This study ends where it began, with the particularities of the children's context when it comes to considering metafiction, transmediation of metafiction to children's film, and adaptation itself. The important role of metafiction in children's reading is central to an understanding of the particular pressures brought to bear on its adaptation, particularly to other (screen) media.

All metafiction reflects on itself: the medium and its methods, and renders the reading process opaque. All metafiction requires (at least) double reading. One of the many paradoxes of this in the context of children's literature is that it presupposes a level of literacy and literateness often not accorded to the developing reader. While the strategies and devices of children's metafiction have almost everything in common with metafiction for adult readers, yet the child reader presupposed by such texts revolutionizes the picture. Children's genres have particular historical associations with metafictional genres, which in turn have strong associations with the pedagogy of literacy. The child reader is not only presupposed by metafiction but constructed by it: metafiction is didactic and prescriptive as much as it is playful and empowering. The revelatory and liberating purpose of children's metafiction is inherently radical. In Christine Wilkie-Stibbs’ words, ‘It brings to them a gradual understanding of how they are being (and have been) textually constructed in and by this intertextual playground’ (2005: 177). And while the effects of such liberation might be fleeting or illusory—the self-actualized reader is still at the mercy of the powerful text and its (adult) author—yet the invitation to readers to become literate and even to assume the mantle of authorship and their own power persists.

Such is the genre of sourcetext for the adaptations considered here. Children's screen media themselves share many of the same tensions and paradoxes as children's literature, as well as some of the same latent or overt prejudices against them. Issues of definition complicate understanding They are riven by the same paradoxes of production and reception: they prescribe even as they presuppose the young viewer; they are generated by adults and adults often serve as gatekeepers to the reception of the media as well.

In large part due to these varied contexts which are both unique and central to children's media, expectations for screen adaptations of children's metafictions have their own particular characteristics as well.