Paper Title
THREE CREATIVE TRANSFORMATIONS OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE IN FILM ADAPTATION: A COMPARATIVE CASE STUDY ON JOURNEY TO THE WEST

Abstract
Abstract - This article conducts a comparative case study between the novelized text of Journey to the West, a 16th-century Chinese Novel,and its film version. It takes a transcultural perspective to develop a clear picture of the cinematic adaptation by exploring what happens when the novel, which originated in mainland China, travels to different cultural contexts. Based on Lin and Gaicia’s creative transformation theories, this study combined the 1592 version, acknowledged as the original text, with its circulation history in Japan, the United States, and Taiwan and sequentially selected three films from the aforementioned locations: Doraemon: The Record of Nobita’s Parallel Visit to the West (1988), The Forbidden Kingdom (2008), and Fire Ball: Journey to the West (2005), for novel-film comparative analyses. We found that it is the diversity of the novel and the flexibility of traditional Chinese culture that allow this classic to survive and even thrive in trans-cultural contexts and thereby show destination-oriented, world-oriented, and origin-oriented creative transformations in Japanese, American, and Taiwanese movies, respectively. Accordingly, the research, while introducing an Oriental perspective into the adaptation studies led by Anglo-American academics, provides new ideas for the creative transformation of this Chinese masterpiece and the abundant traditional Chinese culture that it entails. Keywords - Film Adaptation, Journey to the West, Creative Transformation, Traditional Chinese Culture