Home › The Swiss Family Robinson › Book vs. movie

The Swiss Family Robinson: the book vs. the movie

Swiss Family Robinson (1960) — Disney's, shot on Tobago, with a working tree house built in a 200-foot saman tree; the fourth-highest-grossing film of 1960, and the reason the Swiss Family Treehouse exists at Disney parks · Swiss Family Robinson (1940) — The RKO version with Thomas Mitchell. Disney bought the rights to it after making his own and kept it off screens for decades; it turned up on Disney+ at launch, and there is no disc to link to · Lost in Space (1965) — Irwin Allen's series was built from this novel — the family is called Robinson, and the Gold Key comic it had to be distinguished from was titled Space Family Robinson

Read first, or watch first?

Watch first, and enjoy it — this is one of the few books here where the film being unfaithful barely costs the reader anything, because the two are not competing for the same ground. Disney's 1960 version is a good adventure film with a plot; Wyss's novel has almost no plot at all, and is instead a decade of small competent work described by a father who cannot stop teaching. A kid who has seen the film will come to the book already loving the tree house, and will then be startled to find it abandoned by chapter nine, a fourth brother who was never in the film, and a snake that gets the donkey. Those surprises are the pleasure. Pick the 1960 film; the 1940 RKO version is hard to find and Disney kept it that way on purpose. If your family gets on with the book, the thing to do afterwards is watch for the pirates, and notice that they never come.

What the movie changed

There are no pirates in the book. None.

The film's whole second half is a siege: Kuala's pirates come for the island, the family fortifies a clifftop and lays booby traps, the attack comes during a holiday animal race, the traps do most of the work, and Captain Moreland's ship arrives to finish it with cannon fire. Wyss's family never meets a hostile human being. The nearest thing to an enemy in 119,000 words is a boa constrictor, and the nearest thing to a battle is the ambush they lay for the troop of apes that has wrecked the farm at Woodlands. What the book has instead of a villain is weather, work and animals.

Roberta is Jenny, and she arrives ten years later

Janet Munro suggested the idea of a girl dressed as a boy, and the film's Roberta is found early, disguised by her grandfather to keep her from the pirates, and rescued in a chase through the jungle. In the novel the castaway is Jenny Montrose, the survivor of a different wreck; she does not appear until chapter seventeen, ten years in, and she arrives by post. Fritz, out alone in a kayak he built, knocks an albatross out of the air with a boat-hook, finds a rag wound round its leg reading 'Save an unfortunate Englishwoman from the smoking rock!', ties a strip of his handkerchief to the other leg — 'Do not despair! Help is near!' — and lets the bird go. She has been alone three years; she is the daughter of a British officer and was born in India; and she has built herself a hut with clay-plastered reed walls and a chimney hole, which Fritz describes with open admiration.

One brother is missing

The book has four sons — Fritz, Ernest, Jack and Franz — and their differences are most of the comedy: Fritz is capable and a little proud, Ernest is lazy and almost always right, Jack is reckless, Franz is small and wants a mount of his own. The film keeps three, Fritz, Ernst and Francis, and folds Jack's recklessness into Francis. Every scene where the older two argue about natural history and the father lets them run is gone with him.

The ending is reversed

In the film Ernst sails away to a London university and everyone else stays, with Moreland guessing the island will become a colony and Father its governor. On the page it is Fritz who goes — to England, with Jenny, to ask her father for her; Franz goes too, for school; and Ernest and Jack stay behind with their parents. The father's last act is to hand Fritz the journal we have just read and ask him to have it printed, which is the book explaining where it came from.

The tree house is not where they live

Disney's tree house has a water wheel, and it is the film's image of the whole story — the set was built in a 200-foot saman tree on Tobago, and Disney liked it enough to build a walk-through version of it in the parks. In the book Falconhurst is a summer house. The rainy season drives them out of it in the first year, and by chapter nine they have hollowed a home out of a wall of rock salt and called it Rockburg, and that — dry, defensible, with a library and a workshop — is where the family actually lives for the next decade.

What only the book has

The tub boat

Before anything else there is the problem of getting six people off a wreck with no boat. Jack solves it — 'can't we each get into a big tub, and float there?' — and their father fishes four large casks out of the flooded hold, saws each across the middle, and nails the eight halves to a plank keel with outriggers to stop it rolling. Then it is too heavy to move, and there is a whole page on the lever and the rollers that get it into the water. Then they load it: canvas for a tent, a chest of carpenter's tools, guns and powder, fishing tackle, an iron pot, a case of portable soup, ten hens and two cocks netted into one tub, and the mother's bag, as big as a pillow, which she hands to eight-year-old Franz to sit on and will not explain. The two dogs, left behind on the wreck, howl until they jump in and swim after. The film opens with the family already ashore.

The two epitaphs

Ernest, the bookish one, writes verse. When the boa takes Grizzle he produces ten lines with the blush of a modest author — 'A monstrous serpent, springing from the grass, / Seized, crushed, and swallowed him before our eyes' — and the father copies them onto a flat stone with the red pencil he uses for marking wood. Years later, when the lioness kills Juno, he writes another. Both are in this edition, set as verse, and they are the only moments where a member of this relentlessly practical family stops to say what something felt like.

The natural history, which is also the joke

The island has penguins, ostriches, kangaroos, a walrus, a hippopotamus, a boa, a lion, a tiger, a whale and a herd of buffalo, all on the same shore, because Wyss was teaching out of travellers' books rather than describing a real place. The father identifies everything, at length, and the boys interrupt. Read straight it is a bestiary a nine-year-old can graze in for weeks; read with an atlas open it is very funny, and older kids catch on fast that this island cannot exist.

Ten years passing

Chapter sixteen opens 'We spend our years as a tale that is told,' and the father sits down to account for a decade at once — the farms at Woodlands and Prospect Hill, the boys grown, the pinnace, the fleet of small craft, the guns on the island battery. No adaptation has room for that chapter, and it is where the book stops being a story about surviving and becomes a story about a place that now exists because a family made it.

Making it a movie night?Find the 1960 film on Amazon →

Ready for the real thing?Get the free ebook →

Film links are Amazon affiliate links. Works both directions, by the way: how to use a movie to spark the book →