From Page to Screen / Vom Buch zum Film. Группа авторов
and his sorrow at having lost his son, Heidi’s grandfather, known by the rest of the villagers as Alm-Öhi, has isolated himself from society and lives by himself in a hut in the mountain. Surprisingly enough – but in accordance with Spyri’s intention to show the benefits of nature for human beings – the girl easily adapts to this new environment: she likes her grandfather and soon becomes friends with a young goatherd named Peter and grows attached to his family, most particularly to his blind grandmother. However, three years later, Dete returns and forces Heidi to join her in Frankfurt, where she is to become the companion of Clara, the daughter of the wealthy Sesemann family. Clara had lost her mother and is confined to a wheelchair. Although she is soon enthralled by Heidi’s innocence and joyful personality and her feelings are shared by her father and her grandmother, Fräulein Rottenmeier, the governess of the house, dislikes the Swiss girl and believes she cannot be a good influence on Clara. Indeed, Rottenmeier is the counterpart to Heidi: while the young protagonist supports her companion and gives her the courage and the desire to walk, to grow and to flourish, Rottenmeier figuratively cripples Clara and hinders her from improving her condition, effectively binding her to her immobility. The pedagogical component of the novels is evident from the very title of the works, whose primary objective is to educate young readers in values and attitudes through Heidi’s adventures. As mentioned before, nature has a pivotal role: the purity of life in the mountains shows the Alps as an idyllic place in contrast to Frankfurt, the city, which destroys the individual rather than sheltering him or her, with Clara in her wheelchair as a metaphor for the damage caused by supposed progress and repressive education.
The purpose of this essay is to examine how the character of Fräulein Rottenmeier has evolved in the various film adaptations of Johanna Spyri’s novels – more specifically, in the animated versions – and to make an attempt to understand the socio-political implications of such an evolution and of the alterations in the depiction of this female figure.
2 From Page to Screen:
The Girl of the Alps Becomes a Moving Image
Among those theories by those who distance themselves from Fidelity Criticism and rather endorse the belief that adapted texts and adaptations engage in a sort of intertextual, intergenerational conversation, one finds the transtextual model as established by Gerard Genette in his The Architext. The author takes inspiration from Bakhtin (dialogism) and Kristeva (intertextuality) to develop his ideas on transtextuality, which he defines as the “textual transcendence of the text, all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts” (Genette, 1992: 83). Genette talks about five different types of transtextuality, although hypertextuality deserves the most attention, and is also the focus of this analysis. Hypertextuality examines the relations between a text – the hypertext – and its predecessor – the hypotext –, which the hypertext modifies, re-elaborates or amplifies. According to Genette, hypertextuality involves “any relationship uniting a text B (hypertext) to an earlier text A (hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary” (Genette, 1997: 5). Thus, hypertextuality represents the relation between a text and a text on which it is based but which it transforms, modifies, elaborates or extends. Spyri’s Heidi has no doubt also been the inspiration of many other literary and filmic products and, as a hypotext, it also includes an archetypical figure – the innocent child-figure who is able to change the lives and attitudes of others and whose goodness is often portrayed in relation to nature. Heidi-like figures include Pollyanna, the protagonist of the homonymous novel by Eleanor H. Porter (1913), Anne Shirley, the main character in Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery, 1907) or Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden (Burnett, 1911).
Most of the cinematic adaptations of Spyri’s novels evidently do not intend to deviate greatly from the hypotext. Such is the case of Luigi Comencini’s Heidi (1952), the first Swiss film adaptation; Delbert Mann’s Heidi (1968), starring Jean Simmons as Fräulein Rottenmeier; or the more recent live-action film versions of the novel released in 1993 and 2015. The former, a three-hour television mini-series with ambitions to become the family entertainment of the year, is a Hollywoodish Walt Disney production, directed by Michael Rhodes, with British actress Jane Seymour playing an unconventionally attractive Fräulein Rottenmeier, and containing all the elements that audiences expect in a feel-good movie for children or family audiences. In contrast, the most recent Swiss version of Heidi (2015) – directed by Alain Gsponer and starring national treasure Bruno Ganz as Heidi’s grandfather and Hannelore Hoger as Frau Sesemann, Clara’s grandmother – does not spare the viewer the sordid elements of the story – poverty and cruelty towards children –, yet shows a joyful, innocent and pure Heidi (Anuk Steffen), just as Spyri might have imagined her in 1880.
However, some film adaptations have transformed or extended the hypotext, in order to retell Heidi’s story in different contexts or for different audiences. For instance, in the famous Hollywood version from 1937, directed by Allan Dwan and starring Shirley Temple in the role of Heidi, the plot is radically altered to become a sort of film noir – a genre that was in vogue at the time – in which good battles evil and in which Fräulein Rottenmeier displays criminal tendencies in a bid not to lose her power inside the Sesemann’s household. The moral element is indeed present but bears no relation to nature; instead it is linked to the presence of innate human features. Likewise, a more recent Heidi (Markus Imboden, 2001) portrays an orphan who is taken to Berlin by her aunt Dete, a successful fashion designer, to become the companion of her very own daughter, Clara, an emotionally deprived teenager, who has no interest in becoming friends with her younger cousin or letting her steal the little attention she receives from her own mother. As in its hypotext, Heidi longs to return to the mountains to be with her grandfather and her friend Peter and manages to do so by the end of the movie. The film leaves out the Sesemann household completely, and Heidi’s good nature is juxtaposed on this occasion with her overindulged and far from empathetic cousin.
As it is an appropriate story for family audiences and for children, in particular, Spyri’s work has also been transformed several times into animated versions. In spite of a tendency to consider animated versions of classical literary works “unholy” (Wells, 2007:199), the fact is that Heidi’s cartoons have become cult viewing for more than one generation of audiences. The most celebrated animated version of Heidi is, without a doubt, the renowned 1974 TV series Arupusu no Shôjo Haiji, Japanese for Heidi, Girl of the Alps, which marked the beginning of the ‘anime-boom’ in Japan (Fornasari, 2018: 365). The series, which was produced by Zuiyo Enterprises and directed by Isao Takahata, faithfully transferred the adventures of the Swiss character onto the screen in 52 episodes. As Fornasari (2018: 367) points out, its popularity helped to establish the unmistakable appearance of the characters – drawn by Oscar-winner Hayao Miyazaki – in the popular imagination: Heidi as a dark-haired, rosy-cheeked girl, Clara as a pale, blonde girl dressed in blue sitting in a wheelchair and Fräulein Rottenmeier as the strictest and most hardhearted woman in the history of television, with her tight bun and her pince-nez. The anime also included one of the most iconic characters, namely the dog Josef, which never appeared in the novel, but was created by the Japanese authors to add some comic and charming episodes to the story.
In 1982, the powerful producers Hanna-Barbera Cartoons developed another animated version of Spyri’s creation. In the form of a musical, Heidi’s Song deviates greatly from its hypotext, both in terms of content and in the values it aims to convey. When Heidi is in Frankfurt, Peter and the country animals come to rescue her. Together with Clara, the three escape back to the mountains. When Clara’s father returns to Frankfurt, however, he is angered to see that his daughter has disappeared and immediately leaves for Switzerland to bring her back. Meanwhile, Rottenmeier and the butler Sebastian, who in this version plays an equally evil character, take the opportunity to flee. Up on the mountain, Clara is attacked by a hawk and, when she crawls out of her wheelchair to use a stick to fight it off, she discovers that she is able to stand. In keeping with the spirit of the novel, the film portrays the fears and longings of its two main characters, namely Heidi and Clara, in their process of growing up: on the one hand, it depicts Clara’s coming of age and her yearning for romantic love; on the other, it shows Heidi’s fears which are condensed in a few scenes and are those of every child (darkness, the unknown, being lost