In December of 2007, the film version of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis was released. Initially, Satrapi was hesitant to transform her graphic novel into a movie in order to preserve her story’s integrity. However, after she was given full artistic control of the project and funding was secured, Satrapi decided she was ready to help create an animated Persepolis film. Despite her artistic talent and willingness to transform her autobiography into a movie, Satrapi had no prior experience with movie production; she compared her experience making the Persepolis movie to jumping into the sea for a 200 mile swim before even learning how to swim. Resultantly, she recruited her friend and fellow artist Vincent Paronnaud, who had made multiple animated films in the past, to join the project.
While Satrapi wanted to maintain as much of the novel’s plot as possible, she understood that the time constraints of a movie would force her to leave out some aspects of the story. So, she and Paronnaud set out to produce the film with a slightly different objective than the book. Rather than focusing entirely on telling the dramatic life story of Marji, the film intends to more directly address Iranian history in an attempt to educate viewers. Specifically, the films omits many of the novel’s scenes of Marji in Austria, instead focusing more on her relationship with her home country. Additionally, the film does not incorporate the scene in which Marji’s mother visits her while she is living with eight homosexuals. While this scene played a significant role in revealing Marji’s mental state in the novel, the film ignores it completely. This could potentially be because the scene did not align with the film’s main goal of educating viewers. Ultimately, Satrapi describes the challenge of adapting her novel into a movie by highlighting the differences between readers and moviegoers. Because readers are actively engaging with the text, they are able to absorb more subtle details and symbolic elements that often go unnoticed in a movie. Contrastingly, movie viewers are much more passive; resultantly, Satrapi made conscious efforts to make important messages clearer and more evident to viewers. As she describes, “when I am making a movie, the viewer is absolutely passive…you cannot lean on your viewer. When you make a comic you can lean actually on the reader to make the work for you.” Although Satrapi adapted her work to better suit a viewing audience, the film’s art style remains true to the novel. Overall, while the film version of Persepolis was created with slightly different goals than the novel, both works beautifully depict Marji’s life in relation to Iranian history, providing educational value and evoking emotion in audiences around the world.
Works Cited
Kennedy, Brittany. “Differences Between the Graphic Novel and Film, ‘Persepolis,” by Satrapi Analysis – ReelRundown – Entertainment.” ReelRundown, 12 Dec. 2011, reelrundown.com/animation/An- Analysis-of-the-Graphic-Novel-and-Film-Persepolis-by-Satrapi.
Kerr, Euan. “Why It’s Difficult to Make a Movie from a Comic Book.” MPR News, MPR News, www.mprnews.org/story/2008/01/17/satrapi.
I think that’s a struggle for many authors considering turning their story into a movie, it’s a hard struggle on maintaining the true meaning of the book with a time constraint and different viewers. It was smart of her to prioritize the educational aspects, rather than her own life. While both are interesting, as she said the viewer of a movie is passive, and the lesson must be more directly put in front of them. Great post!
I really like how you brought up the unforeseen circumstances that Satrapi faced when making her movie! Whereas films tend to have time constraints and may lose the attention of people after a couple of hours, books can be pretty much any length because they are not usually read in one sitting. As a result, Satrapi’s book could be much more detailed than her movie, and this is why many individuals always say to “read the book before you watch the movie.” However, I like the fact that Satrapi was still able to convey the most important lessons/messages she has learned in her life; it is almost as if we are seeing an elaborated portion of her life in the film whereas the book is more of a general life story. Although the film has different intentions than the story, I agree that both works provide an excellent understanding of Iran’s history and provide very important messages.
I love how you highlight the difficulty Satrapi faced converting her novel into a movie. As a former theatre major I know too well how hard it is to make even a piece of theatre into a movie let alone a book into a movie. I also learned the reasoning behind which aspects of the book to keep in the movie and which ones to let go which I think was super insightful.
Thank you so much for this insight! After watching the trailer, I was a little bit confused about how Marjane would be able to translate this story into a movie, and it seemed to not focus as much on her life’s journey. This helped me a lot to realize the target audience, and I appreciate the fact that she is going for a more informational tone about the Islamic Revolution than a narrative tone about her life.
The context surrounding the differing goals of the book and movie is very helpful to my understanding of the movie. As I watched, it was obvious that the emphasis was altered from that of the book, but it was hard to get a grasp of what, exactly, was different, in the large picture.
Overall, the movie removed a lot of the light-hearted scenes we see in the book, like Marji and her classmates playing with their veils, and used the time to focus on the more emotional scenes. The result is that the movie, for me, was even more gut-wrenching than the book. Perhaps this is related to the issue of the “passive” movie audience- the deaths and war crimes may have faded into the background for movie-watchers if there was too much emphasis on the day-to-day for young and idealistic Marji.
Nice post! The part that stood out to me the most in the film was when the scene in which Marji’s mother visits her while she is living with eight homosexuals is not in the movie. I can’t really guess why but your explanation makes sense. I bet it was hard for her leaving parts out that were really important.
I really liked how the movie was seen more as a comic rather than real life people. It really helped to see the characters reactions to certain situations. I really like how you brought up how you thought the movie was more on the Iranian history and less on Marji’s dramatic life. I thought the same thing. Making this book into a film seemed a little interesting at first, but I can’t express enough how much I really enjoyed the film. Great work!
Really good post! Thank you for calling out the struggle of Satrapi to convert the book to film! I had many mental images of her smoking, hunched over like at the airport, figuring out what to do with the film! I’m sure there were many spirited discussions about what to include and cut.
Excellent post!! I always love hearing how authors trying to turn their literary work into movies. It is a very fascinating to me personally. By bringing a movie to life like this, you bring in a whole new audience that is able to understand this story better and might get more people interested in her work.
I think you did a great job explaining the relationship Marji had with the Lord in your presentation. Your presentation really helped me understand her relationship with the Lord and how her viewpoint had changed throughout the story. I also think the video you provided at the end really emphasized what Marji was feeling and her viewpoint. Good job!