Armchair BEA 2015: Book to Movie Adaptations

This is something I've written on before, and I don't really think my feelings have changed much. Film is vastly different from books, so book-to-movie adaptations are just that- adaptations. As much as I would love to say that everything has to be done just like the book, the truth is that a lot of things that work in books don't work on screen. I've loved adaptations that are very different from the book (Lord of the Rings, for example).

There's two ways to love an adaptations: as a film, and as an adaptation. Loving it as a film is something based solely on its own merit. Loving it as an adaptation is appreciating how well one medium was translated into another. Going back to Lord of the Rings, I LOVE it as a film on its own, though I do have a few mixed feelings about it as an adaptation (though, all things considered, it still scores pretty high there, too).

Then we've got movies that are more "inspired by" than "adapted from" a book. This, to me, is films like Howl's Moving Castle, the book and movies of which I both really like. They share a general concept and a few similar scenes, but tell stories that are quite different in terms of plot, villain, and overall feel. These are the films that use the books more as a touchstone than as anything else, and they can have wonderful results as well.

How loyal do you think adaptations have to be to the book? What are you favourite adaptations, and why?