The Films That I Have Taught: Gnomeo and Juliet

In addition to books, the other big text that I teach as a teacher is films. Much like the book series, The Films That I Have Taught, is a personal reflection on the films I have taught in my classes. Their experiences often revealed interesting truths, not about the themes necessarily, but more about the outcomes and interactions I had with my students and how it influenced my writing.

The last post was about Shrek and the one before that was WALL-E and both of them were part of the selection of films that my students consistently asked to watch. I was not that surprised by Shrek and WALL-E but I was when my year 9/10s asked me to put on Gnomeo and Juliet by Kelly Asbury.

For context, we were studying Romeo and Juliet, which I talked about in my Books I have Taught series. The request made sense, the film was an adaptation of the play and after studying the play, it made sense to watch it. The film does a great job of capturing the heart of the play for a modern audience and even gives the ending a modern twist so that it is no longer considered a tragedy.

As a teaching text, I found it useful when teaching the idea of adapting a text, due to the changes that it makes to the original. You could lead students down an interesting path of pulling apart a text and asking how we change meaning for a new audience. It is also engaging for students, a little too much some as I remember one year 8 boy being very excited when the scene with the frog came up.

In my own writing, I have played with the idea of a modern Biblical story. Maybe adapting the story of Sampson or Moses into a modern context. I currently have no plans to follow through, but if I did, it would be interesting to see what I thought was worth changing and what needed to stay the same. I also acknowledge that there is more weight in adapting God’s word compared to that of Shakespeare, but if it could reach a new audience, then it might be worth consideration. The important part would be, however, that the heart of the text is captured and replicated.