The Breadwinner: A Graphic Novel

This slim book version of the currently released animation of Deborah Ellis’s The Breadwinner has no credited author or illustrator. It is simply a series of images from the film to which dialogue has been added. It does no favours to the original book nor, I imagine, to the film. It is subtitled “a graphic novel” but actually it is the antithesis of a graphic novel. If anyone needed convincing of the narrative and pictorial skill involved in creating a graphic novel then all that would be needed would be to take any true example of the genre and place it beside this arrangement of stills which jerk spasmodically from one incident to another. This is not any criticism of the movie itself, which I have not seen. It is just confirmation that you can’t simply take a pair of scissors to a film, cut away nearly all of the carefully edited narrative, arrange what’s left in a chronological sequence, and expect it to work as a story. This is neither a movie nor a book. It might serve as a souvenir of the film but that’s all.