Would you escape into a book if you could?

Inkheart movie night

What if you could read yourself into a book? What book lover doesn’t love that idea? I’ve read several books based on this concept, but the first book I read using that concept was Inkheart by Cornelia Funke. When I heard they were making an Inkheart movie several years ago I was so incredibly excited. I couldn’t wait to see these characters brought to life, how would they show the magic of someone who read aloud so well he could read characters out of a book? Of course, then the Inkheart movie came out and it bore some resemblance to the book, but I managed to forget that disappointment until I assigned Inkheart as our next book and a movie a few years ago. So, here’s our Inkheart movie night and how they ruined a great series with a terrible first movie.

(This post contains affiliate links)

Inkheart synopsis

Meggie always thinks of her Dad as a book doctor. People who love books will call him to come to fix their books and she loves to watch him fix the books. That is until one night when a strange man visits, he mentions strange people like Capricorn and someone searching. That is when her life changes and she discovers her Dad can read people out of books, and even more exciting and scary he can read people into books.

This is the first book of the Ink World series, sadly they’re never going to produce the other books in the series because they changed the ending of the book. For most of the movie they kept somewhat to the book, with a few odd choices for changes, but the ending completely undermines the rest of the series and makes it impossible to continue it. That being said, I always enjoy Brendan Fraser movies once he moved past the bumbling idiot comedy phase.

More 4th grade books made into a movie

Full disclosure, while Inkheart is listed as a 4th grade reading level because of vocabulary, it’s length is more appropriate for a 6th grader or older, but I know there are some 4th graders who would love the length of this series, so I left it at that age for those motivated 4th grade readers. My kids read it in 6th grade I believe.

If you want some more 6th grade books made into movies

 

Inkheart movie night snacks

We had a disappointingly few snacks for our movie, for whatever reason between the four of us we did not think of all that many snacks. I might need to go reread the book to see what all I can add to them after the fact because that’s kind of sad…

fire- there’s a character in the book that breathes fire (he’s an interestingly gray character morally with quite a lot of depth), so we used crunchy Cheetos to represent fire (rather like we did with How to Train Your Dragon)

swords- because the characters are brought from a fantasy world, there are of course MANY swords used, ours were plain pretzel sticks this time (I’m beginning to wonder if I was getting over being sick when we had our Inkheart movie night)

matchsticks- pretzels dipped in red candy melts

writings- graham crackers with marshmallow fluff and melted chocolate (people’s ability to write is a big deal in the story)

books- not originally part of our snacks, but it makes complete and total sense with the book itself, these are Hershey nuggets on a piece of cardstock with “Lorum Ipsum” text glued to it

fire water- the drink Dustfinger would use to breathe fire, Orange Fanta (not going to bother linking to the sodas because they’re always crazy insane on Amazon)

ink- ink plays a significant part in the book, so we used a couple of liters of Coke and Dr Pepper (family favorites) to represent it

If you’re a subscriber to my mailing list, I’m going through and adding the labels I made so you can download them for your own movie night (check your email for the link and password).