Animation, Adaptation, and the Plague

Abstract This article offers the most sustained critical assessment to date of The Periwig-Maker (1999), a short-animated film that takes on the formidable challenge of adapting Daniel Defoe’s novel A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). After embedding both film and novel in intertextual webs that far exceed their putative relationship to each other, the article explores in detail two of the ways in which The Periwig-Maker transmutes its adapted text: first, its complex sound design, instantiating the plague’s soundscape that can only be faintly intimated in Defoe’s print-bound work; second, its gothic mode, hyperbolizing what is only one of a wide array of generic options followed in the Journal. The final section of the article extends the afterlives of both film and novel by considering them as fictions that, eerily, not only look backwards to the plague in the seventeenth century but forward to our own experience of deadly pandemic with COVID-19.