Comparing The Film Adaptation Of The Pedestrian By Ray Bradbury

The PBS article on the film adaptation discusses the difference between written text and the film and the struggle of adapting a book into a movie. The major difference between books and the film is that the visual images stimulate our perceptions directly while written words do this indirectly. Film is also very limited, film must cut out certain events that happened in a book to make it fit into a two or three hour movie. The filmmaker of a movie must build off their own material and choose and change things. For example, “the meaning of a novel is only controlled by one person, the author, while the meaning we get from a film is the result of a collaborative effort” (PBS). In the Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury, the short story compared

For example, In both the film and the movie everyone was addicted to watching TV. “It was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows”(Bradbury 86). The light he sees which glimmers through the window demonstrates the glow from the TV reflecting off of the wall, out the window. Since everyone else was addicted to the TV it made it easier for him to sneak out and walk because no one could take their attention off of the TV to notice he was out there. In the film he heard the voices of the TV. Another similarity between the film and the novel is the dogs. “For long ago, he had wisely changed to sneakers when strolling at night, because the dogs in intermittent squads would parallel his journey with barking if he wore hard heels”(Bradbury 87). He had to wear sneakers because if he wore heavier shoes he would trigger the dogs to start barking and it would catch people's attention that someone was walking outside. His shoes demonstrate that he didn't want to be caught sneaking outside. There are several similarities between the film and the novel and watching TV and the dogs are two of

For example, in the novel the computerized police that catches him is a car, when in the film it’s a helicopter. “What a rare, incredible thing, in a city of three million, there was only one police car left”(Bradbury 87). Changing the appearance of the cop car is a huge difference because the way he was taken away created a whole new perspective. The city of three million is so quiet and peaceful only one police car was needed because there was no crime to stop, such as people sneaking outside. Another difference is that in the novel he was by himself, in the film he had a friend with him. “In ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not once all that time”(Bradbury 87). In the novel he tried to keep his walk every night a secret when in the film he and his friend weren't very afraid of being caught. Also, he’d been walking for years longer in the novel than the film. There are many differences between the film and the novel and the police car and his friend are