as a major audience group. Over the last decade, almost every film aimed at school-aged children has been accompanied or followed by 11 This argument is also valid regarding the musical choices for the songs “On Children” by Damien Rice and “On Love” by Lisa Hannigan and Glen Hansard, the main soundtracks by Gabriel Yared and the featured Cello solos by Yo-Yo Ma. 45 complete guides, with advice and materials for teachers. KGTP appeals to students of all ages as it functions on different levels, while also offering a considerably ample curriculum material. Soon after the release of the film, Journeys in Films developed a school curriculum based on KGTP. The lessons cover a wide range of areas, including Art History, Philosophy, Social Studies, History, English Language Arts, and Film Literacy. The eleven lessons have been developed by experienced classroom teachers to be taught as a unit or used individually, and they are aligned with Common Core State Standards. Students get to view and discuss (parts of) the film, examine visual elements to grasp literary devices, engage with film criticism, and craft creative projects. Much like the adaptation studies, the curriculum guide works on three interconnected levels; the context, the text, and the changes applied to the text through the adaptation process. While the opening lesson introduces students to Kahlil Gibran's life and philosophy as a cosmopolitan figure, the second lesson focuses on Gibran as a visual artist and the artistic traditions that influenced his art. The eight shorter English language arts lessons focus on the poems and dreamlike animation sequences embedded in the story of Almitra and Mustafa. Each lesson is designed in three parts so that students can analyse the poem, review important terms for the study of poetry, thoroughly understand how literary devices work, and produce their own creative writing. Lastly, there is a film literacy lesson that guides students to look beyond the film's message to how it is conveyed through screenplay and directional choices in animation. The notes to the teacher section opens with a quote from The Prophet: 'If [the teacher] is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind' (35), affirming the affiliation of Gibran's philosophy with the curriculum guide's vision of child and young adult students as equal researchers and the aim of catalysing students' creativity and critical thinking. The guide employs KGTP as a multimodal narrative that contains striking visuals, music, and movement and consists of various modes (e.g., linguistic, visual, auditory, gestural, spatial). To design a course based on Studio Ghibli's animated films, Wendy R. Williams has integrated the Personal Digital 46 Inquiry (PDI) framework for teaching any multimodal work, be it comics and graphic novels, picturebooks, or film (2020). This PDI four-part framework (New London Group 1996), especially when integrated into teaching animated films, can help us thoroughly understand the link between multimodality, adaptation and film literacy. In what follows, I am shedding light on how each of the four factors of the PDI framework (situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transforming practice) is integrated into the KGTP curriculum guide. 1. Situated practice "involves experiential learning and opportunities to actively build personally relevant connections to a certain perspective and knowledge base" (Coiro, Kiili, & Castek 120). Each of the KGTP curriculum guide lessons starts with a "Wonder & Discover" activity that encourages deeper personal connections to a specific notion (e.g., coming up with ten things that make you happy and creating sight, smell, and taste imageries). Discussion and creative ideas should naturally emerge as learners are asked to share what evidence or detail in the image or the text supports or relates to their thinking, leading to overt instruction. 2. Overt instruction refers to "develop[ing] explicit ways of thinking and talking about meaning-making conventions in different contexts" (Coiro et al. 120), including using metalanguage (New London Group, 1996) such as visual vocabulary (W.R. Williams, 2019). Through various sets of questions and comparative text/medium analysis, students of KGTP get to collaborate with the teacher in unfolding the multilayered multimodal text. They are encouraged to engage with different meaning-making practices and openly discuss and critique them, which catalyses critical framing. 3. Critical framing "involves contextualizing and critically interrogating ideas from multiple perspectives" (Coiro et al. 120). The KGTP curriculum introduces students to comparative studies through integrating other classical texts, such as “Sympathy” by Paul Laurence Dunbar, or popular culture texts, such as quotes from The Simpsons and discussing different art and animation styles. Such choices in the curriculum design help expose students to 47 various perspectives on the same topic or concept, thereby fuelling their critical thinking and sensitivity to nuances. Ideally, critical framing is encouraged to be taken further to creative, transactional responses and transformed practices. 4. Transformed practice: "Learners, informed by their personal goals and values, design new ways of demonstrating and transferring their knowledge to new contexts" (Coiro et al. 120). All the lessons in the KGTP curriculum end with a “Create” transformed practice, such as creating a personified portrait for the lesson “On Love” or creating a restaurant menu for the lesson “On Eating and Drinking”. According to JIF, many teachers have reported that the JIF curricula have encouraged their students to develop profound empathy and genuine curiosity about the world beyond their own cultural groups. In their reflective analysis of their work on the PDI framework, the New London Group introduces illustrative examples of actual pedagogical moves and learning activity sequences of young learners' engagement with the core PDI practices: "personal inquiry, reflective thinking, critical reasoning, and civic participation" (NLG 7). Teachers also discuss how these practices increased learners' understanding of and participation in a complex digital world by 1) fostering a culture of curiosity, creativity and reflection, 2) developing the ability to visualize, critically reason and deliberate complex ideas, and 3) expanding access to civic participation for children, youth, and adults (7-10). Journeys in Film's ultimate learning outcomes seem to match these three potential pedagogical moves. The organisation's vision revolves around enriching the younger generation's understanding of the world's diversity and complexity while engaging youth in a meaningful, empathetic examination of pressing political and sociocultural issues of human rights, stereotyping and racism, gender roles, immigration, or poverty. Moreover, JIF stresses the film curriculum discussions as not confined to school settings but designed to be taken further to civic participation in public spaces and broader communities (Journey in Films 2020). Here, I want to highlight the link between the extension of the KGTP curriculum guide into youth awareness and activism, which entails critical engagement 48 from the young with the adult-dominated reality, catalysing both intergenerational conflict and solidarity. Discussing Kahlil Gibran's life hardships as an immigrant child and adolescent and perceiving Mustafa's status of a political prisoner who cannot practice his freedom of speech as tethered to a child's struggle to find her voice and to temper her natural force with the rules of an adult-dominated world can shift the two generations' perspectives on one another and the world as a could-be-much-better shared space. However, if we are to prepare children and young adults for effective participation in the world as proactive, informed global citizens, then, as Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Jaques posit, the prerequisite of "a systematic cross-age effort" (11) is essential. Intergenerational relations policies can enable such change to occur, persist, and manage the inevitable cultural and socio-political conflict between young people as the 'rebels' and adults as the 'domineering authorities.' Conclusion This chapter presents an analysis of KGTP as a site of three primary intergenerational solidarity practices that can expand into further enactments in broader communities and contexts. The analysis has highlighted the links between adaptation of classical literary texts, the family film concept, and multimodal, film-based literacies. I have illustrated KGTP as a direct application of the adult-child kinship model, a channel for manifesting restorative nostalgia, and a rich multimodal, pedagogical resource. I have focused on animation film adaptation specifically for the coherence purposes of my analysis of KGTP as a poetry animation adaptation. However, I would argue that the analytical framework introduced here applies to various kinds of adaptations of classical literary texts for children or a dual audience of children and adults. Future research approaches may attempt to fill in the gaps in understanding the correlation between adaptation studies and intergenerational relations in various sociocultural and pedagogical contexts. 49 Chapter Three Holistic Fragmentation: Mapping (Children’s) Poetry Animation in Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet One interesting phenomenon in animation film studies is the extremely diverse theoretical and critical language of analysis. Pre- and non-digital animation studies, for example, rely on a fine-arts-based language that is as varied as fine art production itself: illustration, collage, printing, embroidery, sculpture, drawing, graphics, among many others. Other mediumspecificity oriented studies, on the other hand, centre on film’s time-based visual narrative and film editing analysis and terminology, focusing on images’ transformation, statism and dynamism. Similarly, when animation is intertwined with literary adaptations, the language will tune into literary and adaptation criticism. Because contemporary adaptation criticism is driven by interdisciplinary, multidimensional analysis of the medium, the text (literary, visual, audial or multimodal), and the adaptation’s process and context, it can combine both approaches into a broader, holistic view on what an animation poetry adaptation may encompass. In this last part of my analysis, I attempt to answer the central question of animation poetry studies in the last two decades: why can animation effectively correspond to the complex structure of poems? The existing body of literature concerned with this question suggests two directions for animation poetry analysis. The first dismissively views animation poetry as a minor category of poetry film, which in turn is treated as a minor subject within film theory although animation crosses the disciplines of film, fine art and graphic design. The second approach, on the other hand, connects animation directly to poetry, relying on a more flexible framework of film theory, animation poetics and literary criticism to analyse animation poetry adaptations. This approach also seems to resonate more with the practical experience of poetry animators. Reflecting on her award-winning animated adaptation of Phillip Larkin’s 50 “The Old Fools” (2002), director Ruth Lingford unfolds this direct connection between animation and poetry: I think poetry and animation have a really interesting relationship to each other, they are both very compressed forms, very metaphoric and they have this way of colliding familiar elements in order to get new thoughts, new ideas. It seems to me that there is some basic parallel between morphing one thing into another and placing words together to create new meaning. I think the conjunction of poetry and animation is a very useful one because they both seem to have got caught in various corners culturally; poetry’s in the ‘serious’ corner even when it’s funny, while animation’s in the ‘funny’ corner even when it’s serious. I think having a mix of the two is kind of useful, it helps to flow a bit of air around our expectations of both forms. (Lingford 2011) As a poetry animation adaptation with a central child character, KGTP requires a theoretical framework that weaves animation poetry and children’s poetry into adaptation criticism. I have elaborated on the relevant literature review in Chapter One to view the history and the manifold, often confusing use of the terms visual poetry, poetry film and videopoem. I will briefly visit these three key definitions again before I delve into my analysis. Visual poetry in my analysis refers to the aesthetic concerns and creative acts of stylizing, crafting, shadowing or highlighting significant details in the film without necessarily a direct involvement with an actual poetic text (Dullec qtd in McCreary 20) 12. Lastly, videopoetry is another category of visual texts which ––which like poetry film–– treats poetic texts, albeit through a broader range of audiovisual grammar and fluid conceptuality. A videopoem to a poem is arguably an equivalent of what a music video might be for a song; a free intermedium exploration of the poetic text that aspires to be an expansion rather than an adaptation of it. 12 Poetry film, on the other hand, feeds on such direct involvement as it deals with limiting the limitless meanings of a certain poetic text, while also expanding its iconic references and poetic imagery into an actual sequence of images (Wees qtd. in Ieropoulos 32). 51 The Telling Representational Animation vs. The Showing Abstract Animation Being the only case of a poetry collection animated feature adaptation until the date of writing this thesis, KGTP has to be examined both as the multimodal whole, shifting between narrative and poetry, and as the eight short poetry films by eight different directors. Employing Hutcheon’s three modes of adaptation ––telling, showing, and interactive–– may facilitate understanding Allers’ oscillation between the framing narrative and the poetry segments. Paul Wells’ subjective correlative model of analysis, on the other hand, may help us fathom the animation-poetry merging process as two naturally connected art forms. Poetry offers a rich source material for short films in general because it is a highly compressed form with the potential, and even the urge, to be explored in every possible way through various media. Nevertheless, abstract animation in particular is argued to afford poetry adaptation by its own nature. Both poetry and abstract animation often work with musical structures (rhythm, loops, composition) and not with a narrative structure. Representational or orthodox animation, on the contrary, is concerned with the characterisation and works through narrative structures. As noted earlier, KGTP employs a spectrum of these two kinds of animation, which are very unlikely to be found together in one film, thereby challenging the conventional categorisation of animation films and their target audience. Susan J. Hanna’s definition of poetry as a medium rather than a literary genre suggests that poetry affords “all the weight of thousands of years of form, structure, sonic and visual description, using metaphor, compressed narratives and rhythm in the service of spectacle and emotion” (9). Interrelatedly, Sergei Eisenstein defines animation as “a rejection of once-andforever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to dynamically assume any form” (21). Viewing both definitions together, poetry as an uncontainable force and animation as an elastic fabric can enlighten us on why the animation medium affords the metamorphosis process of poetry adaptations. Wells draws on Eisenstein’s definition of animation to argue that animation is the only medium to “properly facilitate the fullest proposition of the literary 52 text” (204). Correspondingly, Hanna orients Wells’ argument specifically to poetry adaptations by highlighting Wells’ earlier note of orthodox animation being about ‘prose,’ while experimental animation, in contrast, is “more ‘poetic’ and suggestive in its intention” (Understanding Animation 46). Building on Hanna’s work, I take Wells’ observation as a point of departure to reroute Hutcheon’s telling and showing modes of adaptation as intertwined with the duality of the representational prose animation (Allers’ framing narrative) and the experimental poetic animation (the eight animation poetry films). In other words, KGTP transcends the direct adaptation from the telling literary sourcetext into the showing film mode to manifest in a more elaborate transformation dynamic of the telling prose animation vs. the showing poetic animation; one adaptation playing the sourcetext’s telling role for another to show the essence of this very sourcetext. This endorses Hutcheon’s seminal observation that “the move from a telling to a showing mode may [entail] a change in genre as well as medium, [leading to] a shift in the expectations of the audience” (45). She further notes that “the same genre shift can happen with various media within one mode of engagement as well” (45), which thoroughly explains the shifting between experimental and representational animation and between narrative and poetry, as connected to the showing and telling modes of engagement in KGTP, and to the range of expectations from a dual audience of children and adults. As discussed in the previous chapter, Allers had to stretch The Prophet’s brief anecdote (an immigrant poet talking to the people of Orphalese before he boards the ship taking him home) into a representational animation narrative whereby Almitra’s and Mustafa’s characters and their friendship could evolve and deepen. Hence, it is safe to assume that Allers has followed a pattern similar to that of short stories filmic adaptations, where the adapters have to significantly expand their source material by adding details and themes from other texts by the same author (e.g., David Fincher’s 2008 film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, adapted from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story with the same title), and sometimes, in the case of debatably autobiographical texts like The Prophet, drawing from the author’s life itself. 53 While Alles focused on the telling narrative to facilitate communicating the poetry, the eight different directors, according to Hayek, “had complete free reign interpreting the poems”. The 2D computer animation of the framing story in KGTP is of a considerably neutral artistic tone that is often marked flat and soulless by animation critics. In his interview with Gold Derby, Allers explained that his animation style choice was deliberately neutral to avoid overwhelming the audience with the frequent oscillation between the poems and the main story. His only note on the storyboards submitted by the directors was for them to avoid any other independent storylines from the main story of Mustafa and Almita and to rather focus on delivering the abstract ideas in the poems: For one thing I asked people to try to stay away from creating independent [...], big storylines that had beginnings, middles and ends in these poems. I encouraged them to focus on interpreting the text rather than creating another story because if we had a storyline and then these other stories would pop up, it would become very confusing. But by them really focusing on Gibran's words it was very much integrated into the whole artistically. (6:59 - 7:30) Allers’ rule here draws a clear line once again between the narrative representational animation’s narrative affordances and the abstract animation’s poetic ones, with a direct employment of the telling and showing modes of engagement. This does not imply in the least sense that representational animation only tells while abstract animation shows. Naturally, the two kinds of animation will show to engage because they both are visual media in the end. However, representational animation in KGTP specifically should be understood as telling on one level in terms of how the artistic whole functions with frequent shifting between various animation styles and artistic visions. Poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s psychological reading of his calligrammes of concrete poetry or visual iconicity (Ellestrom 2016) suggests that “it is of no importance that [the] visible image be composed of broken language, for the bond between these fragments is no longer the logic of grammar but an ideographic logic, culminating in an order of spatial disposition totally opposed to discursive juxtaposition – it is the opposite of narration.”(qtd. in Esther Leslie 23) 54 Wells deploys Apollinaire’s view in his framework of animated literary adaptation analysis, relating the ideographic logic to the animated world’s inner logic conveyed through the spatial disposition of the adapted text into a pictorial form. Because KGTP’s inner logic, which often stems from the animator’s self-reflexive and metafictive recreating of the text, is not of one animator, fragmentation instituted the inner logic of the adaptation as a whole. In the same interview, Allers takes refuge in music analogies to describe how the artistic whole of KGTP functions. He refers to the collaborative, strongly diverse work of animation mosaic as a Jazz music performance with all its jamming, straying solos, exploration, improvisation and finding the way back to the theming tune, evident in the final adaptation product. From this very sense of harmony, Almitra’s vocalisation journey is forged in direct connection to the animator’s attempt to balance individuality with conventionality. Another reason KGTP’s depiction of Almitra is important is that it connects the creative voice of an artist, struggling to come through, to the child’s experience of claiming her own voice. This leads to the next section of my analysis, which focuses on what children’s poetry should do for the young, reflected in Almitra’s progress from transgressive muteness to activating poetic thinking to agentic speech production. Finding the (Poetic) Voice and the Politics of Silence Allers’ simple 2D style’s main function is to anchor the audience down; to prepare them for taking in the next poem, while making sure the spectators, especially children, are still engaged with a story that connects all parts together. In that sense, representational animation in KGTP attempts a safe transition for the young from their strongly embodied experience of the world into the engagement with elaborate, abstract animation poetry. Almitra’s first spoken words are poetry, and before that she used to imitate seagulls’ sounds. She refuses to go to school and her only friend is a free bird pet that follows her everywhere, yet she would never cage it. She is deeply connected to nature, especially the wind and the sea as reflections of her unruled force of being. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s analysis of the tempting discursive analogies between savagery as the childhood of humanity and childhood as the savagery of a 55 human being, and the noble savage child concept as a natural extension to or origin of the Romantic child image can be insightful in understanding Almitra’s character. Tarzan and Mowgli are clear examples of Disney’s representations of noble savage children who are innately pure, connected to nature, closer to animals in their visceral behaviour, unalloyed by any sociocultural structures or systems, and thus, transgressive. Such aspects, indeed, complement Almitra’s characteristics of the Romantic child discussed in Chapter One that drive Disney’s conceptualisation of childhood and children in general. The adult-child tension and/or solidarity, the agency-subservience duality and the noble savage concepts have always been dominant topics in children’s and young adult literature and film. However, KGTP offers a fresh take on these topics by relating them directly to poetry in a way that can shift our understanding of what children’s poetry can do for children. Children’s poet Randall Jarrell’s poem “The Bat-Poet” inspired Joseph T. Thomas’ analysis of child poets forming two categories. One group of child poets mirrors the adult poets they encounter and connect with their poetry, equipped with the tools of poetry as a craft in Myra Cohn Livingston’s wording. The other group includes the raconteurs “who specialize in the sometimes bawdy playground poetry”. Child poets of the latter category, as Thomas avers, are the more common and they “remind us of what children often do with language while outside grown-up supervision” (152). Child poet Almitra is, interestingly enough, an illustration of both groups. On one hand, she reflects Koch’s view on children as natural poets who are capable of developing a poetic tradition of richer and more sensuous word play and poetic imagery. On the other hand, however, Almitra often emulates Mustafa as the conversations with him trigger’s her poetic thinking and imaging and his poetry introduces her to a language that she can use to alleviate her turbulent and blocked self-expression through. At the beginning we are introduced to muted Almitra as ill-equipped to deal with prolonged grief upon the loss of her father; her ‘misbehaving’ is justified and tolerated out of pity and compassion. This soon changes when she meets Mustafa; as she empathetically recognises 56 her own struggle in his, Almitra’s silence is immediately politicalized as a protest; a political stance of resistance as her position as the “unspeaking subject” who lacks the capacity to communicate verbally (Weld 2014) shifts into that of an explorer of possible ways for her voice to come through in harmony with her often misunderstood wild nature. The attempts to understand the roles of silence in political practice as it operates as resistance to domination have been original and eye-opening. However, the argument concerning Almitra’s silence here goes beyond this simple dualism to examine how silence does not solely reinforce or resist power but can also be used to constitute selves and structure communities. As Foucault has argued, “silence and secrecy are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions, but they also loosen its hold and provide for relatively obscure areas of tolerance” (101). These political dynamics of silence are most evident in Almitra’s relationship with her community, and in Mustafa’s influence on this relationship. Applying Foucault’s understanding of what silence may do to power, we can see that Almitra’s silence becomes a form of resistance, of detachment from and resentment towards practices of community building, norm setting, and identity formation that might cage her soul. In other words, her silence denotes a clear rejection, and even a satire of such practices of power over her, while, obviously, reflecting Mustafa’s determination to continue practicing his right in freedom of speech in resilient, creative and playful ways (Fig. 3.1 & 3.2). The moment Mustafa declares Almitra his friend whose spirit “dwells in rhythmic silence, holding a truth that cannot be told in words”, the town people’s perception of Almitra changes, shifting their attitude to become more friendly and open towards her. Mustafa’s statement about Almitra simultaneously represents the essence of the Russian avant-garde infantalist philosophy of voicelessness (Weld 2014) and the foundation of Coats' rooting of children's poetry in the child's sensuous experiencing of the world. This rhythmic silence is probably the best metaphor for the stream of creativity that enables the process of poetry animation to unfold. Only by the time Almitra and Mustafa’s bond is formed, are young viewers as ready as Almitra to undergo deeper experiences of abstract, avant-garde animated poetry. 57 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 By the end, in Mustafa’s moment of absolute despair while awaiting his execution, Almitra’s voice comes through for the first time to remind him: “You can fly away. Not houses. Not bodies. Spirit.” 58 Here, Almitra reproduces the meaning she made of Mustafa’s poem “On Freedom” in her own rhythm, emotion and voice (Fig. 3.3). We see her transcending barriers, standing in front of Mustafa as an equally eloquent communicator who is empowered to maintain direct eyecontact while expressing her thoughts and feelings independently from her pet seagull for the first time (Fig 3.4). Although the perspective on children’s poetry in KGTP is clearly leaning towards associating it with adults’ responsibility to help the young engage with life through language, her Romantic and noble savage traits suggest that children’s poetry should as well help the young engage with language through their kinaesthetic and sensuously fresh experiencing of life. Almitra’s understanding of the abstract concept of freedom, for example, is inherently connected to her bodily experience of being on the edge of a roof top to embrace the wind with her arms widely spread. While poetry is especially convenient to the navigation of dream states, emotional spheres, thought processes, memories and fantasies, children’s poetry accesses such abstract states primarily through an embodied cognitive experience. Taking the animation-poetry relation into account, this argument is equally valid for poetry animation in terms of how child viewers perceive the abstract animation segments in KGTP. Similar to how poetry provided Almitra with a language for her self-expression to forge and emerge into the world, abstract poetry animation might appeal to young viewers even if they could not still comprehend the poem in a conceptual way. In other words, children’s poetry animation can amplify the linguistic-kinaesthetic links children’s poetry creates through a rich and highly impactful audio-visual experience. 59 Fig 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Ryan Pierson argues that the animation viewer’s task of resolving ambiguities is often more prominent as the consistencies that we might take for granted, such as the dimensions of the space where the events are happening or the performer’s physical form have to be earned through the transition from frame to frame, the relations among the components within each frame, and the relation of image to soundtrack. Hence, “[i]t would be more accurate to say that animation is considered here as an art of coordinating sensory units into perceptible figures and forces. Style in animation emerges, in part, from how units coordinate with each 60 other. Thus, we can use style to think about animated movements as experiments in the possibilities of sensory organisation” (4). This understanding of animation is taken into consideration for the order in which the animated poems appear in KGTP to assist in making the viewer’s swinging between the different animation styles smoother. Muhammed Saeed Harib’s On Good and Evil, for example, tackles the concept by following a sequence of a prey deer hunting in the wilderness, and so it appears during Mustafa’s path through the forest and is followed by another watercolour-based poem, On Death, in which the Gothic effect triggered through On Good and Evil peaks to dissolve again into a sense of mystic peace. Less abstract poetry films like John Sfar’s comic styled tango dance On Marriage, in which the newly met couple’s movement dynamic tells a rich, yet simple story and Plympton’s On Eating and Drinking are shown between more abstract and sophisticated poems, brimming with symbolic details such as On Children and On Love. It comes as no surprise, however, that a number of KGTP’s reviewers and critics have recommended seizing the animated poems once again, separately from the whole. Although its holistic fragmentation is carefully orchestrated, KGTP indeed can be a lot to take in as a whole and viewers are likely to miss out on some of the animated poems while relating more to or getting fixated on others. Allers’ note on the collaboration with different animators with such diverse visions and styles ––“I felt like the kid with the box with two layers of different chocolates!” –– affirms the potential overwhelming impact of KGTP. That said, I dedicate the last part of this chapter to navigating the eight short poetry animations more thoroughly and independently from the whole feature-length. The Subjective Correlative in KGTP’s Poetry Animation Shorts As noted earlier, each of the eight animation poetry films in KGTP can be viewed independently from the feature length watching experience. Specific poetry films are mostly acclaimed in their own right by reviewers for certain directional and artistic choices, with 61 notes of the director’s signature style, dominant techniques and animation influences. Joan C. Gratz (Director of On Work), Michał Socha (director of On Freedom), and Nina Paley (director of On Children) list their KGTP’s animation poetry films in the filmography section of their official websites. Paley and Socha have reflected on the adaptation process of Gibran’s poems in blog posts and video essays. Such reflections on and documentations of the adaptation process testify to the animators’ familiarity with poetry and film language and to their ability to illustrate and translate the poem through establishing a clear methodology. Moreover, highlighting the segments as individual projects in such an intimate way necessarily calls for Wells’ understanding of adaptation as a creatively subjectivising process, where the animator is “the explicit and present agent of ‘metamorphosis” (204). Revising T. S. Eliot’s concept of the objective correlative as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.’’(45), Well suggests that the animator’s inevitable self-reflexive presence in the creative process of adaptation to bring about certain aesthetic outcome “effectively subjectivises the correlative materials and resources of the text” (204). In my analysis of the animated poetry films as separate from the whole, I focus on how some of the six subjective correlative approaches are worked through the adaptations. Wells’ defines the subjective correlative as: a process which views any ‘‘text’’ –– linguistic or visual –– as a model of transmutation which must account for 1) its execution (‘plasmaticness’ 13); 2) its wit (the ‘serio-comic’); 3) its solipsism (the illustration of the ‘interior’ creative premise – the space when animation auteur and literary author simulate each other); 4) its simultaneity of the literal and the abstract (‘ambiguity’); 5) its spatial discourse (the ‘ideographic logic’); and 6) its intended effect (the emotional outcome). (204) 13 The concept of animation’s plasmaticness was first mentioned in a series of notes that Sergei Eisenstein wrote on Disney in the 1930s and 1940s. “To see a shape changing shape, Eisenstein writes, is to see a willful freedom from the constraints of form as such, a distillation of life as that which defies form” (qtd. in Pierson 4). 62 Socha’s On Freedom is the first animated poem to appear in KGTP. The transition from telling to showing is made smoothly through Almitra playing with a wooden charm bird on Mustafa’s desk that comes alive with Mustafa’s reciting of the first verse “I have seen people throw themselves down and worship their freedom”. In his video essay of the adaptation process, Socha follows the gradual evolution of his adaptation from sourcetext editing, to sketching and colouring, to computer animating. Socha’s self-figuration is evident in his creative process of creating an aesthetic that champions all of the animation’s tradition, a tradition inherent to both this specific filmpoem and animation history, which claims the visual poetics of this artform as a key language in combining poetry and animation. On Freedom ––or any of the other seven animated poems in KGTP–– can be viewed as an illustration of Mustafa’s ‘‘stream of consciousness’’ to reflect the literary model of interiority/ exteriority, whereby the visual externalisation of interior states through animation parallels articulating them through literary devices. 14 Adaptation of Gibran’s On Work and On Death have embraced and re-interpreted their textual source by striking the balance between painterly emotional expressions of interior states and improvising abstraction, in clear homage to and endorsement of the independent animation’s Golden Era between 1928 and 1945. The condensing and minimizing of poetic imagery in these two animated poems parallel the literary device of ‘ambiguity’ (William Empson 5) as a mode of continuity and revelation to deliver the metamorphosis experience that enriches and liberates the potential meaning of the text. Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi’s embracing of the ‘‘plasmatic potential’’ in the poem On Death is facilitated by the supernatural watercolor imagery lending itself willingly to continuous animated metamorphosis (Fig. 3.6). Similarly, but not exactly, Joan C. Gratz has employed the clay painting in On Work to evoke a sense of natural formation and dissolution loop that connects human work with divine work as a process of creation and erasure (Fig. 3.5). This metamorphosing technique of applying bits of 14 Wells employs Edward Morgan Forster’s engagement with ‘‘Mickey and Minnie,’’ (1980) and Virginia Woolf’s critique of Dostoyevsky (1979) to formulate this parallel model. 63 clay, blending colours and etching fine lines to create a seamless flow of images is C. Gratz’s signature visual poetry aesthetic which she has previously used in two poetry animation shorts, James Weldon Johnson’s classical poem “The Creation” (1981) and Samuel Taylor Coleridges’ poem “Kubla Khan” (2011). Fig 3.5 Fig 3.6 The conflicts and tensions in the ‘‘serio-comic’’ is more evident in Bill Plympton’s On Drinking and Eating, in which the caricature modality of expression and the comic, action mimicking music is making the practice of eating and drinking both serious and amusing through evoking the tension between the literal and the abstract (Fig. 3.7). As we follow the human body’s processing of foods and drinks in a satirical way, we are also being ‘seriously’ introduced to the abstract idea of human existence as ‘rooted’ in Earth, and the simple everyday act of eating and drinking as a prayer for Earth, the provider and the guardian of all blessings. This tension is, to a great extent, a successful reworking of Arthur Koestler’s notion of “bathos [becoming] pathos” (13) in a two-way reversible and optional passage between playfulness and thoughtfulness. Unlike in On Death and On Work, the metamorphosis in On 64 Drinking and Eating manifests through the cartoon drawing lines, not the colours, which automatically induces a lighter appeal that enables the comic to surface. Fig. 3.7 Cartoon Saloon’s Tomm Moore, on the other hand, deploys the movement of figures itself to convey this metamorphosis effect in On Love. Known for his highly stylized and detailed backgrounds, with strong modern art influences, Moore’s animation is perceived as establishing its characters within rich environments in his previous award-winning films The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea. According to Pierson, the equivalent for the characterenvironment dynamic of representational animation is the figure-force dynamic in abstract animation (6). This dynamic is apparent in On Love’s components of one frame collapsing in harmony to facilitate the transition into another; as if the force is releasing the figures to correspond to the soundtrack’s rhythm and tempo, then gravitating them again to build the new frame (Fig. 3.8). Fig. 3.8 65 To wrap the poetry animation shorts analysis into the whole of KGTP once again before I present my conclusions, I will trace the holistic fragmentation dynamic in KGTP’s twominutes-long official trailer, which is another illustration of the poetry-animation intimate and yielding liaison itself. Opening with the emphasis on the film being from the director of The Lion King, a melange of three bird-themed scenes from three different animated poems emerges to highlight the freedom motif. The “Based on the 100-million-selling masterpiece” affirmation leads to the author’s name and the book title combination that forms the film’s title Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, surfacing on Gibran’s illustration of The Prophet’s cover and title pages in the background. Next appears Mustafa and Almitra’s first encounter sequence, and then we see a snap of the village’s people’s reaction to Mustafa’s release from the prolonged house arrest, followed by Mustafa’s confrontation with the Pasha, accusing him of calling for a rebellion. Afterwards, we hear Mustafa’s reassuring voice “They think I am a prisoner, but I have flown away many times”, while watching him painting. With the soundtrack On Love (composed and performed by Lisa Hannigan and Glen Hansard) getting louder, we are transported through Mustafa’s original painting into Paley’s adaptation of it in On Children, then to a thread connecting various movement sequences from various poems runs to the song’s rhythm and beat. We feel thrilled as we see the arrows releasing from On Children and targeting the running in On Good and Evil, while the soul’s elevating from On Death with the tree’s uprooting from On Freedom evokes a sense of relief. As Hannigan hits higher notes with faster tempo, we go through different spiral movement sequences from the lovers’ falling down in On Love, to the golden round maze of wheat/sun in On Work, to the inside of the tree/cage in On Freedom. The same happens with combining different dance moves from On Love and On Marriage in one sequence. These threads weaving the different animated poems together meet through knots of Allers’ scenes of Almitra’s defining moments that correspond to the song’s pauses and segues. Near the end, we hear Mustafa’s statement “My crime? Poetry”, followed by a list of the eight poetry animation shorts’ directors. Watching the trailer carefully can be insightful in regards to understanding the seemingly impossible process of making KGTP one artistic whole. The trailer is an invitation for the 66 viewer to trust the oscillations, transitions and transformations in order to enable the holistic fragmentation effect to manifest: it is all linked and connected at the end in an ultimate interplay and reciprocity between animation and poetry, between the narrative telling and the abstract showing, between adulthood and childhood. Conclusion This chapter has looked at animated poetry adaptation from a variety of angles, touching on the interdependency between the media of poetry and animation, and hence the necessary interdisciplinary approach to study poetry animation adaptations. My analysis has delved deeper into KGTP as a unique case of holistic fragmentation, in which various styles, types and techniques of animation are harmonised and orchestrated. I have presented my argument of the relation between the narrative structure of representational animation as suited for the telling mode of communication and the poetic affordances of abstract animation as showing in relation to the concept of ideographic logic. Moreover, I have linked the representational/abstract animation binary to the function and the meaning of children’s poetry, suggesting that Almitra is a child poet whose voice has emerged from a middle ground between the two major children’s poetry schools of thought. Lastly, I have examined some of the mechanics of the animation process by analysing the visual poetry of some of KGTP’s segments as case studies, employing the subjective correlative model of analysis’ angles of plasmaticness, interiority/exteriority, serio-comic tension, and ambiguity. 67 Conclusions Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet is an interesting case of crossover adaptation that suggests a fresh view on children’s poetry, poetry animation and adaptation criticism at the same time. My analysis of the recent poetry animation adaptation illustrates possible links between the three different scopes of animated adaptation of classical literary texts, film literacy, and intergenerational relations. The first chapter deploys Hutcheon’s palimpsestuous intertextuality concept to frame KGTP as a process and a product of adaptation, looking into the context and the motives behind the project. The second chapter builds on Tagore’s He model as a representation of the adapter who facilitates intergenerational and playful encounters between an adult and a child that mirrors the creative exchange of poetic thinking between Mustafa and Almita in KGTP. Moreover, the analysis draws from the restorative nostalgia and multimodal pedagogy frameworks to explore the intergenerational solidarity practices of JIF’s curriculum guide based on KGTP and the restoration of The Prophet text as a reliving of former meaningful intergenerational connections and a catalyst of contemporary ones. The third chapter, on the other hand, concludes with positing a new mapping of representational and abstract animation styles in relation to the different literary devices and functions of narrative and poetry genres, conveyed in the telling and showing modes of communication. Although my analysis provides a preliminary depiction of KGTP’s potential as a field of intergenerational solidarity practices and a reforming of the seemingly opposing schools of animation and children’s poetry, further empirical research to survey and examine the dual viewership of adults and children’s reactions during and after the viewing experience is essential for testing such potential. In order to evaluate how suitable animated adaptations of adult poetry are for child viewers in general and KGTP’s model of holistic fragmentation in particular, further study into children’s responses to KGTP and different poetry animation adaptations needs to be conducted. Similarly, more research is needed in order to explore all the possibilities these poetry animation adaptations offer as a new resource for literary and 68 film education. Moreover, further investigation of the ways children’s practices of silence and speech production are inherently connected to childhood policies and rights, as well as children’s poetry’s cognitive function of facilitating the child’s transition into language as the Other’s system may contribute to filling in the gaps in children’s poetry theory and its applications. To sum up, watching Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet again as an adult researcher of children’s literature, film and culture has made me think of all the possible ways it would have impacted me as a child viewer who was naturally drawn to poetry and animation. This thesis has been itself another application of Tagore’s He model; a conversation between the adult researcher and the child viewer in me which I hope to inspire further research concerning poetry animation adaptations and children’s poetry. 69 Works Cited: "About." Journeys in Film, 11 Aug. 2020, journeysinfilm.org/about-us/. Allers, Roger. 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