Defoe on Screen

Abstract This chapter examines the animated film Michaël Dudok de Wit’s The Red Turtle (2016) as a filmic ‘Robinsonade’, the name for a text that adapts or appropriates Daniel Defoe’s archetypal castaway narrative. The chapter first surveys the history of Defoe on screen, taking in film and television reworkings of Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), and above all Robinson Crusoe (1719). (It also provides a selective checklist of Defoe screen adaptations.) Turning to The Red Turtle, the essay interprets the film as following in the tradition of using Defoe’s writings to address contemporary debates. In this case, The Red Turtle reworks the adversarial relationship between humans and nature central to Crusoe by centralizing the relationship between the eponymous animal and a castaway. It feeds into debates about animal rights and ethics by replacing a paradigm of humanity’s ‘dominion’ over nature with an ‘interactive’ or ‘independent’ relationship.