Rich and lovely to look at, but probably much more evocative as a memory of the animated short rather than a thing in itself.
A Pixar film with an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short is transformed into a picture book with decidedly mixed results.
The textures and colors, blues, greens and golds, are simply beautiful, as the three characters, a boy, his hugely mustachioed father and his hugely bearded grandfather take their little boat, La Luna, out. The boy is going to work with the men for the very first time. The great moon rises from the sea, and the boy climbs a ladder to the moon, finding its surface covered in glittering stars. This family’s job is to clean up the moon, but his father says one way and his grandfather another. A huge star crashes into the moon, and while his father and grandfather argue about how to deal with it, the boy taps it. The star breaks into a plethora of tiny stars, and the three sweep them all up, “each in his own way.” The film, which won’t be seen until June, when it precedes Pixar’s Brave, is visible in 30-second clips online and is almost entirely wordless. (The book's text writer gets a tiny credit line, “Words by Kiki Thorpe.”) Its tender story about generations and carrying on the work, alas, does not quite come across with words on paper.
Rich and lovely to look at, but probably much more evocative as a memory of the animated short rather than a thing in itself. (Picture book. 5-9)Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4231-3766-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
This story covers the few days preceding the much-anticipated Midnight Zombie Walk, when Stink and company will take to the...
An all-zombie-all-the-time zombiefest, featuring a bunch of grade-school kids, including protagonist Stink and his happy comrades.
This story covers the few days preceding the much-anticipated Midnight Zombie Walk, when Stink and company will take to the streets in the time-honored stiff-armed, stiff-legged fashion. McDonald signals her intent on page one: “Stink and Webster were playing Attack of the Knitting Needle Zombies when Fred Zombie’s eye fell off and rolled across the floor.” The farce is as broad as the Atlantic, with enough spookiness just below the surface to provide the all-important shivers. Accompanied by Reynolds’ drawings—dozens of scene-setting gems with good, creepy living dead—McDonald shapes chapters around zombie motifs: making zombie costumes, eating zombie fare at school, reading zombie books each other to reach the one-million-minutes-of-reading challenge. When the zombie walk happens, it delivers solid zombie awfulness. McDonald’s feel-good tone is deeply encouraging for readers to get up and do this for themselves because it looks like so much darned fun, while the sub-message—that reading grows “strong hearts and minds,” as well as teeth and bones—is enough of a vital interest to the story line to be taken at face value.Pub Date: March 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7636-5692-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fans both young and formerly young will be pleased—100 percent.
Published in magazines, never seen since / Now resurrected for pleasure intense / Versified episodes numbering four / Featuring Marco, and Horton and more!
All of the entries in this follow-up to The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories (2011) involve a certain amount of sharp dealing. Horton carries a Kwuggerbug through crocodile-infested waters and up a steep mountain because “a deal is a deal”—and then is cheated out of his promised share of delicious Beezlenuts. Officer Pat heads off escalating, imagined disasters on Mulberry Street by clubbing a pesky gnat. Marco (originally met on that same Mulberry Street) concocts a baroque excuse for being late to school. In the closer, a smooth-talking Grinch (not the green sort) sells a gullible Hoobub a piece of string. In a lively introduction, uber-fan Charles D. Cohen (The Seuss, The Whole Seuss, and Nothing but the Seuss, 2002) provides publishing histories, places characters and settings in Seussian context, and offers insights into, for instance, the origin of “Grinch.” Along with predictably engaging wordplay—“He climbed. He grew dizzy. His ankles grew numb. / But he climbed and he climbed and he clum and he clum”—each tale features bright, crisply reproduced renditions of its original illustrations. Except for “The Hoobub and the Grinch,” which has been jammed into a single spread, the verses and pictures are laid out in spacious, visually appealing ways.
Fans both young and formerly young will be pleased—100 percent. (Picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-38298-4
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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