As the previous chapter illustrated, adaptations of children’s metafiction do not have to be adapted as metafilms; instead, metafiction can be filmed through plot, character, and mise en scène, and foregrounded as a form of ekphrasis. Yet, to paraphrase Robert Stam again, many film adaptations of metafictions do indeed wrestle with the ‘obligation’ of adapting the metalevel as well. And while in many respects the resulting self-reflexivity is a close adaptation of the self-reflexivity of the fictional source, at the same time, and by definition, medium self-referentiality is inherently self-interested. With respect to meta-reference, equivalence in another medium is paradoxical.

Metafilm is film (and other filmic media, such as television) that makes the viewer aware that they are viewing a filmic medium. Watching metafilm is therefore as double as reading metafiction: viewers are simultaneously aware of both story and discourse. In Brian Young’s words, ‘Through form and narrative, these are movies that draw attention to the processes of storytelling and, more specifically, the processes of filmmaking’ (2011: 5). In Winfried Nöth’s more poetic phrasing, ‘Instead of narrating, they narrate how and why they narrate, instead of filming, they film that they film the filming’ (2007: 3).

Not all metacinematic moments are aimed at disrupting the cinematic illusion, however. To reprise Werner Wolf, metafilm is a ‘gradable phenomenon’ (2009: 58), and instances of metafilm must therefore be situated in context to determine the degree of self-referentiality they enact. Much of the storyline of the children’s film Bolt, in which Bolt is a dog on a television series called ‘Bolt,’ while it certainly features a ‘Hollywood on Hollywood’ reflexivity, ultimately upholds the story’s realism. Bolt must learn his real limitations as a dog: he has no superpowers. This realism can be contrasted with a meta-cinematic moment from within the film’s diegetic reality, not within the televised show, when the same helicopter is shown exploding from three different angles, consecutively. The film The Last Action Hero, by contrast, systematically disrupts the cinematic illusion in the same ways as Woody Allen’s film The Purple Rose of Cairo does, breaks the fourth wall by having the villain directly address the extra-diegetic camera, and focuses on ontological questions of what is real both on screen and off.