Comparison with film adaptation

The 2014 film adaptation of Lois Lowry's young adult novel The Giver, directed by Phillip Noyce and scripted by Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weide, is slightly different from the novel. The first major difference is in terms of the age of the main characters. Jonas and his friends are about twelve years old in the book. In the film, they are 16-year-old teenagers.

The film begins in black and white, which reveals from the start that there is no color in the community. Only gradually do individual objects become colored. In the book, readers learn only in the course of the novel that the members of the community cannot see colors; their world remains gray. In the book, the elderly live by themselves in the House of the Old. In the film, the old people are not shown.

In the movie, when the Giver gives Jonas his first memory, the two are  sitting across from each other, whereas in the book Jonas is told to take off his tunic and lie on his stomach on the bed. Jonas, the Giver, and Gabriel are distinguished from the other people not by their blue eye color and the...