Film Adaptation: Children of Blood and Bone

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Film Adaptation
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Children of Blood and Bone
‘The book is always better than the movie,’ has been the response of avid readers who
had watched many of their favorite books into Hollywood movies and this has been the way for
several decades now. Novels and movies are actually two distinctly different species that it is
really difficult to marry them with each other (Balazs p. 2). A novel is essentially an art form
that is complete in all sense and adapting the same into a movie will result in there being very
few commonalities between the two in the form of setting, the cast/characters, and the story with
several other elements being infused newly into it. The ideas presented by an author in a book is
perceived in numerous number of ways with more and more people reading the book and each
them having their own perspective about the same. Essentially, words printed would never ever
tend to change (Hutcheon p. 34).
Adaptations have become a highly popular trend these days with one out of three films
that are made today being an adaptation of some popular literary work. The predominant reason
behind such high degree of popularity in adaptations can be attributed to the appeal such
adaptations offer to the literary text, in terms of the popularity and the plot to the makers of the
movies, in addition to the financial benefits that such makers reap out of such adaptations
certainly.

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The filmmakers are certain about the financial gains that they will reap by transforming
the novel into a film, because the novel would already have been a huge hit in the market – not
just within a specific geography or location, but also at a global level. Besides, the very fact that
the novel is a franchise on its own is something that assures of very negligible risk to the people
investing money into adapting such literary works into movies (Naremore p. 103). It should also
be noted that along with earning well at the box-office and gaining a lot of attention from the
audience mainly on the social networking sites, most of these adaptations in the Hollywood
make it to the Academy Awards.
The current study aims at presenting how it would look when Tomi Adeyemi’s first novel
in here Young Adults (YA) trilogy ‘Children of Blood and Bone: Legacy of Orisha,’ is made
into a movie. The title of the movie would remain the same.
This book by Tomi Adeyemi is undoubtedly Nigerian and is filled with countless number
of myths and legends from Nigeria. There are several places and characters in this book that are
named in traditional Nigerian style, in addition to there also being a strong spiritual connection to
Nigerian roots.
The actual story by Adeyemi is set in the fictionalized village called Orïsha, wherein a
young girl named Zélie Adebola, is introduced as the protagonist of the story. This girl assists
here father in his business of selling fish. Interestingly, her father is a person possessing divine
and magical powers, using which he transforms his daughter into a ‘maji.’ Majis are those
having magical powers, but in the kingdom of Orïsha, these people have always been treated as
second-class citizens for several decades ensuing the extermination in the form of a territory-
wide massacre that resulted in this magic being completed wiped out. This annihilation was an
act of ruthless army of the monarch.

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After the genocide, very few people were left with the possession of such magical
powers, and those few people used to hide their magic, in fear of being attacked by King Saran’s
army. After an unexpected happenstance leads Zelie to learn that the magic is not completed
dead and that it is she alone who can bring that magic back to the kingdom of Orïsha, she
embarks on an expedition to resuscitate and revive the prehistoric magic of the Orïsha clans (Pan
Macmillan).
In the meantime, it is found that the King of Orïsha – King Saran, apparently orders the
killing of all the people in his kingdom possessing magical powers (black magic essentially). It is
important to mention that Orïsha was apparently a land that was subject to the authoritarian rule
by its monarch for several centuries and this book deals with Zélie’s relentless pursuits to restore
the magic of the land to its ancient clans, and subsequently ousting the authoritative monarch
Saran.
Zélie has some very strong memories of the soil of Orïsha having been whined with
magic and there were instances where burners kindled flames, tiders beckoned waves, and even
Zélie’s mother beckoned souls. Apparently, Zélie’s mother is introduced as a Reaper.
However, all this magic unfortunately vanished in a jiffy, on the night when the magic was
eradicated.
With King Saran ordering the killings of all people possessing magical powers, Zélie
becomes an orphan with her mother also being killed along with several other people from her
family and neighborhood and is left with no hope. Finally, Zélie sets in pursuit of bringing the
magic back, for which she takes the help of the princess Amari who apparently is known to be in
the possession of the maji scrolls, notably the last that exists in the Kingdom (White).