In spite of the many and often unique challenges to adaptation of children's literature, and particularly of children's metafiction, such adaptations nevertheless do thrive. A common, medium-specific equivalence for the ‘meta’ of the source's metafiction is metafilm. However, arguably a much more robust adaptation ‘equivalent’ is not metafilm at all, but rather a more globalized extrapolation of metafiction's tendencies: metaadaptation. As will be shown, meta-adaptation transmediates metafiction's didacticism, has subversive and empowering tendencies, and functions reflexively without necessarily replacing one medium in the mirror for another.

The term ‘meta-adaptation’ is a relative newcomer. Eckart Voigts- Virchow coined the hybrid term: ‘metadaptation’ to describe the same phenomenon ‘for films and other texts that foreground not just the filmmaking process or other processes of text production, but also the adaptive processes between media, texts and genres’ (2008: 146). The film A Cock and Bull Story (2005) provides his descriptive case study; Voigts-Virchow argues that the film ‘is heuristically rich and worth studying … because it lays bare the specific mediality not only of literature and film, but also of the in-between process of adaptation’ (2008: 140). This ‘laying bare’ is the function of the ‘meta’ of both metafiction and metafilm. But in metaadaptation, the ‘adaptive processes’ which are typically all but invisible to the audience are rendered part of the ‘material’ reflected in the mirror. As Voigts-Virchow points out, ‘Any foregrounding of adaptive processes … is a heuristically extremely useful subgenre among adaptations’ (146; 149).

In meta-adaptation, the object in the reflecting lens is no longer one medium or another—fiction or film—but rather both, and (implicitly or explicitly) transmediation itself. The didactic thrust of meta-adaptation is focused on the usually invisible codes, conventions, and processes of adaptation. That this has radically subversive potential in cultivating adaptation-informed youth viewers can be argued by extrapolation from the subversive, empowerment, and transformational arguments made for other meta-genres for children as well as from the needs and expectations for multi-literate and media-literate youth in the twenty-first century. Timothy Shary wrote that failure to cultivate media-literate youth means ‘our children will be raised as victims of the media, and they will not feel the authority to change the situation’ (2005: 109).