I’ve been listening the Harry Potter Audio Books by Jim Dale while drawing for the past few weeks. I just started book 7 today and I’m already sad that I’m nearly done with the series. I can’t recommend this audio book series more. Jim Dale absolutely brings each and every character to life with an individual voice and distinct personality. I don’t want to gush too much about how thoroughly I’ve enjoyed each book so far, but I do have to say a sincere apology to anyone I mocked over the last decade or so for getting too involved in “a children’s book.” I didn’t know, ok? I didn’t understand.
With this new found infatuation with the source material, I am finding myself increasingly distraught with the movies. This is odd considering the movies were my introduction to the franchise and what got me interested in the books. It’s like REALLY enjoying your cousin’s Zeppelin cover band, then hearing the real thing and realizing cousin Randy probably shouldn’t have been playing a banjo with vacuum cleaner attachment.
I know you can’t properly film a 700 page book for budgetary and attention span reasons, but some of the omissions and alterations in the movies are just lazy. Entire characters are distilled to one or two lines of dialog and often attributed to the wrong character. Most of the frustration I felt with the series was actually due to issues the movies would address but then leave hanging. I’m excited to see the adaptation of “The Half-Blood Prince” on the big screen, but now I realize not to expect it to be too faithful to the books. If it’s a good film, I can enjoy it for what it is but I’m not expecting them to cover everything. I actually do anticipate that I’ll be staring puzzled at the screen for most of the movie when key plot elements are glazed over or left out entirely.