You can tell a story set in the distant future or in a fantasy world using virtually any medium imaginable, but prose has one advantage over many of its compatriots: writers don’t have to worry about disappointing visual effects. There’s a point in the 1968 occult thriller The Devil Rides Out where the film’s heroes confront what’s supposed to be a demonic apparition that chills them to their very souls. One assumes that in the Dennis Wheatley novel on which the film was based, this vision was indeed something eminently horrifying.

Unfortunately what we see on screen is a middle-aged man wearing a toga and tinted contact lenses. The overall feeling is less that of an eldritch horror and more that one of the crew members either won or lost a bet and got to appear on screen for a crucial shot.

The Devil Rides Out isn’t the only case of a literary adaptation where something terrifying on the page didn’t have the same onscreen oomph. Director Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, a 1957 adaptation of M.R. James’s story “Casting the Runes,” about the diabolical effects of a lethal curse. Just what was carrying out those lethal acts was made far more explicit in the film, against the wishes of the director.

In other words: there’s a reason why the film is called Night of the Demon, and it has to do with a visual effect that turns up several times in the film. According to documents from the American Film Institute, Tourneur was opposed to this aspect of the film.

“The scenes in which you really see the demon were shot without me. All except one. I shot the sequence in the woods where Dana Andrews is chased by a sort of cloud. This technique should have been used for other sequences. The audience should never have completely seen the demon.”

The director blamed the film’s producer for adding the demon, which he referred to as “that horrible thing.”

The gulf between what’s possible on the page and on the screen can also be reflected in what hasn’t been adapted. Consider H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, a genre classic that has resisted cinematic adaptation thus far, despite the interest of high-profile filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro. It isn’t hard to see why this has eluded easy adaptation: much of Lovecraft’s work involves indescribable horrors that are outside of the boundaries of human perception. It’s one thing to write that on the page; it’s another to come up with an onscreen translation for that that doesn’t look ridiculous. 

Which brings us to the question of animation.

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There’s been no shortage of high-profile science fiction and fantasy films told using animation: KPop Demon Hunters, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, and the Spider-Verse films all come to mind. Here, I’ll be looking at three animated films that adapted existing novels: writer/director Hayao Miyazaki’s 2004 Howl’s Moving Castle, adapting the novel by Diana Wynne Jones; writer/director Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, adapting the novel by Philip K. Dick; and writer/director Ari Folman’s The Congress, adapting Stanisław Lem’s novel The Futurological Congress. Each of these three films uses animation in a very different way; each one also demonstrates different strengths when it comes to telling these particular stories though an animated medium.

Arguably the most faithful of the three adaptations is Linklater’s. The film and novel both tell the story of one Bob Arctor, an undercover drug enforcement agent whose mind has splintered, meaning that the man he’s currently investigating is himself. Linklater and his collaborators told the story using rotoscoping, the same technique Linklater had used in his earlier Waking Life and would go on to use in his 2022 film Apollo 10 ½.

For me, the greatest strength of this decision comes from the way that it allows Linklater to depict the “scramble suits” that Arctor and his colleagues wear to disguise their identities. Here’s a passage from the novel explaining how they work:

“‘This man,’ the host declared, ‘whom we will call Fred, because this is the code name under which he reports the information he gathers, once within the scramble suit, cannot be identified by voice, or by even technological voiceprint, or by appearance. He looks, does he not, like a vague blur and nothing more? Am I right?’ He let loose a great smile. His audience, appreciating that this was indeed funny, did a little smiling on their own.

The scramble suit was an invention of the Bell Laboratories, conjured up by accident by an employee named S. A. Powers. He had, a few years ago, been experimenting with disinhibiting substances affecting neural tissue, and one night, having administered to himself an IV injection considered safe and mildly euphoric, had experienced a disastrous drop in the GABA fluid of his brain. Subjectively, he had then witnessed lurid phosphene activity projected on the far wall of his bedroom, a frantically progressing montage of what, at the time, he imagined to be modern-day abstract paintings.”

For his part, Linklater has stated that he always envisioned this adaptation as an animated one – though that led to some delays in funding. Here’s how he described the process to the Austin Chronicle in 2006:

“I had it in mind as animated from the get-go. But I still had to kind of fight the fight, which is probably one of the reasons the film didn’t happen for two years after I wrote it. The word came down from above that adults don’t really go to animated movies. And this is obviously not a kids’ film. So it kind of lingered in the background for a while. It wasn’t until the actors came aboard and we kept our budget low that it began to happen.”

There’s an elegiac quality to the surreal visuals as well. Having a world that drifts, in its animation, from realistic to bizarre – at one point, Arctor hallucinates one of his housemates turning into a gigantic insect – helps to bolster the novel’s sense of a constantly fluctuating reality. There are times when, watching A Scanner Darkly, you might wonder why this wasn’t told more conventionally – but as you get further into Bob Arctor’s shattered mind, the reasons for that become far more understandable.

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The Diana Wynne Jones novel that Hayao Miyazaki adapted for the screen was published in 1986, and was followed by several other books set in the same world. Both the novel and the film tell the story of Sophie, a young woman cursed by the Witch of the Waste, who takes refuge in the home of a mercurial wizard named Howl. This is how the castle that gives the novel its title is described in the book:

“So when, a few months after that, a tall black castle suddenly appeared on the hills above Market Chipping, blowing clouds of black smoke from its four tall, thin turrets, everybody was fairly sure that the Witch had moved out of the Waste again and was about to terrorize the country the way she used to fifty years ago. People got very scared indeed. Nobody went out alone, particularly at night. What made it all the scarier was that the castle did not stay in the same place. Sometimes it was a tall black smudge on the moors to the northwest, sometimes it reared above the rocks to the east, and sometimes it came right downhill to sit in the heather only just beyond the last farm to the north. You could see it actually moving sometimes, with smoke pouring out from the turrets in dirty gray gusts. For a while everyone was certain that the castle would come right down into the valley before long, and the Mayor talked of sending to the King for help.”

Miyazaki’s adaptation has a more traditionally animated approach than Linklater’s film. It abounds with lush landscapes, bizarre non-human characters, and strange magic. Certain scenes from the film play like direct adaptations of the novel. Other elements, such as the role of a character named Suliman, are wildly different. The novel’s more pastoral setting and the idea that Howl is actually from modern Wales are not present in the film; instead, the world where Howl and Sophie live is more, shall we say, steampunk.

And there’s also the matter of war. Much of the film involves Howl’s efforts to contain a war taking place between two neighboring kingdoms, an effort that puts his life at risk and threatens him with permanent transformation into a bird-like creature. This element is new to the film and, as its director pointed out in an interview with Newsweek, it had to do with the then-ongoing war in Iraq. When asked about his previous film Spirited Away winning an Oscar, Miyazaki addressed the elephant in the room:

“Actually, your country had just started the war against Iraq, and I had a great deal of rage about that. So I felt some hesitation about the award. In fact, I had just started to make Howl’s Moving Castle, so the film is profoundly affected by the war in Iraq.”

It’s not hard to figure this out; an anti-war ethos runs throughout Howl’s Moving Castle. Does it mesh seamlessly with Jones’s original novel? As someone familiar with both, it can be a bit jarring at first – but the novel has a fairly anti-authoritarian element to it, and the horror that both Sophie and Howl feel at the leaders who put their people at risk emerges organically from that.

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Of the three films discussed here, The Congress is both the loosest adaptation and the most unique in its use of animation. Only about half of the film is animated, for starters; writer-director Ari Folman has taken the plot of Lem’s novel The Futurological Congress and added a very different element: namely, a look at aging and technology in the film industry.

Lem’s novel is set at, well, The Futurological Congress, an event taking place that year in Costa Rica. The attendees are overwhelmed with psychedelic drugs, making the question of what is real and what is a hallucination increasingly difficult to pin down. Here’s how Ezra Glinter described the world of the novel in a 2014 piece for The Paris Review:

“Rather than solving its problems, humanity learns to mask them using comically sophisticated pharmaceuticals. In the “psychemized” future, you can take drugs like “gospelcredendium” to have a religious experience, and “equaniminine” to dispel it. Books are no longer read but eaten; they can be bought at the psychedeli, a kind of one-stop psychem superstore.”

And here’s a selection of the novel as narrator Ijon Tichy describes the growing chaos there as the hotel where the congress is taking place comes under attack:

“Professor Trottelreiner was, as luck would have it, a specialist in the field of psychotropic pharmacology, and he cautioned me not to use the gas mask under any circumstance, as it would cease to operate at sufficiently high concentrations of aerosol; this would then give rise to the so-called phenomenon of filter overload, and in an instant one could inhale a much heavier dose than if one breathed the air without the benefit of a mask. The only sure protection, he said, anticipating my question, would be a separate oxygen supply; so we went to the hotel desk, managed to catch one receptionist still on duty and found, with his assistance, a storeroom full of fire-fighting equipment, including plenty of oxygen masks: Draeger make, with closed circulation. Thus accoutered, the Professor and I returned to the street, just in time to hear the dreadful, ear-splitting whistle that announced the arrival of the first planes. As everyone knows, the Hilton was accidentally bombed with LTN minutes after the air raid commenced; the consequences of that error were disastrous.”

Among the big differences between Lem’s novel and Folman’s adaptation is who the protagonist is. As opposed to Ijon Tichy, Folman’s film is centered around Robin Wright, playing a version of herself. The first half of the film is set in the present day and centers around Wright’s agent and a studio executive trying to convince her to be scanned, so that an electronic version of her can go on acting forever; the second half, set twenty years later, finds Wright visiting a massive hotel where an event familiar to readers of Lem’s novel is taking place so that she can renew her contract.

In an interview with Craig Skinner, Folman explained what drew him to the novel in the first place:

“The book is completely psychedelic. And I think it’s such a cinematic book, extremely cinematic. For me it was a gift that I could explore. Obviously when I first read this novel, when I was sixteen years old, I was attracted to it solely because of the psychedelic part. But when I grew older I understood all the layers of it. For making this kind of animation – going backwards in time – the drugs and the psychedelic part, this is I think every director’s dream.”

The idea of losing oneself in time is shared by both versions of this story, though in the film that sense of loss is bolstered by Wright’s character’s love for her son and her attempts to find a treatment for a degenerative condition he has been diagnosed with. Much of The Congress also has plenty to say about aging in the film industry; it would make for a fascinating double bill with The Substance, for instance.

The Congress feels prescient in other ways as well, notably in the questions it raises about how advances in technology will affect storytelling, and what it might mean to have recycled screen icons delivering “performances” that they were never on set for. It’s telling that the brief scenes of computer-generated films in this film’s universe are, by and large, terrible.

The Congress takes some of the biggest risks of these three animated features, both in terms of its storytelling and its deviations from its source material. I’m not sure all of them entirely work, but there’s a bravery in how Forman and his collaborators pulled it off.