Merlin

We're all watching Merlin, the BBC series (on NBC and Syfy in the US, and now via Netflix), and enjoying it immensely. It has politics and intrigue; swordplay, romance, and magic: something for everyone (I'm not saying who likes what best, but my thirteen year old son and nine year old daughter are equally taken with it. Their parents, too). It's also sent me on a quest of sorts, for Arthurian reading material to suit each of us. An excuse to revisit old favorites, really (White and Stewart, for me, and probably Gerald Morris's Knights' Tales for the kids), but I hope to discover some new ones. Any recommendations?

Movie Night: Miss Minoes

Milly and I would like to recommend for your viewing pleasure Miss Minoes (2001), a Dutch film based on the children's book Minoes by Annie M.G. Schmidt (published in the United States as Minnie; Milkweed Editions, 1994). I love the premise--a cat turns into a young woman, instead of the other way around as so often happens in fantasy books. And I love Miss Minoes's green fur-lined coat.

But back to the premise. It's a fun one for cat-lovers in particular, as Miss Minoes retains a lot of her feline qualities: she climbs trees, rubs noses, hides under the table, sleeps in a box. She purrs even! There's a plot, too (it involves a shy newspaper reporter), but it's the cat-as-young-woman part that makes me want to track down the book, which is bound to be better than the movie. And to ask about other children's books featuring animals that turn into people (not just anthropomorphic animals, which are a dime a dozen). I know there must be lots.

Listen to Origami Yoda, you should

Not the finger puppet that counsels students at McQuarrie Middle School (although you could do worse than follow his advice), but the audio of Tom Angleberger's The Strange Case of Origami Yoda (Recorded Books, 2011; Amulet, 2010). We listened to Origami Yoda (and its sequel, Darth Paper Strikes Back, which is even better) while on vacation last week and highly recommend it to everyone who loves Star Wars and has ever been (or will ever be) in middle school.

Origami Yoda has some of our favorite audio features--namely multiple narrators, only one of which we didn't like, and an episodic plot (we were mostly making short trips in the car). Bonus: it's funny. And for a couple of hours, the kids only argued over who got to read The Secret of the Fortune Wookiee first when we got home (I won).

Rococo Rapunzel

Does this scene look familiar?  It might, if you've recently seen a certain computer-animated adaptation of one of my favorite fairy tales.  The good news is I liked it a lot more than I thought I would based on the trailer (which was not at all).

The bad news is it doesn't really resemble Fragonard's The Swing (which, coincidentally enough, I also saw recently, at the Wallace Collection), although the animators referenced the painting for inspiration (Bill Desowitz, "Chicken Little and Beyond," Animation World Network, 11/4/2005).  The more I look at it, though, the more I notice elements of The Swing--the palette, the frothiness of the flowers and leaves--that did make it into the movie.  Oh, and this iconic image:

Have you seen Tangled?  What did you think?

Arcimboldo and The Tale of Despereaux

I skipped lunch the other day to watch the exhibition film for Arcimboldo, 1526-1593: Nature and Fantasy, currently on view at the National Gallery, which references the character of Boldo in the animated feature The Tale of Despereaux.  That's Boldo in the image above, a character composed entirely of fruits and vegetables, pots and pans--distinctly resembling the composite heads painted by his namesake, the Renaissance artist Arcimboldo.

Unfortunately, I couldn't remember a character named Boldo in Kate DiCamillo's Newbery Award-winning novel The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread (illustrated by Timothy Basil Ering with no apparent debt to Arcimboldo; Scholastic, 2003) and was forced to reread it.  In vain, as it turns out: Boldo (a sort of soup genie) was created for the movie version of the book (which I also watched this weekend). The animation, by London-based Framestore, employs a palette and lighting drawn from the Dutch Masters; and the movie also spotlights two portraits, one of the deceased Queen and another of Princess Pea.  Altogether I prefer the movie.  You can watch a video podcast (of the exhibition film, that is! It's narrated by Isabella Rossellini) here, or better yet, at the National Gallery til January 9, 2011.

[Here's Arcimboldo's Vertumnus (c. 1591, on loan from Skokloster Castle in Sweden) for comparison to Boldo.  Note especially the apple cheeks!]

Despicable Me and Sleepy Kittens

The best part of the movie Despicable Me, for my money anyway, is when Gru reads a bedtime story to Margo, Edith, and Agnes, the three little girls he's adopted to help him infiltrate his nemesis Vector's lair.  The book he reads--at Agnes's insistence--is called Sleepy Kittens; it's a novelty book featuring three kitten finger puppets who drink their milk, brush their fur, you get the idea.  Gru is disgusted: "This is garbage!  You like this?"  (Of course they do.)  I think he even suggests that a two-year-old could have written it.  I'm sure a lot of parents have thought they could do better when it comes to their kids' books, too.  It's harder than it looks.

Anyway, the smart merchandising folks at Universal published Sleepy Kittens as a movie tie-in, finger puppets and all.  Apparently the actual book is not as good as the one in the movie, in a sort of meta-reversal of people's usual complaints, but it's a clever idea nonetheless.

[And one that the people who made Michael Clayton missed out on completely.  My post on the middle-grade fantasy novel featured in that movie, Realm+Conquest, consistently gets more hits than anything else I've written here, and despite the fact that Realm+Conquest is not a real book, people continue to ask me where they can get it.  Someone please write that book already!]

Back to Despicable Me.  Later in the movie, Gru reads the girls a book he's written just for them, The Lonely Unicorn.  He should probably stick to his day job, but the girls love it.  (Of course they do.)  Have you seen the movie?  Did you?

Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Congratulations to Charlotte of Charlotte's Library and Jennifer of Jean Little Library, who correctly identified the source of last month's featured work of art in the Middle Grade Gallery:  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis.  The rest of you just weren't trying!  It is of course the picture of a Narnian ship at sea that hangs in a back room at Aunt Alberta's (I've always wondered who gave it to her) and becomes a portal into Narnia--or more precisely, into the Narnian sea--for Lucy, Edmund, and their horrible cousin Eustace.  I love this scene in the book and have been very curious about how it will look in the movie (due out December 10); fortunately, it's featured prominently in the trailer.

In the book, the children notice that the things in the picture are moving (Lewis notes that "it didn't look at all like a cinema, either"); then there's wind and noise and a wild, briny smell; finally, "a great, cold salt splash [breaks] right out of the frame." Then the children grow smaller or the picture grows bigger (it's not clear which), and they're all drawn down into the sea.  Here's the trailer for comparison:

What do you think?  Does this scene look as you had imagined it?

The Secret of Kells

I may not have seen any of the movies nominated for Best Picture (despite there being ten of them this year), but I have seen one of the five nominees for Best Animated Feature:  The Secret of Kells.  Apparently, I'm one of the few people in the US (outside of the Academy) who has; it doesn't open here until March 6.  But the National Gallery of Art showed it last fall as part of their Film Program for Children and Teens, and the kids and I (not surprisingly) loved it.  According to Variety, "[The Secret of Kells] may be the perfect film for children whose parents are art historians specializing in pre-Renaissance periods."  Close enough!  

Before the screening, the museum educator in charge of the film program asked the kids in the audience to pay attention to the use of color in the movie.  I wish I could remember her exact words (she may have mentioned specific colors and emotions, or not), but her question was short and simple and helped focus the kids' attention, especially when things got a little slow or, conversely, a little scary.  There's an art, I'm learning, to asking just the right question.  What's yours?

 

11 Birthdays on Groundhog Day 2

I didn't like Groundhog Day (the movie), but I loved 11 Birthdays (the middle grade novel) by Wendy Mass.  They share a similar conceit:  the main characters repeat the same day over and over again.  In the case of Amanda Ellerby, it's her eleventh birthday--the only one she hasn't celebrated with her ex-best friend Leo.  Now she has to figure out how to move on, and she needs Leo's help to do so.  But is Leo experiencing the same day over again, too?  Who's responsible, and why?

It's easy to forget that 11 Birthdays is a fantasy novel (and a Cybils finalist in that category), simply because it's so firmly set in a middle grade world.  Mass revisits that world (and some of its characters) in her latest novel, Finally (Scholastic, 2010).  This one is about Rory Swenson's long-awaited 12th birthday--but the weeks that follow it aren't what Rory wanted them to be.  I wonder if Angelina has anything to do with that?

Shoes News

From last week's PW Children's Bookshelf (8/21/08):
"Noel Streatfeild's 1936 novel Ballet Shoes, which was adapted by the BBC and shown in Britain earlier this year, has been picked up by Screenvision to be shown in U.S. theaters, according to Variety. The feature-length film reunites three actors from the Harry Potter movies: Emma Watson (Hermione Granger), Richard Griffiths (Vernon Dursley) and Gemma Jones (Poppy Pomfrey). Limited release begins August 26, and a DVD will follow."

Emma Watson plays Pauline.  The movie is playing in two local theaters, but I think I'll wait for its release on DVD next week (9/2/08), if only because I can't find anyone who'll see it with me.  Actually, I'm not at all sure that I'll like it.  Unlike The Golden Compass, Ballet Shoes (the book) was a childhood favorite, my favorite of all the Shoes books I read.  Sometimes I liked Posy best, sometimes prickly Petrova, but eventually I grew to appreciate (if not identify with) pretty actress Pauline.

I was also delighted to discover that there are Shoes books I haven't read!  This website is an excellent source of information about, and analysis of Noel Streatfeild's books for children (and adults).  Many of them are hard to find now, and I'm sadly missing my childhood copy of Skating Shoes (my next favorite; used copies of the Dell Yearling paperback I had are available on Amazon starting at $43.45).  But Oxford Children's Classics has a beautiful new edition of Party Shoes that I'd love to get my hands on.  In the meantime, I'll just have to get out my worn-out copy of Ballet Shoes.

What are your favorite Shoes?

The Golden Compass movie

My husband and I watched The Golden Compass last weekend. Disclaimer:  I'm not a scholar of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials.  I read The Golden Compass and liked it well enough; I started The Subtle Knife and abandoned it (if I recall correctly, its agenda was too obvious); I never bothered with The Amber Spyglass.  I didn't have high expectations for the movie version of Compass, either, all of which may explain why I liked it as much as I did (and more than the first Narnia movie).  I'm actually disappointed that the sequels to the movie will probably never be made.

Here's what I liked:

  • The casting.  Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra and Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coulter were perfect, as was Sam Elliot as Lee Scoresby.
  • The concept of daemons.  This is what I remembered best from the book.  In case you haven't read it, or seen the movie, your daemon is an animal manifestation of your soul (there's more, obviously, but that'll do).  I spent the first part of the movie deciding what I would like my daemon to be, and had just settled on a hare when Lee Scoresby showed up with Hester.  What would your daemon be?
  • The panserbjorne.  I'm not ordinarily a fan of CGI animals, especially ones that talk, but I liked the armored bears, too.  I do wish we could have seen Iorek Byrnison making his own armor, or at least putting it on: I'm always interested in how people (and polar bears, apparently) dress their parts.
  • Lyra's knit cap.  If the knitwear in this movie doesn't inspire me to learn to knit (preferably by Christmas), then nothing will.  There's even a pattern available here.

Have you seen it yet?