Flush with Harry Potter money, Scholastic has been producing animated versions of children's books for its Scholastic Video Collection at a rapid clip these days. And while I tend to cringe at the thought of animated versions of books I consider true classics - books so lyrical (Where the Wild Things Are) or beautiful (The Snowy Day) that they possess almost magical properties when enjoyed with a mesmerized toddler - other, less canonical stories seem ripe for it. Scholastic first dipped into the work of Laurie Keller with their adaptation of her clever Scrambled States of America (book|DVD); her quirky, busy, and aside-filled Arnie the Doughnut is a great fit for the series, and makes for an animated short that our two-year-old daughter Z enjoys and which I sit down to watch almost every time we play it for her.
Keller personalizes a familiar commercial style of illustration by sprinkling Arnie with unusual compositions, scattershot dialogue, and quirky narrative devices. An early scene in Arnie the Doughnut is a bustling mural full of details that serve a main plot point; others are structured like deconstructed print ads, their authoritative simplicity swapped for Keller's whimsical cartoons, peppered with interjections and announcements and a playful, postmodern confusion of the authorial and advertorial that manages to be both nostalgic and highly contemporary.
The animated Arnie only ups the commercial ante with a schmaltzy jazz score and timely drum rolls, and seeing the story in motion makes it clear that Arnie's ending, in print and on-screen, succeeds precisely because Arnie's fate is a triumph of marketing.
You see, this is the story of a doughnut who is unaware that he will be eaten until he is on the way into a man's mouth. The signs in the shop window, the baker's proud self-promotion, the enticing sprinkles - all failed to clue him in to his designated destiny. When Arnie discovers the horrible end that is planned for him, he stalls, grieves, then negotiates, and after a lengthy and difficult brainstorming session with the man who purchased him, they manage to come up with a role for him that pleases them both: He will be the man's "doughnut dog."
With a leash, a collar, and a variety of doglike activities, Arnie takes on the role of a playful pup so well that everyone marvels at the solution. We have a word for this, boys and girls, and that word is spin. This is the eternal youth offered in a culture mediated by advertising: instead of passing from innocence into experience, or from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, we recapture innocence through creative branding. I, for one, am sold.
Among the other shorts on this DVD, our family can only recommend one, and that only tepidly. Roberto the Insect Architect is a gorgeously-illustrated, obnoxiously punny book by Nina Laden, and its adaptation successfully carries much of the collage-like and textural visual power into the televised format, but also brings the book's flat and overwrought language into high definition. Laden introduced her skills at mimicking great artists' visual styles in her popular picture book When Pigcasso Met Mootise, and she does so with flair in showcasing work by invertebrate incarnations of the world's great modern architects. But the humor is lost on young children, and for me the gag got old long before the story's end. Like Pigcasso, Roberto seems to have been well-received, however, and Laden is dangerously close to sinking into a franchise.
The DVD contains three other shorts: Peter McCarty's Hondo and Fabian, Emily Jenkins' That New Animal, and Anne Isaacs' Swamp Angel, the latter gorgeously illustrated in an American primitive style by Paul O. Zelinsky. But each feels like the afterthought it undoubtedly was, with gappy, stop-motion frame rates and minimally-animated moving parts that Gustafer Yellowgold managed to make charming but here feel half-baked. One segment in particular mars the variety show: That New Animal, whose characters look, as Booklist pointed out, as though they were carved from wood, is a wonderful subject (jealousy of a new baby... by pets) marred by poor judgment. This may be a matter of taste, but as owners of a large dog and an impressionable toddler who loves said dog, my two-year-old daughter and I were of one mind in cutting this story short after one of the the dogs pleaded with the other to let him bite the infant (over which they were standing, no adult in sight) and then suggested burying the baby in the backyard, like a bone. Thanks, but no thanks.
For the feature story alone, it's hard to argue that Arnie the Doughnut and Other Fantastic Adventure Stories is worth shelling out $15 for a DVD. But we place a premium on space in our household and are pretty picky about how we spend our TV time, so it's saying something that this video will be sticking around. If you're a fan of any of the other books featured on the disc, I'd recommend the DVD at Amazon's pre-order price of $11.19, a discount of 25% off of list; if you're familiar with more than one of them (they are all major award-winners) this collection could be a hit. The DVD hits shelves and ships from Amazon on June 26.
Other popular Scholastic book-to-DVD titles:
- The Snowy Day
- Harold and the Purple Crayon
- Where the Wild Things Are
- Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
- Insanely large bundles (27 or 12)
0 comments:
Post a Comment