Hello my Beautiful Watchers and welcome back to Lost in Adaptation, the internet review
show that focuses on the plot and theme accuracy of film adaptations of books and other literature.
The Princess and the Goblin was a children’s fantasy novel published in 1872. Its author,
George MacDonald is one of those writers who is not exactly a household name in his own
right but is sighted again and again by world famous authors as an inspiration.
Indeed he’s been claimed as a literary influence by J. M. Barrie, Hope Mirrlees, L. Frank Baum,
C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Peter S. Beagle and Neil Gaiman. But you know what, he had
one thing that none of them had... a great big bushy beard!
There have been a few adaptations of the story over the years but the one featured in today's
episode is the animated feature that came to be about 118 years after the book in 1990
and was a joint Hungarian, British and Japanese production directed by, and I’m taking a
wild swing at pronunciation here, József Gémes.
As usual before we get down to the biscuits of comparing the two please allow me to share
my thoughts on the book and the film as individual entities.
The vaguest most general description of the book’s plot is as follows:
Once upon a time there was a very young princess name Irene... Umm, it’s spelt Irene but
they pronounce it Eye-ree-knee in the film and apparently that is a legit way of saying
it, which seems weird to me but so I’m going to do the same to avoid confusion.
She’s been kept indoors pretty much her entire life because there are a lot of goblins
living under the mountains of her kingdom who would love a chance to kidnap her while
her father the king is away traveling through his domain.
One day she goes exploring her castle and finds a woman in the attic who somehow gives
off the impression that she is super old despite having no signs of aging besides silver hair.
She tells Irene that she is her great great grandmother and she’s all magic and shit
so if she ever gets in trouble she’s got a cool super powered relative to have her
back.
Eventually Irene and her nurse get caught outside after dark and almost get into goblin
related trouble but are saved by a young commoner boy and named Curdie who scares away the goblins
off by singing, something they hate to hear.
Curdie is later captured by the goblins while trying to spy on them to find out what their
evil plans are but is saved by Irene who was guided to him with a magic thread weaved by
her grandmother.
He returns the favor yet again by helping to save her home when the goblins invade it
with the intention of kidnapping her and forcing her into an arranged marriage with a goblin
prince.
The butthurt goblins try to divert a shedload of water into a human mine to get revenge
but Curdie having already found out about this plan had arranged for all the tunnels
to be blocked up so the water has nowhere to go but back into the underground goblin
kingdom and all the little buggers drown. The few survivors either assimilate into human
culture or are driven off.
I found the title of this book a tad misleading as there's no singular goblin in the story
that it could be referring to, they always feature as a large group.
A more fitting name for it would be the Princess and the Miner’s son as her relationship
with Curdie is way more significant than any of her interactions with the antagonists.
MacDonald shares a LOT of opinions on the way a “true princess” should act. The
book pushes the old fashioned belief that those born into royalty are genetically imbued
with a greater sense of manners, honour and good behaviour than regular people.
I think this stood out to me so hard because it's one of the fairytale tropes that my favorite
author, Sir Terry Pratchett loved picking apart and making fun of in his Discworld series.
On first reading I was half convinced that the plight of the goblins was an allegory
for gentrification in this story because it involved them having been been forced out
of their homes above ground long ago and they were constantly having to move deeper and
deeper into the mountain as the humans mined out their former towns, so I was surprised
when the book ended with the supposedly deserved accidental self genocide of the evil goblins.
I’d forgotten that this book was written in 1872. While gentrification dates as far
back as the 3rd century people acknowledging that it’s a super dick move is a relatively
modern development as far as I’m aware.
I must confess my mind tended to wander a LOT while reading this book. I think it's
a perfectly fine story to introduce to children as it treats them with more intelligence and
respect than you might expect from a book written for young ages but I don’t think
it’s going to have universal appeal like some others do. Right, onto the film.
Ok I know I’m stepping on a few childhoods here but holy mother of mercy this film is
hideous. I mean, the backgrounds are ok but the animation for every human character is
beyond terrible.
Gah! No. Eh, wow! What’s wrong with your mou..? Ah! Hey, woah! Holy shit goblin, bad
touch bro.
Partly making up for this is some pretty solid voice acting, even from the younger cast.
Granted the kid playing Curdie never seems to show enough awareness that he’s falling
to his probable doom but I suspect that's more of a directing fail than acting.
And of course you have to love hearing Rick Mayall being given a chance to be as Rick
Mayally as he likes. Ooh.
The film wasn’t released in the US until 1994 and unfortunately was a total flop on
this side of the Atlantic.
Partly due to its own failings I’m sure but also due to some pretty bad luck. In other
circumstances I suspect it might have been able to achieve “Eh, it’s ok” status
but it had the misfortune to be released the same year as Disney’s The Lion King and
as you can imagine the comparisons did not fall in the Princess and the Goblin’s favour.
Weird random fun fact: The VHS release of this film came with a commercial, starring
the voice actress for Irene’s great great grandmother in full cosplay who tried to sell
you a prepaid phone card that you could give to your kids to use in case they get lost
or need to contact you from a pay phone.
Hello children, remember you should never wander off from your parents but if you do
you should call them immediately with this card. Now please enjoy this movie where I
command a preteen to blindly march into some demonstrously unsafe caves unaccompanied by
an adult.
:glitter sound effect:
Ok, let's…
Let’s talk adaptation.
There's a decent amount in this section so I’m probably going to have to skim through
a few things fairly quickly. There are some order of events issues that I’ll discuss
later but for now I’m just going to list the scenes from the film that tie into the
book in the sequence that they appeared on screen.
Just like the book, the film’s story is split between Princess Irene, the daughter
of an apparently wise and beneficent king of an unnamed country and Curdie Peterson
a young minor.
Irene getting lost away from home and looking like she’s in danger of getting nabbed by
the goblins and their pets, but Curdie driving them off by using their hatred of singing
against them.
Irene making her way up a hitherto unnoticed staircase and meeting a woman who is at once
both young and old looking, claims to be her great great grandmother and promises that
if she needs it she will use her rose and bird themed magic to protect her.
Curdie, while working in the mines overhearing some goblins talking about having big plans
to shake up the status quo in regards to their relationship with the surface folk, dispositioning
him to spy further and discovering that they intend to divert an underground river to flood
the human’s mine and kidnap Princess Irene and force her to marry the goblin King’s
unpleasant son.
He also learns that the underground dwelling goblins have developed very thick skulls but
incredibly soft feet.
A long legged cat, a pet of the goblins making its way into Princess Irene’s room and scaring
her into running right back to her great great grandmother, who gives her a magic ring that's
apparently attached to a magic thread that she can follow in case of emergencies.
Curdie, in his attempts to gleam further information on the goblins getting cornered, defeated
by the goblin queen via an attack with her granite shoes and stuffed and walled up in
and seemingly inescapable alcove.
Princess Irene, following her grandmother's magic thread being led into and through the
goblin caves to Curdie allowing her to rescue him.
Curdie, in an attempt to disarm her, stealing one of the queens shoes, revealing that she
has toes which is apparently considered a disgusting deformity in goblin culture.
Irene trying to introduce him to her grandmother but Curdie being unable to see her, causing
a rift between them as they both think the other is being kind of a dick.
Curdie getting badly wounded by the King’s men at arms who mistook him for a goblin.
The goblins putting their princess kidnapping plan into action by digging a tunnel that
comes up through the king’s wine cellars. Quickly overcoming the surprised guards.
Irene's gilf healing Curdie wounds so he’s able to join the battle and tell everyone
that the goblins feet are their weak spots.
The routed goblins trying to go to plan B and flooding the human’s mines, but once
again being thwarted as the forewarned miners had blocked up the access tunnels so the water
backs up and submerges the goblin kingdom instead.
Help others? To be friendly to people? Oh ha ha! Pleh pleh pleh! Impossible.
The film shows Irene living in her father's castle. In the book she lived her whole life
on an estate quite separate from her father’s strongholds. She’d been sent there shorty
after birth because the king travelled around his kingdom constantly improving the lives
of his people and her mother was, and I quote “not strong”.
A notable book inaccuracy in the film is a new feline sidekick by the name of Turnip.
Combined with the addition of a small magic door I was starting to get nervous that this
film was going to lean hard into being a rip off of Alice in Wonderland instead of an adaptation
of the Princess and the Goblin but aside from a few other minor similarities they appear
to have stayed in their own lane so I’m prepared to write it off as a coincidence.
As mentioned, there's some minor switching of the order that events took place in. For
example Irene originally met her grandmother before her near miss out on the mountain.
None of it appears to have had a lasting effect on the narrative though.
Lootie, Irene’s nurse is a pretty standard clumsy comic relief character in the film.
She had the much more interesting role of being a semi antagonist in the book.
She wasn’t evil but she was petty, insecure, cowardly and ungrateful and often misrepresented
facts and events to better suit her needs.
In the book the reason that Irene didn't kiss Curdie after she promised to is because Lootie
took offence to the idea of her sullying her mouth on a commoner and wouldn’t accept
Irene’s assurances that her father would much rather that than a princess break a promise
until the man himself backed her up on the issue.
It gets so bad that Irene threatens to have her dismissed from her service and only relents
when Lootie breaks down sobbing and takes pity on her.
In the film while the common folk who have encountered them seem to have accepted the
existence of goblins, the nobility largely dismiss Irene’s experiences with them as
imaginative nonsense until they turn up in the flesh at the end.
This is in contrast to the book where their presence in the kingdom and belligerence toward
humans is common knowledge and the reason that there's standing orders for the princess
to not be out after sundown under any circumstances.
I’m thinking MacDonald wouldn’t have approved of the very un-princessy behaviour of film
Irene, and by that I mean normal child behavior like hiding from one's caretaker for fun and
not immediately trusting strangers that you find in the attic.
Curdie is also a bit more like a real kid in the film. The lad from the book was possibly
a tad too perfect, being a good mannered, well behaved, devoted son and incredibly hard
worker to the point where at age 12 everyone basically treats him as an adult.
His anti-goblin singing is made into a full musical number with instrumental accompaniment
in the film. It sounds good and it’s a clever way of working in a musical number without
veering from the book’s plot, though as a result they dropped the simple rhyming scheme
that was particularly offensive to goblin ears.
I got the distinct impression that the filmmakers were not a fan of ambiguity in any way shape
or form.
Some things in the book were hinted at pretty strongly but never 100% confirmed, like why
Irene has never met her mother or what her great great grandmother's deal is. The film
makes a point of including dialogue that confirms the queen has passed away and Grandmama is
a guardian spirit.
The film wouldn't even leave it up to the audience's imagination if the King ever met
his daughter’s magical helper, straight out confirming that he never did at the end.
The film also goes out of its way to reduce the chances of you feeling bad for the goblin
in both subtle and unsubtle ways.
Subtly, they changed it from Curdie overhearing a family talking about the goblins future
while they’re being forced to relocate to avoid the miners to just two random goblin
works, removing any… for want of a better word humanising that might have emparted.
Unsubtly they also added said goblin workers immediately partaking in senseless cruelty
to animals and has Prince Frog lips, formally hair lip talking about how much fun it is
to be evil and do nasty things har har har. Can you tell I’m quite proud of my Rick
Mayall impression?
About a third of the way into the film a mouse turns up acting like a castle guard and starts
taking part in the movie’s shenanigans but no one except two cats ever acknowledge its
existence and it's weeeeeird.
It’s a minor change but in the book, when Irene rescued Curdie she was trying to follow
the thread to her Grandmother, but it led her to him instead. A “where you needed
to be not where you wanted to go” sort of thing. The film adjusted it so that Grand
G came to her in a dream and told her that she needs to get moving in order to find her
own magic. I guess friendship was her magic? I sort of missed the point on that one I think.
The princess surfing a rock through the cave isn’t in the book. Man this movie is weird
in places.
The mountain is apparently an active volcano in the film. I feel that should be a more
pressing concern for both the goblins and the humans but neither side seems particularly
interesting in the river of lava next to their homes.
The film portrays Irene’s grandmother as simply not there when she tries to introduce
Curdie to her. The book was a little more confusing as Irene could see her but Curdie
couldn’t, leading to both kids getting all the more angry that the other was clearly
messing with them.
I should also mention that Curdie has a weaker case for not believing that Irene had access
to a magic thread after they ziplined down the damn thing in the cave.
The book ends on a slight anti climax where it turns out that Curdie and the guards worried
for no reason because the princess had been led out of the estate by her grandmother’s
thread just before the goblins attacked and was in fact at Curdie's parents’ house the
whole time.
Later during the victory celebrations Irene and Curdie get everyone out of the manor just
before the whole place floods with water and goblin corpses.
The filmmakers made the probably wise decision to go all out and not only include the heroes
having to deal with Irene BEING kidnapped by the goblins but also getting caught in
the castle as it overflows with water ending in a classic rooftop final showdown.
:smacking sound:
Oww! AGHHHHHHHHH!
There's a small chunk of the story snipped out of the build up to the climax where Curdie
goes home and is somewhat miserable about his falling out with Irene. To his surprise
his parents encourage him to forget about logic and cynicism and take Irene’s word
for it that mystical forebears are a thing, partly because princesses never lie but also
because his mother claims she was once saved from a pack of goblins by a magic glowing
bird thing that might or might not have been Grandmama.
It was after this during his attempt to figure out where the goblins were digging their tunnel
that Curdie trespassed onto the royal estate one too many times and got fucked up by the
guards.
They did hint at sexy grandma’s affinity for birds in the film but it wasn’t a few
doves here and there in the book. She had a rooftop army of fat cooing pigeons strutting
back and forth and she apparently lived on an exclusive diet of their eggs.
This apparent need for sustenance is one of the reasons her exact nature of being was
a tad ambiguous in the book.
Curdie was offered a commision in the kingsguard at the end of the book which he turned down
to continue supporting his parents like the perfect little shit that he was.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
While this film clearly wasn’t too concerned with every detail of the book, I'd be willing
to admit that it did manage to get the gist, and dare I say it the heart of the story.
It's not the loyalist of adaptations but it does appear to be a well intentioned attempt
at honoring its source material.
It’s just a damn shame about the fugly animation. It might have been a genuine hit without it
and garnered more interest in the book as a result.
Despite this, I would be prepared to recommend this film to someone who enjoyed the book
and if you have a nostalgic affection for the film but have not experienced the book
you really should.
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