Abstract

This article seeks to analyse the aesthetic and narrative construction of the stories framed on the young-adult novel A Monster Calls, written by Patrick Ness, in its rewriting for the big screen, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona and released in 2016. Although the film is largely made using real images, the first two stories which include the tales that a monster narrates to Conor, the young protagonist, to help him deal with the imminent death of his mother from cancer, were made using digital animation by the Catalan studio Headless. A mixed methodological design based on content analysis is proposed and its application has made possible a comparative study of the chapters/sequences of the book and the film, to then focus attention on the aesthetic and narrative construction resulting from the transfer of the monster’s stories to the big screen. The work treats the possibilities of the hybridisation of the real image and the animated image in the production of mixed aesthetics films in which the mechanisms of literary language are translated into the cinematographic discourse with the purpose of maintaining a high degree of constitutive dependence.