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Page to Screen by Anita L. Burkam Chris Van Allsburg’s 2002 picture book Zathura echoed his 1981 Jumanji: the title refers to a magical game that, once begun, must be played out. Zathura is a space adventure game: as two brothers spin the dial and move their pieces around the board, the game spits out cards announcing space-related hazards like meteor showers, killer robots, and aliens. But these meteor showers aren’t imaginary — they’re real, and they’re dangerous. Only by playing the game through to the end can the brothers get back home. Now, to make a two-hour feature film out of a thirty-two-page picture book does not always yield the best results — think Mike Myers’s The Cat in the Hat. But the movie Jon Favreau made from Zathura not only avoids the pitfalls of padding and stretching that picture books adaptations are prone to, it even improves on the original. Zathura has a flexible plot framework that allows the insertion of additional episodes into the movie format without strain. The movie version of Zathura further expands the basic picture book plot with the inclusion of adult game-players who have been trapped in the game — a nice recurrence from Jumanji and a device that grants both movies extra scope to create tensions and dynamics among the characters. Finally, the Cat in the Hat–like destruction of the house that was a major theme in Jumanji is carried to new heights in the sequel. Zathura chooses a beautiful house — solidly built, with wood panels, strong architectural accents on the lintels, and a working dumbwaiter. On the movie posters, an image of it floating on its own little asteroid, lit up against the blackness of space, encapsulates the game’s juxtaposition of space fantasy and suburbia. The book knocks the house around pretty hard, but the film throws itself into house-wrecking with a will, cataloguing the succeeding insults of meteors, a sideways shift in gravity, an out-of-control robot who enjoys busting through doors, an astronaut who sets their couch on fire and jettisons it into space, photon bursts, and eventually grappling hooks and demolition by the Zorgons. Why? Because it’s fun to watch things being destroyed, as anyone who has ever walked past a wrecking ball will tell you. I’m reminded of those clips on Sesame Street of a baker with an armload of desserts who falls down a flight of stairs and ends up at the bottom smeared in pie. Gratuitous. Compelling. Art. Van Allsburg’s own art is a large part of his appeal — Jumanji won the Caldecott Medal, after all — and director Jon Favreau had to choose whether or not to carry that distinct visual aesthetic over into the film production. The filmmakers of The Polar Express, for instance, work hard to sustain the artist’s visual ideation in their movie version. Favreau goes in a different direction with Zathura, and he makes a good choice. The carefully rendered black-and-white drawings of the picture book, with their textured surfaces composed of thousands of tiny squiggles, create an atmosphere of eerie almost-realism, features and architecture ever-so-slightly elongated to suggest a barely twisted normalcy. But it’s a distancing effect. The illustrator’s eye seems more focused on the contrast of the shapes and textures of space with a domestic interior than on the characters’ connection with each other or the reader — the brothers are often viewed from behind and seem to be avoiding the reader’s gaze. The live-action movie characters are far more human and accessible. Six-year-old Danny works his melting brown eyes and cherub cheeks for the camera, while ten-year-old Walter, at first a total pain of an older brother, opens and softens as he realizes the danger they’re in. Although a movie can be more dynamic than a book simply by virtue of its being a “motion picture,” Van Allsburg’s illustrations are particularly static, while the movie makes good use of the brothers chasing each other around the house, fighting, and, later, fleeing alien Zorgons. Van Allsburg creates his own universe in his picture book (literally); Favreau creates a different one more suited to the immediate and intimate medium of the screen. One problem the book and the movie share as a result of the game-based plot structure is a certain whiff of mechanization, of paint-by-numbers storytelling — the complications are arbitrarily assigned obstacles introduced by the game itself, and apart from deciding whether or not to play in the first place, the brothers are mostly reactive. The movie, however, with its greater scope for development, heightens the areas where the boys do have choices, greasing the mechanism a little. In the book, sibling rivalry is didactically but briefly sketched; as the game unfolds, the initially antagonistic brothers help each other in turn, and in the end, released by the game, they go off together to play catch. Nice, but minimal. The movie, on the other hand, takes its time setting up the brothers’ relationship. With their parents divorced, both boys vie for their father’s attention: Danny is desperate for one talent to top his athletic brother, and Walter, weary of his little brother’s puppylike desire to play with him, is certain that Danny’s birth ruined his formerly perfect life. The conflict escalates somewhat predictably — Danny and Walter’s “He broke it!” and “Hey, I was watching that!” could be everybrother’s — but each note resonates. And when Danny starts playing the game (designed like a wonderful 1920s mechanical tin toy, with a wind-up key, GO button, spinning counter, a pair of tin space ships that cruise automatically around their tracks, and a slot from which a card pops each turn with a satisfying ding), their squabbling continues. But the two need each other, and the expansion on that dynamic is where the movie makes its most interesting departure from the book. Danny draws a card that says, “Rescue Stranded Astronaut,” and the character so introduced really gets the action moving. The Astronaut understands the game — what attracts the lizard-like Zorgons (heat) and what they like to eat (Astronaut: “Meat.” Danny: “Well, that’s good . . .” Astronaut: “Dude — you’re meat.”) It turns out the Astronaut once played Zathura with his own brother, but when he got a golden “Shooting Star — Make a Wish” card, he wished his brother had never been born. A shortsighted wish, because without his brother there to take his turn, the Astronaut could never finish the game. At times roughhewn action hero, at other times hapless babysitter, the Astronaut is a great older-brother role model, his ultimate fate tying back into the sibling-rivalry/sibling-bonding theme in a surprising but satisfying way. The movie heightens the story’s stakes and tension over the book version, bringing the Zorgons closer and even letting them get hold of the game, which the players must retrieve if they want to finish and get home. The sibling rivalry subtext in the movie enriches the characters of both brothers, adding in motivations and backstory, and the screenwriters have created new characters who give the story greater depth. If the storytelling is occasionally clunky, the movie hits all its marks in a way that engages the viewer more than Zathura the book reaches out to the reader. Some books seem written in the express hope that someone will make a movie of them; the results are usually shallow and flashy. Zathura doesn’t seem to be in that category, but it really benefits from the translation.
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