Books to Movies: Verne and the Problem of the Travelogue Continued

Can the travelogue have a successful narrative arc?

Like most seeking-for-parents/family movies, In Search of the Castaways is a shaggy dog story, which means it is entirely in keeping with Verne's approach. As Wikipedia states about the book, the search for the children's father along the 37th parallel south provides A "pretext to describe the flora, fauna, and geography of numerous places to the audience."

That is, the search for the parent provides a pretext to send ordinary people into various dangerous and exciting situations. It's not that different from Hitchcock's Torn Curtain. 

This approach works with books in part because the individual chapters are rather like graphic novel/manga volumes--the adventure and momentary interactions are the point. Out of the Verne books I've read, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea grabs me the most (despite the singular inability to explicate Captain Nemo's motivations) because the under-ocean setting is so enthralling. I can imagine that for budding sci-fi readers in the late-1800s, Verne offered something that captured both the steampunk impulse and the exploration impulse.

On screen, however, I prefer more of a definitive narrative arc. 

So, can the travelogue be transformed into a arc? 

One of my mom's favorite novels, Nevil Shute's Trustee from the Toolroom, is a "searching" travelogue that would make a great movie! The main character--a non-wealthy, unassuming man of mechanical genius--has to get across the world by relying on contacts (nope, not email! contacts created through letters). He has to problem-solve various hiccups, including how to retrieve and safely guard his niece's inheritance from her dead parents' yacht. 

The parents thankfully don't turn out to be alive. And yes, frankly, I prefer that. I always found the BBC Little Princess far preferable to versions that keep the father alive. To me, that story is about survival and revelation, not about a return to the status quo. Likewise, Trustee is about the uncle doing everything he can for his niece, not about everything going back to what it was before.

Hey, written in 1960, Trustee would now be a historical film!

Overall, one approach to turning a travelogue into a film is to present a series of events, cameos, and interesting settings. There's nothing wrong with that approach!

The other, which is more movie-like, is to make the journey itself a matter of character development or revelation--that is, the characters solve problems rather than having things happen to them. In many ways, this solution is the mystery novel solution: the protagonist/traveler as detective moving towards an epiphany.