Transmedial adaptation—the transmission of a work from one medium to another—depends upon the idea that a story unit can transfer from one medium to another, new, medium, while still remaining recognizable to the extent that the adapters wish it to be so and the new medium affords. While the finer points of that notion are controversial—the medium being a large if not integral part of the message, as it were—that idea remains the foundation on which adaptation must rest. Any text can be adapted to film, with the usual losses and gains in translation; as Eckart Voigts-Virchow says, ‘There are no unfilmable texts’ (2009: 137). That said, some texts pose particular challenges to film adaptation. Arguably, metafictions comprise one of the more challenging sets of source texts in terms of adaptation and, as will be shown, children's metafictions, specifically, compound these generic challenges with additional ones, including greater expectations of fidelity in adaptation from book to screen.

As shown in the previous chapter, metafiction is always (at least) double. In addition to the story being told, the text's self-reflexivity requires a dual reading of its story-ness, holding up a medium-specific mirror to how the story is being told. The first layer, the story, is as adaptable as any other story as a ‘story-only’ transmediation. But the second layer, the discursive ‘meta’ layer, cannot be so easily transmediated. The ‘meta’ of textual metafiction is, by definition, medium-specific to textual fiction. But further, the ‘meta’ layer is the reason for the metafiction's existence. Without the ‘meta’ layer, metafiction is simply fiction.

The ‘problem’ of adapting metafiction to film has, of course, several ‘solutions.’ These solutions are visible in practice and comprise the main discussion of this chapter and dictate the applied examples of the remainder of this book. But as with children's literature—and, as will be seen, with children's film—the audience-centric contexts inherent to these children's genres influence their adaptation contexts as well. Additional pressures are brought to bear on children's adaptations of books which—while they exist across the adaptation spectrum—are more intensive in these cases. Once more, it is a matter of degree rather than one of kind. The pressures of fidelity on children's screen adaptations of books will be discussed first below, followed by an analysis of the three dominant options evident—sometimes simultaneously—in filmic adaptations of children's metafictions.