Fantasy Unleashed The Book And The Movie Version Of ‘Jumanji’ Don’t Agree, But The Author Is Still Pleased

The children’s book author and illustrator Chris Van Allsburg laughed lightly as he ran his fingers over a small replica of the sinking Titanic, a sculpture he made 23 years ago.

“The whole idea is that it’s a disaster, but tiny,” he said, examining the object, with its separate iceberg tip, as he sat in the living room of his brick home here. “It’s made out of bronze, and it’s held in place. It’s static.”

But the 46-year-old author remains fascinated by the idea that art can elicit strong emotions, even at a distance, that “you can sort of feel them and get close to them without having to suffer from them.”

Several of his books seek to allay youngster’s fears by letting children vicariously experience menace. And none does so more directly than his second, “Jumanji,” which won the Caldecott Award for best picture book in 1981. In the book, two children discover a board game called Jumanji that brings live jungle animals into their home, animals that won’t leave until the game is over.

Now the primal fears in that tale about what is real and what is imaginary have been cranked up in “Jumanji” the movie, starring Robin Williams and Bonnie Hunt. “Jumanji,” which opens on Friday, brings the screeching jungle creatures as close to the viewer as today’s digital pyrotechnics permit, thanks to Industrial Light and Magic.

Move aside, existential subtext. Here come monkeys chittering in the kitchen and computer-generated elephants stampeding through a wall of books and over the cars on Main Street.

It’s all quite different from “Jumanji,” the 32-page book of meticulously rendered charcoal-pencil drawings. There, the two main characters, a boy and a girl, have an adventure that lasts only a few minutes and occurs almost entirely within their home.

Even though the book has moments of heart-stopping danger, it does not create a sustained sense of a world running amok. (Nor is there a role for Williams to play.)

The movie, by contrast, is a super-charged version of the story, expanded to 100 minutes.

“I can’t imagine that Chris would like the film very much,” said Joe Johnston, who directed. “It’s so different from what he had originally written and what he had originally conceived. We got notes from him on all the different drafts, and he disagreed vehemently with a lot of the things we were doing.”

Johnston, who started his career as a special-effects artist on “Star Wars” and directed “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” and “The Rocketeer,” was sympathetic to Van Allsburg’s point of view. “It’s tough for an author,” the director said. “It’s like you’re selling your baby to the white slavers.”

Johnston needn’t have worried. “I liked it,” the amiable Van Allsburg said after an early screening of the film.

“I take so many hats to the theater - as the author of the original material, as one of the screenwriters, one of the noncredited screenwriters, as a parent of a child who’s going to see the film. I look at it in a lot of different ways.”

“But overall I thought it was, uh, stimulating,” he said, laughing a bit, perhaps from hearing his faint praise, perhaps from being unable to resist offering it.

Described by friends as reserved and softspoken, Van Allsburg chuckles quietly, as if much of his amusement is used up before others can see it. His 15 books are very much like him: full of restrained humor and an inward-looking view of the world.

His most popular, “Polar Express,” a tale of a nighttime train trip to visit Santa Claus (and a 1985 Caldecott winner), has sold more than 2 million copies. Most of his books establish a sense of mystery; in “The Sweetest Fig,” a fussy Frenchman’s dreams come to life.

Many are eerie, like “The Stranger,” in which common things like steaming soup seem unaccountably odd.

“Jumanji” is probably the scariest of the lot. To many children, it’s painfully obvious that the world beyond hearth and home is dark and often scary. That’s what makes books like Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” or “Jumanji” so popular; children read them to cope with their fears.

Even when Van Allsburg’s illustrations do not try to unsettle the reader, they often seem impatient on the page, wanting to leap off into three dimensions. Odd angles and extreme perspectives abound, rather like those in the movies.

Perhaps Van Allsburg’s most important concern was that the filmmakers keep the story anchored in reality, as in his book. Even in the drawing style he chose, depicting rounded, black-and-white characters, he had tried for realism. Readers, he thought, are more readily drawn in to such a menacing world than to a pretty watercolor world of make-believe monsters.

Johnston, in turn, strove to maintain a sense of hostile reality, even when he had to restrain Williams’s inspired improvisations.

“You can’t have people doing outrageous things and going out of character and going wild,” he said. “You have to let the situation be wild and let the characters be absolutely grounded.”

All in all, Van Allsburg says he is pleased that some of his ideas and concerns made their way onto the screen.

“Because of the status of films in popular culture, the film version of a book almost always establishes itself as the version of the story,” he said. “Fleming’s ‘Wizard of Oz’ is the one that we know,” he observed, “not L. Frank Baum’s.”