What adaptation(s) do you prefer over the source material, and why?

[Mexican Wolf]

This applies for any medium being adapted into another other medium, not just books to movies.

I like the movie Smoke Signals (1998) more than the short story collection it's based on, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) by Sherman Alexie. I read the book first and while I found some of the stories interesting, I found it hard to connect to a lot of the characters and feel the weight of the events they went through because Alexie's writing style felt so distant and he seemed to skip over or cut out a lot of relevant details. It felt like there were deeper meanings lying under the surfaces of the stories that I couldn't find a way to dig out.

Smoke Signals, on the other hand, felt much more compelling because Alexie took the loosely connected stories he originally wrote and crafted them into a narrative arc that gave the film's protagonists, Victor and Thomas, more depth and their friendship stronger development than they had in the original short story. I also like several additions he and the film crew made that gave the journey Victor and Thomas take in the movie more emotionally resonant than the blandly described one in the book. Some examples are the movie-original character played by Irene Bedard and a great scene where Victor and Thomas debate about what a "real" Native American should act like and Thomas points out the ridiculous of some still persistent stereotypes about Natives.

I still think the book is decent, but the movie is definitely my preferred version of these characters and their stories.