Sesemann household completely, and Heidi’s good nature is juxtaposed on this occasion with her overindulged and far from empathetic cousin.
As it is an appropriate story for family audiences and for children, in particular, Spyri’s work has also been transformed several times into animated versions. In spite of a tendency to consider animated versions of classical literary works “unholy” (Wells, 2007:199), the fact is that Heidi’s cartoons have become cult viewing for more than one generation of audiences. The most celebrated animated version of Heidi is, without a doubt, the renowned 1974 TV series Arupusu no Shôjo Haiji, Japanese for Heidi, Girl of the Alps, which marked the beginning of the ‘anime-boom’ in Japan (Fornasari, 2018: 365). The series, which was produced by Zuiyo Enterprises and directed by Isao Takahata, faithfully transferred the adventures of the Swiss character onto the screen in 52 episodes. As Fornasari (2018: 367) points out, its popularity helped to establish the unmistakable appearance of the characters – drawn by Oscar-winner Hayao Miyazaki – in the popular imagination: Heidi as a dark-haired, rosy-cheeked girl, Clara as a pale, blonde girl dressed in blue sitting in a wheelchair and Fräulein Rottenmeier as the strictest and most hardhearted woman in the history of television, with her tight bun and her pince-nez. The anime also included one of the most iconic characters, namely the dog Josef, which never appeared in the novel, but was created by the Japanese authors to add some comic and charming episodes to the story.
In 1982, the powerful producers Hanna-Barbera Cartoons developed another animated version of Spyri’s creation. In the form of a musical, Heidi’s Song deviates greatly from its hypotext, both in terms of content and in the values it aims to convey. When Heidi is in Frankfurt, Peter and the country animals come to rescue her. Together with Clara, the three escape back to the mountains. When Clara’s father returns to Frankfurt, however, he is angered to see that his daughter has disappeared and immediately leaves for Switzerland to bring her back. Meanwhile, Rottenmeier and the butler Sebastian, who in this version plays an equally evil character, take the opportunity to flee. Up on the mountain, Clara is attacked by a hawk and, when she crawls out of her wheelchair to use a stick to fight it off, she discovers that she is able to stand. In keeping with the spirit of the novel, the film portrays the fears and longings of its two main characters, namely Heidi and Clara, in their process of growing up: on the one hand, it depicts Clara’s coming of age and her yearning for romantic love; on the other, it shows Heidi’s fears which are condensed in a few scenes and are those of every child (darkness, the unknown, being lost or losing loved ones). This interpretation of Spyri’s works is meant to please the palates of American audiences, as it embraces the most American of film genres, namely the musical, and includes a hint of romance in the story. Indeed, this merging of reality and imagination in the depiction of characters, together with the presence of musical numbers have become typical features of animated movies, particularly those by Walt Disney.
In 2015, Heidi 3D, a Franco-Australian co-production of a total of thirty-nine episodes, marked the fortieth anniversary of the anime Heidi, the Girl of the Alps. Even if this CGI-animation remake also draws inspiration from the original novel, it mainly models itself on the Japanese animation series. The physical resemblance of the main characters in the two series is very obvious, even if the most recent adaptation offers more colorful and detailed versions of their anime predecessors. Despite the series being considerably shorter, as a hypertext, it manages both to expand the plot and to develop the characters by being far more interpretive. It even allows the viewer to empathize with one of the main protagonists, the ever-loathed Rottenmeier and depicts her as a more vulnerable and sympathetic figure. In general, all the characters are re-examined and given individual story arcs: from Peter, who finds out he can be good at school, to the grandfather, whose past is gradually revealed, as well as Clara or her grandmother. The series is thus able to develop and somewhat re-invent the original characters, allowing them to leave behind the two-dimensional figures of the first animated version and to provide new insights into their personalities and backgrounds, which were concealed or only implied in the hypotext.
3 Analysis
As mentioned in the introduction, and according to Cartmell and Whelehan (2007: 34), adaptations of literary works for television, unlike their cinematic counterparts, have often been excluded from the realm of adaptation studies, despite their popularity from the 1970s onwards, and have been – more often than not – subject to pejorative judgments from scholars and critics, one of the most common being that they reflect television’s tendency towards “conservative programming in contrast with the more innovative proposals of cinema” (Cardwell, 2007: 183). Spyri’s Heidi was one of the many works of literature which was turned into an animated television series1 in the 1970s and early 1980s, as part of a surge of adaptations of classical works of literature aimed for the small screen which made their way into most Western households.
The first Heidi animated TV series partly fits into the definition of transposition as established by Wagner “in which a novel is directly given on the screen, with the minimum of apparent interference” and in which the film is frequently “envisaged as a book illustration” (Wagner, 1975: 222). Transpositions re-tell in a different platform or genre the content of the story, but nonetheless preserve characterization of figures and the chronotope of the original text (cf. McCallum, 2018: 38). In this regard, the first twenty-five episodes of Takahata’s version closely follow both the plot and even parts of the dialogues of Spyri’s original and also retain the voice of a female narrator, who, as if she were Johanna Spyri herself, sides with the character of Heidi. Nonetheless, from the appearance of Clara’s grandmother in chapter 27, the animated version deviates remarkably from its hypotext: as mentioned before, the religious message conveyed by Clara’s grandmother is silenced and this female character is more intensely profiled in order to forge an educational counterpart to Rottenmeier and, most importantly for my research, the figure of Rottenmeier herself is granted more of a central role than in the novel, as will be shown in the analysis.
The more recent 3D version Heidi rather conforms to the idea of reversion, in which a film may seek to interrogate the values portrayed in the source text, and potentially update it or its adaptations (cf. McCallum, 2018: 20). In this regard, the dialogical (Bakhtin) dimension of the second animated series is thus far more evident. Heidi 3D, as noted above, enables a deeper exploration of the characters. The plot gains in importance, while several storylines aim to strengthen the bonds between the characters.
Among the child figures, for instance, Peter and Heidi are also confronted with a group of children in the village, in order to underline the goodness of those living higher up in the mountains – again strengthening the dichotomy between society and nature. Indeed, even if these children are depicted as selfish and as bullies, Peter and Heidi do not hesitate to offer help whenever they need it. With regard to Heidi’s grandfather, while the anime is very vague about his past, the 3D version – just like the original novel – more clearly addresses the presence of a “past”, from which he would like to escape: he feels guilty for the death of his only son, Heidi’s father, who died in an accident when they were working together. The 3D series also creates a completely new subplot with the love story between Aunt Dete – who in this version works as a maid and cook at the Sesemann’s house – and Sebastian, the butler, who not only keeps the vis comica he has in the novel and in the first animated version, but is also granted a more endearing character. All female figures are explored in more detail in the most recent series. The character of Aunt Dete, for example, is developed in a completely different way than in the anime or the novel, in which she appears to be a negative character, rough and selfish, who does not really care about Heidi’s needs but rather about her own financial survival, and is willing to let her fall victim to whatever destiny awaits her: “(W)enn Ihr’s nicht haben könnt, so macht mit ihm, was Ihr wollt, dann habt Ihr’s zu verantworten, wenn’s verdirbt, und Ihr werdet wohl nicht nötig haben, noch etwas aufzuladen” (Spyri, 1978: 11)2. Furthermore, both in the novel and the first animated version, she finds an excuse not to have to travel back to Switzerland with Heidi, when the child falls ill and the doctor advises her to return to the mountains (Spyri, 1978:
