Candyfloss Clouds and Vampires: Notes on Peter Pan (2003)

**Fig. 1 - *Peter Pan* (P. J. Hogan, 2003).**

Screen adaptations of the story about the boy who never grew up are plentiful, and there’s certainly a pleasure in plotting the variations and distinctions of each version. Contrary to the idea that a sequel, another retelling, or another iteration, suggests creative bankruptcy might it instead suggest new things of interest to find in each successive contribution to a particular franchise or filmography. Spectators might not like or approve of them all, but there’s interest in seeing what can be done next with the source material. This would seem to be true in relation to screen presentations of J. M. Barrie’s stageplay and novel Peter Pan (1904).

Peter Pan (P. J. Hogan, 2003) - Trailer

Of the many Peter Pan versions and variations, a lavishly mounted, visually appealing feature film adaptation directed by P. J. Hogan (from a screenplay by Hogan and Michael Rosenberg) of Peter Pan was released in December 2003, and used just that title (Fig. 1). The previous live-action feature of note had been Steven Spielberg’s Hook (1991), a film that likewise had looked quite directly to Barrie’s original source material for inspiration.[1]

The screenplay for Hook had been written by Jim V. Hart, with further writing development on it by Malia Scotch Marmo. In 2014, when I interviewed Hart for a piece in Sci Fi Now magazine, he said of Hook and his other fantasy movie, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992), were both stories about death; the one film complementing the other. There’s a Gothic mood in both of these Hart-written films, and this finds expression, too, in Hogan’s film adaptation of Barrie’s novel a release that came at that moment when screen adaptations of the Harry Potter novels and The Lord of the Rings novels had proved to be commercially popular and critically lauded attractions. Disney’s lavishly produced, live action/animation hybrid adaptations of several books in C.S.Lewis’s Narnia series of novels were, of course, still to come.

When thinking about the particular pleasures of the 2003 Peter Pan adaptation, I was recently intrigued by a description, given by Sam Fell, director of the upcoming Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023), regarding the function of a film script: that it provides the intellectual and emotional basis for a film. The point being, that a film is more than those two elements. It’s a sensory experience, too. In its use of colour, that sensory element is one of the qualities of Hogan’s Peter Pan that deploys to sharpen and accentuate the emotional stakes and character situations from scene to scene, sequence to sequence (Fig. 2).

**Fig. 3 - Captain Hook (Jason Isaacs) in *Peter Pan*.**

Where a novel is so much about interiors of thought and feeling, a movie needs to externalise all of that as much as possible. In Barrie’s novel, the chapter in which Peter arrives at the Darling household to fly the children (Wendy, Michael, John) to Never Neverland lends itself so well to visual interpretation as it takes the characters in the story from the known world of their home to the very unknown world of fantasy. As showcases for visual effects and animated characters and elements, film adaptations of Peter Pan are certainly a rich space for thinking about animation’s links to the fantastical. Speaking about the work of ILM on Hogan’s film (ILM had also produced the visual effects for Hook), VFX supervisor Scott Farrar noted that “You’d think that not having to worry about photorealism would make things easier, but this has to be most difficult film I’ve ever worked on. Even just from the colour management point of view, it was such a challenge. We literally had entire colour teams, dealing with such issues as the need to tweak Tinker Bell to suit any given background.” Neverland is not quite the escape from reality that we, or the Darling children might first think (Fig. 3). Often noted for its strand of melancholy and emphasis on death and mortality, Barrie’s Peter Pan (play and novel), offers something more sombre amidst the playfulness. The Hogan version of the story, however, is particularly faithful to this back and forth from Barrie’s story.

**Fig. 4- The Gothic portrayal of Captain Hook.**

Hogan’s adaptation reverberates with the sombre notes of Barrie’s material, and watching the film again for the purposes of this piece I was struck by how Gothic in characterisation the character of Captain James Hook is. In the sequence that adapts “The Mermaid’s Lagoon“ chapter of the novel, that quality emerges briefly but vividly in the setting of the sequence with its emphasis on ruins and skeletons. As a character, Hook’s Gothic aspect is part of the film’s presentation, to the point where he might be proposed to have something of the vampire about his depiction (Fig. 4). This observation takes us some of the way back to Hart’s comment about the Peter Pan and Dracula stories working in shared territory.[2] Hogan’s film also does not ignore Hook’s latent melancholy. When Hook is introduced in Barrie’s novel, there is the note made by the narrator regarding Hook’s eyes that they have “a profound melancholy.” In the final duel between Hook and Pan in Hogan’s film, which is visually spectacular and dramatically focused, the idea of Hook and Pan as two parts of the same lonely self is confirmed. In Peter Pan, Hook is more vicious than in his Hook variation. The Hogan film showcases that Hook, as in the novel, is particularly angered by Peter’s cockiness.

This melancholy and sense of loss that threads through the Barrie novel is given particular expression at various points in Hogan’s film, and is articulated with particular power during the scene in which Peter and Mrs. Darling encounter each other at the bedroom window of the Darling children: Peter tries to close the window, Mrs. Darling tries to keep it open. This scene visualises a moment from the chapter in Barrie’s novel entitled “The Return Home.” The window and its frame of the Darling childrens’ bedroom remain elements of décor that serve their metaphorical purpose well across the range of Peter Pan film adaptations.

Contrasting with the melancholy and Gothic notes that thread throughout Hogan’s film are the scenes and sequences of dazzling colour and brightness. The sequence in which the Darling children race away from West London to Neverland (see left) is a particular highlight of the film. There’s a camera movement that follows Peter as he flies up to the ceiling of the Darling bedroom (although not quite the focus of this piece here, there is certainly more to be written about how fantasy cinema envisions different approaches to depicting flight). The tilt up reveals clouds painted on the ceiling and they anticipate the look of the candyfloss-styled clouds in Neverland. This shot fleetingly indicates that reality and fantasy are the same. What really fascinated me is that this particular shot recalls a shot late in Hook in which the camera tilts down from the skies of Neverland to reveal the mural on the children’s bedroom. It’s a neat visual effect that concentrates an awfully big idea.

Barrie’s novel and stageplay source material offers filmmakers images that have an elasticity to them: they can be transliterated and, all the more interestingly, adapted. The source material’s dynamic between play and sorrow, discovery and peril, forms a thread across the range of Peter Pan film adaptations and the degree to which, to borrow a phrase from Steven Spielberg (1985), they escape from or escape with reality.

**Article published: December 1, 2023**

Notes

[1] With its stageplay beginnings, the story of Peter Pan lends itself well to fusing this with the three-dimensional world of cinema. With this in mind, do refer to a piece about the theatrical aspects of film adaptations of Peter Pan by Charlotte Wensierski that can be found here. As an additional note, readers may want to check out the online page for production designer John Napier who is credited as Visual Consultant on Hook.

[2] The Hogan film, then, revels in the possibilities of theatricality and artifice in presenting Neverland. If you wish to seek out a very contrasting presentation of Neverland, I’d encourage a viewing of the recent Peter Pan and Wendy (2023). The film works as a fascinating companion piece to The Green Knight and Pete’s Dragon, forming an informal trilogy of films from writer director David Lowery.

References

Spielberg, Steven. 1985. “Spielberg: From ET to TV,” Rolling Stone no. 469 (October 24th, 1985)

Biography

James Clarke is currently a Visiting Lecturer for BCU on the MA Feature Film Development course. He has also taught on the MA Screenwriting course at London Film School amongst other HE institutions. James works as a Script Reader for the BFI and his film journalism work focuses on visual effects and animation. On twitter, James can be reached at: @jasclarkewriter. You can read more about James’s work at the Society of Authors site and that can be reached here: https://www2.societyofauthors.org/soa-member/james-clarke/.