After more than a century of depicting readers, writers, books, and their embedded stories on screen, film has developed a staple ‘grammar’ of shots and techniques for rendering them. Books and bookishness frequently dominate the screen. Children's film uses the same shot patterns to film textual elements as adult-oriented films do. And while a film doesn't need to be an adaptation to employ these ‘bookish’ characters, settings, and plots, transmediations of children's metafictions typically do feature the film devices surveyed below. As noted in the Introduction, ‘Bookishness’ is a deliberately loose term to cover a broad array of textual types from books, magical and ordinary, to libraries and bookstores; librarians, teachers, booksellers, and other such mentors and helper figures; struggling readers and master readers, authors and writing. These types and tropes occur with great frequency in children's transmediated metafiction. The filmic devices themselves are technically neutral, although they add up to a repository of types on screen that parallel those types in children's books, and particularly in children's metafictions.

These align with the broad division in children's books: ‘good’ characters generally read and are (or become) pro-book, while ‘bad’ characters do not and are not. While they do burn her book collection, giving her cause, Elinor's insults in the film Inkheart make this clear. She calls the black jackets ‘illiterate cretins’; ‘ignorant halfwit[s]’; and a ‘bunch of unread, solecistic thugs.’ Being illiterate and unread equate with ignorance and—a self-confessed ‘bookworm’ herself—these are her most damning insults.

At the same time, by examining how an individual film treats the onscreen relationship with textuality, the ‘interpretant’ of the film—its particular position in the conversation—can be inferred. This chapter first provides a range of examples from children's films to illustrate a shot ‘grammar’ and a subsequent ‘type’ list, but then discusses two significant, embedded books from the Harry Potter adaptations in more detail to demonstrate how shifts in the ekphrastic use of books on screen in a given adaptation shapes the dialogue between media.

A Film ‘Grammar’ for Transmediating Bookishness

The following is not an exhaustive list, but rather a selection of some of the typical devices used to represent some of the more common situations of representations of ‘bookishness’ on screen. Children's adapted metafictions form a subset of children's films that feature and foreground these ‘bookish’ elements in a highly visible way to a young audience.