Corduroy is one of the most popular children’s books written in English. Since 1968, it has enchanted millions of kids as they follow the night-time adventures of an unwanted teddy bear trying to find a missing button in a department store.
This success has spawned spin-offs including a short-lived cartoon, and a slightly disturbing short film. And now director Tim Story has announced his decision to turn Corduroy into a movie. If it’s a success, this could be a new golden age of children’s book adaptations. However, as a newly minted connoisseur of the form, I am aware that some books must never be turned into films. These are those books.
Goodnight Moon
Goodnight Moon has been in print since 1947, and now sells close to a million copies a year. That does not mean it warrants a movie adaptation, because nothing actually happens in it. A rabbit goes to sleep and systematically says goodnight to everything around him, next to what appears to be the unresponsive corpse of his mother. At one point, he says goodnight to a bowl of mush. Even if Spike Jonze optioned Goodnight Moon and transformed the bowl of mush into an emo adolescent railing against the inevitability of change for two hours, he’d still have trouble overcoming the book’s creepy airlessness. Instead, why not watch an episode of David Lynch’s Rabbits, which is tonally identical.
The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business
Originally a German story entitled Vom Kleinen Maulwurf, der Wissen Wollte, wer Ihm auf den Kopf Gemacht Hat, this book tells the story of a mole who turns amateur detective when another animal poops on his head. He tracks down animal after animal, inspecting their faeces for similarities to the stool that remains atop his head for the duration of the book. Modern advances in special effects mean that a movie adaptation of this book would be horrifyingly lifelike, and therefore should never see the light of day.
Heaven Is for Real for Little Ones
Now, this book’s parent publication – Heaven Is for Real – has already been turned into a movie. It’s a true story about a child who almost dies during surgery and goes to heaven and comes back and tells everyone what it’s like because it’s definitely real. Greg Kinnear is in it. It grossed $100m. However, Heaven Is for Real for Kids – the preschool offshoot publication – hasn’t enjoyed the same treatment. Maybe it’s because instead of telling the story of the surgery this is just the kid listing all the things he definitely saw in heaven. Maybe it’s because his description of heaven (“Pearls and jewels are on the walls and gates”) make it sound like that lift where Nigel Farage met Donald Trump. Or maybe it’s because the woman who wrote Heaven Is for Real also wrote Same Kind of Different As Me, and we all know how that turned out.
The Dinosaur That Pooped Daddy
A book where a boy’s father goes missing and, blinded by grief, obsessively counts everything around him to block out the possibility that the father may have been eaten by the dinosaur they inexplicably keep in the house as a pet. Ostensibly the book has a happy ending – sifting through a colossal mound of dinosaur excrement, the boy realises that his father has somehow passed all the way through the monster’s digestive system intact – but the trauma of the events leading up to this would be too much for young minds to take. Also this book was written by two members of McFly, so there’s that.
Little Zizi
This is, genuinely, a book about a boy who gets teased at school for his tiny penis. He challenges the bully to a peeing contest to reassert his dominance, then becomes too shy to go in front of everyone. Eventually he gets the girl anyway, because what really matters isn’t the size of the boat, it’s the motion of the ocean. The second anyone attempts to make this into a film, they’ll get put on a register.
