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Gulliver's Travels: the book vs. the movie

Gulliver's Travels (1996) — The Hallmark/Jim Henson miniseries with Ted Danson — the only screen version that does all four voyages, and it won five Emmys including Outstanding Miniseries · Gulliver's Travels (1939) — Fleischer Studios' animated feature, the second one ever made in America after Snow White; Lilliput only, and Oscar-nominated for its score and for the song 'Faithful Forever' · The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960) — Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion Lilliput and Brobdingnag, with a Bernard Herrmann score · Gulliver's Travels (2010) — Jack Black as a New York mailroom clerk; Lilliput and a little Brobdingnag, 19% on Rotten Tomatoes and a Razzie nomination for Black

Read first, or watch first?

Read first, and then be selective about what you watch. The 1996 miniseries is the one to pick if you want an adaptation of the book — it is the only version that has ever filmed Laputa or the Houyhnhnms, Danson is genuinely good, and it does not flinch at the fire in Lilliput. But it rewrites the ending into a reunion, and if a family watches it first they will read the last chapters expecting a homecoming that is not coming. The 1939 Fleischer cartoon is a lovely thing to put on with a younger sibling and is not really this book at all; the Harryhausen is worth it for the effects and the Herrmann score. Skip the Jack Black unless somebody specifically wants it, and if you do watch it, watch it after — the joke only works if you know what it is stepping on. One practical note: most people who say they have read Gulliver's Travels have read Lilliput, because that is the part the films and the children's editions keep. The distance between that and Part IV is the whole point of the book.

What the movie changed

The 1996 miniseries invents a madhouse and a happy ending

Simon Moore's script frames the whole thing as Gulliver returned home and committed to an asylum, with a Dr Bates who has taken over his practice and his household and is intercepting his wife's letters. Mary Gulliver — played by Mary Steenburgen, Ted Danson's actual wife — has to get him out. Swift has none of this: his Gulliver comes home sane by every legal measure and simply cannot stand the company of human beings, and the book ends with him still preferring the stable. The miniseries lets him recover and rejoin his family, which is the one thing Swift refuses to do.

The 1939 cartoon invents almost everything except the size difference

Fleischer's Lilliput has a town crier called Gabby, three spies named Sneak, Snoop and Snitch, a romance between Princess Glory of Lilliput and Prince David of Blefuscu, and a war fought over which national anthem gets played at their wedding. Swift's war is fought over which end of a boiled egg you break. Gulliver in this version never leaves Lilliput, never meets a giant, and is a genial big fellow rather than a man taking notes.

Harryhausen gives him a fiancée who stows away

In The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960) Elizabeth hides on Gulliver's ship, is wrecked with him, and turns up later in the King of Brobdingnag's collection of curiosities, where the king arranges their marriage. Swift's Gulliver has a wife at home in Redriff the whole time and barely thinks about her; the loneliness of the voyages is structural, and putting a sweetheart on the boat quietly removes it.

Jack Black makes Gulliver a mailroom clerk with a crush

The 2010 film opens in the mailroom of a New York newspaper, sends Gulliver into the Bermuda Triangle, and has the Lilliputians stage his invented life story — which is largely the plots of Star Wars and Titanic — as court theatre. It is a broad comedy about a man who lies about himself, and Swift's book is the opposite: a scrupulously truthful narrator reporting things nobody should believe.

What only the book has

The third voyage, which almost nothing adapts

Laputa is a magnetic island that hovers over its own kingdom and can be lowered onto a rebellious city to block out the sun. Its noblemen are so lost in thought that each keeps a servant called a flapper to hit him gently on the mouth when it is his turn to speak. Below it, the Academy of Lagado has a man eight years into extracting sunbeams from cucumbers and a professor whose word-machine of forty handles is grinding out a complete body of the arts and sciences by accident. Only the 1996 miniseries goes there at all, and it has forty minutes for what the book gives eleven chapters.

The Struldbrugs

Gulliver hears there are people in Luggnagg who cannot die and spends a page delightedly planning what he would do with eternity. Then he is told what they are actually like: at ninety they lose their teeth and hair and the sense of taste, then their memories, then the ability to talk to anyone born in a different century, and they go on like that forever, legally dead at eighty and hated by everyone. It is four pages, it is in no film, and readers remember it for the rest of their lives.

The two pieces of front matter

The book opens with a note from 'the publisher,' Richard Sympson, solemnly vouching for the character of his friend Captain Gulliver and apologising for cutting some of the nautical detail. Then comes a letter from Gulliver himself, written a year later, furious at Sympson for what the printer did to his book and furious at England for not having reformed in the six months since it came out. The whole satire is set up by those two pieces, and no adaptation has any use for them.

The ending, which nobody will film

Gulliver gets home in chapter eleven of Part IV and it is unbearable. He faints when his wife kisses him. He buys two horses, keeps them unbridled, and talks to them four hours a day; the groom is his favourite person in the house because he smells of the stable. On the last page he has worked up to letting his wife eat at the far end of the table while he holds tobacco leaves under his nose. Every film gives him his family back. Swift does not.

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