Osmar Vergara
translation essay
Course 2400
Persepolis and its different medias
Its 1980 in Iran and they are having many internal and external problems within their country due to political and religious conflicts. In the story Persepolis we follow the story of Marjane and through her perspective we follow her life story about living in these tough times that are happening in Iran. The story being written and drawn into a graphic novel is a great way to convey the authors experience by visuals and character bubble dialogue. Making it a graphic novel makes it great and easy in my opinion for a film adaptation.Like many comic books and graphic novels they get turn into films wether they are live action or animated, like many these can go either way of being faithful to the source material or overall changing the source material to fit it in a film form. In the case for the adaptation for Persepolis it seems to be a very faithful adaptation to the graphic novel where as they even got the animation style too look like the graphic novels illustrations. Obviously theres going to be some changes to the film to fit it in the film run time. In this essay well talk about those similarities and differences and wether its a good or bad thing when films change the source material when adapting a book or graphic novel.
When it comes to the to the film adaptation of the graphic novel of Persepolis it seems to stay very true to its source material by the tone and the style they nailed it down in my opinion. Even though being a faithful adaptation there had to be some changes made for the film version like many other great adaptations. some obvious similarities are the characters and settings shown in the graphic novel and movie like Marji her family her friends her love interests, and for the settings they both include Iran, France, and Austria to name a few. One big similarity is how the movie is shown visually, by having the same art style and being animated adds a lot to the film on portraying the graphic novel and also having it being black and white adds a lot though the movie adds color for some sense to be meant to show the “present” time. Due to being a movie the source material would have to be cut into a movie run time and thats where the differences show between the two medias and also some theme changes as well. One difference between the two is cutting pages or scenes for the movie one example the movie cuts out many scenes of when Marji was living in Austria, another small change that was made when Marjis love interest in the movie it was mainly a fast collage of scenes about their relationship and her eventually being cheated on while in the graphic novel it dove more into detail about their relationship and the climax of it. One main difference is that the plot is changed a bit from its source material while the graphic novel focus more on Marjis story of her growing up to the woman that she eventually becomes by telling it in chapters based on her memories that she actually has. While in the movie it tries to tie in the chapters into a flowing story therefore cutting some scenes out, its also made in Marjis point of view but having different themes by showing that in the movie that story Isnt about only her self but focuses the world around her and tries to inform about the conflicts that were happening to Iran at the time.
In conclusion the movie adaptation does take a lot from the source material and it does it justice even while cutting scenes for its limited run time. It all worked out well from the animation style to the language used for the movie which is french a language the author of the book knows very well. Even while having a not to different theme and plot from each other they take out the best from the graphic novel. Now wether its ok for films to change things from the source material? It depends on the context of the media its being transformed it either can go really bad like the film adaptation on the comic “Death Note” or really good like “The Dark Knight” trilogy both having similar yet different plots to their respected source material. Its also based on preference as well, thats the beauty of adaptations wether good or bad they make you go to the source material to see the real intended message the author wants to show its readers. Like in Persepolis you get different perspectives on the take of this real life story based on the authors life.
