Characters In Name Only

This is a problem with the adaption of one form of media into another: you have a character from a novel or a computer game and you want to transfer that character into a movie or TV series. Ideally, you will cut those parts of the original story which simply don’t work in the new medium (such as internal dialogue) and keep the rest as intact as the confines of a movie or a series (usually the time available, sometimes also the SFX budget) allow. Or you can do what several studios have done, say ‘fuck the original’, and have the characters in name only instead.

 

The most recent example at the moment is “Artemis Fowl”. The series, written by Eoin Colfer during the 2000s (although there is a recent spin-off series focusing on Artemis’ younger brothers), has been a huge success in the preteen/teen market segment and, as I can personally vouch for, is also fun to read for adults. There were several tries to get a movie or even movie series up and running, but until recently, none succeeded. Then Disney bought the movie rights and has just released their movie version, simply called “Artemis Fowl”, just as the first novel it is, supposedly, based on. Most people already knew it was going to be bad once they saw the trailer (such as Dominic Noble).

The Artemis Fowl series was unique among novels for preteens and teens (and pretty rare when it comes to novels for adults) by starting out unabashedly with a villain protagonist. Twelve-year-old Artemis Fowl was a criminal mastermind who successfully kidnapped a fairy and collected ransom in gold bars for her. He outsmarted the entire LEP (lower elements police), made up of people centuries, if not millennia, older than him, and walked away with half the demanded ransom, having traded in the other half for a favour from his former kidnapping victim.

Now, I can see how Disney would be wary about a kid’s movie with a child character who is unabashedly evil, but this bears the question ‘why have they bought the rights in the first place?’ Did they only look at the 28 million and counting fan base? Didn’t any of them read the books - or at least the first one - before deciding on that deal? They bought a franchise and then decided to only keep the name for the movies they wanted to make (not that I think there will be another one - the first is very much guaranteed to tank).

Artemis, for those of you who now think ‘who could possibly love a series with an evil child outside of the horror genre?’, does get his redemption arc throughout the next four books, ending “The Last Colony” as a hero of sorts (before he has a relapse two books later and becomes outright heroic in the following and last book, “The Last Guardian”). There are good influences in his life, such as Holly Short (his kidnapping victim), Julius Root (Holly’s superior at work), his servant/bodyguard Butler, his mother Angeline, and his father Artemis (yes, strictly speaking, Artemis Fowl is Artemis Fowl the Second), once he’s been found and rescued in the second book, “The Arctic Incident”.

 

Disney rode rough-shoed over the complete series, no matter whether director Kenneth Branagh was to blame or whether he himself was under pressure by some Disney executive I have no name or face to.

First of all, they decided that you couldn’t have an evil protagonist - which is not a surprise, since we’re talking about Disney here. So cold-blooded, ruthless and, at times, intimidating (again, as a twelve-year-old) Artemis Fowl the Second becomes, essentially, the complete opposite. We’re told he’s a genius, but everything in the movie is handed to him. It’s mentioned at the beginning of the novel that he’s been working on this plan for two years, starting at the age of ten, putting many, many hours of hard work into getting the background information he has by the beginning of the novel. The reader sees him working at it further, refusing to give up on deciphering the Book, which includes all important knowledge on the fairies, despite being foiled again and again. He manages to work past all the horrible surprises springing up during the novel, working against people who have centuries or millennia on him in age and experience (fairies are long-lived). Artemis earns his success in the end. In the movie, he doesn’t.

The movie does a lot of ‘telling, not showing’ when it comes to Butler as well. In the books, it’s suggested at various points that Artemis’ bodyguard and manservant Butler has a Past worthy of the capital ‘P’. He has definitely been around before taking up his work as Artemis’ servant the night the boy was born - he has acquaintances all over the world, supposedly was part of several different black OPs, has worked for several secret services, and has also made contacts on the illegal side of things. In addition, Butler is one hell of a fighter - the only human to take on a troll (in the first novel) and win. The troll scene is pretty visceral and I’m surprised it was kept in the book, but it’s also an amazing piece of writing. The readers and Artemis also don’t get to know Butler’s first name until the beginning of the third book, “The Eternity Code”, when Butler dies and, with his dying breath, tells Artemis his name. He is revived later (and Holly is forced to use about ten years of his life span in addition to her own magic), but he knew he was dying and wanted to tell his charge and friend this last secret.

There’s basically nothing left in the movie which is in the book, apart from the names. In the books, Artemis’ parents never learn about fairies, in the movie, his father was already working with them. In the books, Angeline Fowl, his mother, is a positive influence in his life, in the movie, she’s dead (and she never dies in the books). Two villains from the second book (one of whom was a minor annoyance to Commander Root in the first book) are brought in to make this work, but they’re neither used well, nor does it really fit. Then there’s a last-minute addition of a MacGuffin which works as well as one would suspect it to: not at all (check another video by Dominic Noble on this).

 

“Artemis Fowl” is not the first or only case in which this happens. Especially with franchises aimed at younger audiences (but also with others), movie and TV studios have bought the franchise and just superimposed their own stories on the characters they bought the rights to. This seems a weird thing to do - it would be much cheaper for the studios to just cook up their own characters (that’s not hard) and start their new franchises where the characters can be whatever they want them to be. It’s not as if Disney has never started their own franchise about two princesses from a Scandinavian country which featured this absolute ear-worm of a song…

Fairies as a such (meaning elves, dwarfs, gnomes, etc.) are not covered by copyright, everyone can use their version of them whatever way they see fit. The same goes for the Greek pantheon of gods (since Percy Jackson was another victim of such ‘in name only’ movie-making) and countless other public domain characters and their lore.

 

If you buy a franchise, keep to the franchise. You don’t make a “Harry Potter” movie without magic where you replace Lord Voldemort with a corporate shark. The same way you shouldn’t make an “Artemis Fowl” movie without a twelve-year-old criminal mastermind who will need to learn to better himself. If you work with other people’s characters (at least professionally, fan-fiction is a different topic), keep the characters and the plot so far intact.