Comparing Books and Movies: Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

          For two weeks I have been reading the fantastic Swiss Family Robinson. I have also watched the 1960 Disney Swiss Family Robinson which is also a great movie. In this essay, I will be comparing the movie and book which are similar, but also very different.

          Both versions start very similarly, but you will notice that there are only three sons in the movie, Fritz, Ernest, and Francis. Jack is cut out in the movie. This means that there will not be a couple parts in the movie that there are in the book.

          After they sleep for the night, they go to the ship to gather all the supplies they need. In the book, the boys go looking to see what they can find on the island before going to the ship. In the movie, however, while Ernest and Fritz go to the ship with their father, Francis stays at the tent with his mother, and gets in trouble for almost getting himself killed.

          They are on the ship for two days in both versions, but in the movie, there are pirates that almost attack the ship, but they are saved by their father. Also, there is a turtle that comes and pulls their raft for them, after killing the sharks surrounding the raft to get to their animals.

           They still have the two dogs in the movie, but instead of having one male and one female, Turk and Juno, they have two males. The dogs in the movie are named Turk and Duke. Despite this, they are very good dogs like in the book.

           There are not as many wild animals in the movie as there are in the book. They do not have a jackal encounter in the movie, because there are no jackals. There are also no lions, rodents of any kind, whales, pigeons, sea lions, walruses, etc. There are, however, elephants, monkeys, ostriches, and tigers as in the book. In the movie, unlike the book, they do not find a salt mine and make it into a winter home. Instead, they have a giant treehouse that they stay in all year round. In the book, they have a similar house for the summer.

             The book covers at least ten years, a much longer time than in the movie. The movie only shows them on the island for about one year.

            Later in the movie, Fritz and Ernest leave to explore more of the island. While they are doing so, they come across the pirates with a boy and his grandfather. They try to rescue both, but they run out of time to save the grandfather too, and he insists they take the boy instead. On their journey back to their home on the island, they discover that the lad was a woman who disguised herself so the pirates wouldn’t know. Her name is Roberta. They help her back to the treehouse and she has a great time meeting the family.

           In the book, on the other hand, Fritz leaves to explore more of the island. The family doesn’t see him for a while, so they decide to go looking for him. When they find him, his skin is dyed darker, but he washes it off and goes to show his family the person he found, which was a woman. She did, however, disguise herself as a boy until she knew she could trust the family. The girl, whose name is Jenny in the book, was alone when Fritz found her. She was not with her grandfather.

           In the movie, they set up a bunch of traps for the pirates for whenever they came, like pits. Then they decided to invent a special holiday, where they did races and other fun activities. It was on this day that the pirates came. The family defeated the pirates, and Roberta got to see her grandfather.

            Both in the movie and in the book, the family sees a ship off the coast. In the movie, the ship is captained by Roberta’s grandfather, but in the book, it is her father, who had been looking for her. Some of the family leaves to go to Europe, and some of the family stays on the island, and they named the island New Switzerland.

            In the movie, Ernest leaves with Roberta’s grandfather to go to school and learn more in England. The rest of the family, including Roberta, stay on the island. In the book, Jenny and Fritz get married, but it doesn’t give very much information on that at all.

            This was a very interesting and exciting book, and I had a great time reading it. I personally think the movie is better, but the book has more detail. I cannot wait for my next book that I will be reading.