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The Princess and the Goblin: the book vs. the movie

The Princess and the Goblin (1991) — the animated feature from Wales and Hungary — gentle, sung, and easy to find on DVD

Read first, or watch first?

Either order works, and for a young or easily-scared kid the film first is a genuinely good door: it is gentle, Dove-approved, and its goblins scare almost no one — and it cannot spoil the book, because the best of the book (the tower, the songs, the teller's voice) is exactly what it leaves out. Families who read first lose nothing either; the film's plot tracks the book closely enough that it plays as a reunion. The DVD of the 1991 film is inexpensive and easy to find; there is no other adaptation worth the name.

What the movie changed

Harelip became Froglip

The book names its goblin prince Harelip — a Victorian term for cleft lip used as a grotesque name — and the 1991 film quietly renamed him Froglip, voiced with spitting relish by Rik Mayall. The film's rename is its own comment on how that name has aged; a kid who meets both versions will ask about the difference, and the question is worth answering.

Curdie gets a duel the book refuses

In the film, Curdie personally defeats Prince Froglip in the flood at the climax. MacDonald plays it differently: the goblins are caught in their own trap — the flood they spent chapters digging toward the miners rolls back through their own halls — and no one duels anyone. The book's ending is stranger and more like a fable; the film's is more like a movie.

The goblins got gentler

Reviewers at the time complained the film's goblins were 'ineffectual and unmenacing' — and for a family with a small or easily-scared viewer, that complaint is a feature. The book's goblins, overheard plotting in their underground palace, carry a real chill the film sands off.

A milestone made between three countries

It was the first animated feature ever made in Wales — drawn between Cardiff's Siriol studio, Budapest's Pannonia, and Japan's NHK — with Claire Bloom as the grandmother and Joss Ackland as the king. Released in America in the summer of 1994, it had the misfortune of opening against The Lion King, and most families have never heard of it.

What only the book has

The grandmother's tower

A stair that is sometimes there and sometimes isn't, an old queen spinning at a wheel with hair like silver light, a fire made of roses, pigeons at the window, and a lamp whose light passes through stone walls. The film keeps the character; the rooms — the part readers remember for the rest of their lives — never made it to the screen.

Curdie's actual songs

The film keeps the idea that singing drives goblins back. The book has the songs themselves — a dozen of them, made up mid-fight: 'Ring! dod! bang! Go the hammers' clang!' and 'Hush! scush! scurry! There you go in a hurry!' Kids pick them up like playground chants, which is roughly what they are.

MacDonald arguing with his reader

The book opens with a child interrupting the author — 'But, Mr. Author, why do you always write about princesses?' — and the storyteller answering back. That frame, the voice of a man who told stories aloud to eleven children of his own, is the book's warmest room and no film has a door into it.

Jessie Willcox Smith's paintings

Our edition is the 1920 David McKay printing with her eight colour plates — the great-great-grandmother in blue with stars behind her, the goblins recoiling from Curdie's rhyme, the princess asleep in a miner's cottage. Smith was the most beloved American children's illustrator of her day, and this book shows why.

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