From Adaptation to Appropriation? Exploring Ruth Stiles Gannett’s Legacy in Masami Hata’s Elmer no Boken and Nora Twomey’s My Father’s Dragon

My Father’s Dragon, Ruth Stiles Gannett’s 1948 novel, has inspired many generations of American and foreign children. This inspiration was so significant that it gave way to an animated adaptation in 1997 by Japanese director Masami Hata. Elmer no Bôken (エルマーの冒険) offers a relatively faithful adaptation of the novel’s narrative. However, its aesthetic is resolutely transcultural as it shows inspiration from the original novel’s lavish illustrations while imbuing them with some of the typical techniques of anime films. In 2022, Netflix released a new adaptation driven by five-time Oscar-nominated Irish studio Cartoon Saloon. My Father’s Dragon beautifully displays the studio’s trademark reliance on “clean geometric shapes against stylized backgrounds” (Zahed, 2022, .26), in which director Nora Twomey presents stylized yet recognizable representations of Elmer and the dragon. However, this new adaptation gives the audience a transformed version of the adventure that eventually brings together these two young children figures who learn to trust in their own and each other’s capacities. This paper seeks to compare both adaptations to emphasize how the directors’ style and the studios’ aesthetics have come to support what appears to be radically different interpretations of the source material. As Sanders (2017) puts it, all adaptations seek to solve an “equation” (p.17), that of a tension between the old and the new. In this respect, Hata’s and Twomey’s films may well display an inescapable movement from adaptation to appropriation.