Let's Do Nothing!

A children's book by my friend Tony Fucile, Let's Do Nothing!, hits bookstores tomorrow. It looks great:



You can read an interview with him about it here. Enjoy!

Toy OTD: Robert Harrop's Roald Dahl Collection Figurine: Willy Wonka

I'm sure every toy fan has a favorite artist that they would love to see in toy form, but believe that the artist's drawing style is impossible to sculpt. That's how I felt about Quentin Blake. I love his drawings, but I didn't think you could really sculpt well from them. Case in point: here's Mr. Blake's version of Willy Wonka (left). There's not a lot of form there, right? Don't get me wrong, it's an awesome drawing, but at best there'd have to be a lot of interpretation by the sculptor in order to make it work:

It's always great to be proven wrong with a nice-looking statuette! Robert Harrop Designs, Ltd. is a large figurine concern in the UK, and their products run the gamut from tacky to wonderful. Some time ago, RHD produced a line of figurines based Mr. Blake's illustations from some of the Roald Dahl books. Check out what one of their sculptors has done with the Wonka drawings...

Great, huh? Granted, the hair is a little less bristly, and the colors are darker, but overall it really captures the flavor of the original artwork. The posing is lively, the paint work is quite tight for a ceramic piece, and the base is cleverly incorporated into the overall concept. No logos or branding, either!

It's been a while since I bought this figure, so I don't remember the packaging very well - I think it was a similar style to the Walt Disney Classics Collection boxes - good, but not much in the way of theming.

You can still buy this figurine at the the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Center's online store for £24.50 + shipping (about $36.35 + shipping USD). Happy shopping!

Toy OTD: Sekiguchi Moomin Vinyl Figure: Snufkin (2003)

I don't know very much about the Moomin stories or comic strip, but I was intrigued enough by the drawings to buy the books. I've read a little of the first one, and to my adult mind they seem really weird. I'll have to reach back into my inner six-year old so I can appreciate them more!

Regardless of how that ultimately sorts out, the drawings are pretty neat - sort of a cross between Crockett Johnson and James Thurber - and they've inspired a lot of merchandising. Like many overseas successes, it's not only popular in its home country (Finland), but in Japan as well. And if you've got Japan... there's going to be toys. And cool ones!

I'm not all that familiar with Sekiguchi as a company, but if the Moomin toys are a good indicator, they're a name to watch. Much like Medicom's figures, the sculpt here is very faithful to the source drawings, and the construction seems to favor dyed vinyl over paint. Not much articulation - the neck, and maybe the right wrist and boot-tops - but the execution is finessed more than enough to compensate in my book! The fishing line is an especially nice touch.

I've got two or three other Sekiguchi Moomin figures, and it looks like there's at least seven or eight in the line. I can't find this particular character for sale anywhere right now, so you'll have to hire an auction search service, or set up a favorite search (something along the lines of "sekiguchi moomin" or "sekiguchi snufkin", or both) on eBay. Good luck!

In Other Hanna-Barbera News

My CalArts buddy Mark Christiansen just finished a book of his Sid Sirloin character, and you can buy it right now on eBay for $5.00 + shipping (sales tax too, if you're a CA resident)!

Mark is a super-hard-core Hanna-Barbera fan, and his work reflects the best qualities of the H-B style. Pick up a heaping teaspoon of piping hot nostalgia for yourself, or for your little one(s)! You'll be glad you did. Well, I know Mark will. Me, too.

Things That Read Like Onion Articles, But Aren't Dept.

"'My Beautiful Mommy' is aimed at kids ages four to seven and features a plastic surgeon named Dr. Michael (a musclebound superhero type) and a girl whose mother gets a tummy tuck, a nose job and breast implants. Before her surgery the mom explains that she is getting a smaller tummy: 'You see, as I got older, my body stretched and I couldn't fit into my clothes anymore. Dr. Michael is going to help fix that and make me feel better.' Mom comes home looking like a slightly bruised Barbie doll with demure bandages on her nose and around her waist.

The text doesn't mention the breast augmentation, but the illustrations intentionally show Mom's breasts to be fuller and higher. 'I tried to skirt that issue in the text itself,' says Salzhauer. 'The tummy lends itself to an easy explanation to the children: extra skin and can't fit into your clothes. The breasts might be a stretch for a six-year-old.'

The book doesn't explain exactly why the mother is redoing her nose post-pregnancy. Nonetheless, Mom reassures her little girl that the new nose won't just look 'different, my dear—prettier!'"

To read the rest of Karen Springen's Newsweek article, click here

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While I kinda-sorta understand the intention of explaining your hospital visit rather than simply disappearing for a while, there's something about introducing a child to more body image issues (and surgical options) to the four-to-seven set that just seems... wrong.

I think they should change the name of the book to, "Mommy Needs This, Jane". Here's some suggestions for additional page captions:

* Daddy talks with the new secretary a lot.
* Daddy's team leader was pretty, too, but her shirt needed more buttons.
* Daddy's DVDs were weird. Jane had never seen girls like these before.
* Mommy was very quiet. She looked in the mirror all day.
* Doctor Tucker gave Mommy some papers. She signed them really fast.
* He explained to Jane that to make Mommy pretty again, that he had to make her a little sick.
* Mommy's face was different. But it wasn't good-different this time.

Here's a preview of the sequel, "Dick Is Small":

* Daddy looked nervous. Wouldn't Dick rather play with the bigger truck if he could pick?, he said. Well, girls feel that way, too.

Wild Things Clip Looks Pretty Cool

The track record for children's books being adapted into feature films is pretty poor, so I didn't get very excited when I heard that Spike Jonze was bringing Where The Wild Things Are to the big screen.

However - there's a clip (brought to you via Gawker/Sloan) that's leaked (or 'leaked') out that happily looks really promising. Granted, the picture quality is pretty poor, so the effects could be anything under all that grain. But the character interaction is really charming - I'm really curious to see what kind of story is surrounding this! It looks like I'll have to wait 'til next year to find out...

UPDATE (2/20): Here's Spike Jonez's explanation of the clip...

DARK HORIZONS: Jonze Responds To "Wild Things" Clip
By Garth Franklin - Wednesday, February 20th 2008 2:47am

Warner Bros. has released a statement from director Spike Jonze regarding "Where The Wild Things Are" in response to a clip that was posted recently online.

"That was a very early test with the sole purpose of just getting some footage to Ben our vfx (visual effects) supervisor to see if our vfx plan for the faces would work.

The clip doesn’t look or feel anything like the movie, the Wild Thing suit is a very early cringy prototype, and the boy is a friend of ours Griffin who we had used in a Yeah Yeah Yeahs video we shot a few weeks before.

We love him, but he is not in the actually film...Oh and that is not a wolf suit, its a lamb suit we bought on the internet. Talk to you later."

The film is scheduled to open later in the year.

Dumbledore Is Gay

TIME: Outing Dumbledore
By JOHN CLOUD
Thursday, Oct. 25, 2007
Illustration by John Ueland

When J. K. Rowling said at Carnegie Hall that Albus Dumbledore--her Aslan, her Gandalf, her Yoda--was gay, the crowd apparently sat in silence for a few seconds and then burst into wild applause. I'm still sitting in silence. I feel a bit like I did when we learned too much about Mark Foley and Larry Craig: you are not the role model I'd hoped for as a gay man.

Yes, it's nice that gays finally got a major character in the sci-fi/fantasy universe. Until now, we had been shut out of the major franchises. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a rich supply of homoeroticism into The Lord of the Rings--all those men and hobbits and elves singing to one another during long, womanless quests. The books and their film versions feature tender scenes between Frodo and Samwise. But in the end, Sam marries Rosie and fathers 13 children. Thirteen! Got something to prove, hobbit?

Other fantasy worlds have presented gay (or at least gay-seeming) characters, but usually they are, literally, inhuman. George Lucas gave us the epicene C-3PO and the little butch R2-D2, and their Felix-Oscar dialogue suggests the banter of a couple of old queens who have been keeping intergalactic house for millenniums. But their implied homosexuality is quite safe. There is no real flesh that could actually entangle. Similarly, there was a girl-on-girl plot in 1995 on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but let me spare you a fanboy summary by noting merely that the two girls weren't girls--they were gender-complex aliens called Trills--and they only kissed.

So along comes Rowling with Dumbledore--a human being, a wizard even, an indisputable hero and one of the most beloved figures in children's literature. Shouldn't I be happy to learn he's gay?

Yes, except: Why couldn't he tell us himself? The Potter books add up to more than 800,000 words before Dumbledore dies in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, yet Rowling couldn't spare two of those words to help define a central character's emotional identity: "I'm gay." We can only conclude that Dumbledore saw his homosexuality as shameful. His silence suggests a lack of personal integrity that is completely out of character.

I had always given the Potter books a pass on the lack of gay characters because, especially at first, they were intended for little kids. But particularly with the appearance of the long, violent later books, Rowling allowed her witches and wizards to grow up, to get zits and begin romances, to kill and die. It seemed odd that not even a minor student character at Hogwarts was gay, especially since Rowling was so p.c. about inventing magical creatures of different races and species, incomes, national origins and developmental abilities. In a typical passage, Blaise Zabini is described as a "tall black boy with high cheekbones and long, slanting eyes." Would it have been so difficult to write a line in which Zabini takes the exquisitely named Justin Finch-Fletchley to the Yule Ball?

And then there's Dumbledore himself. Sure, he's heroic. His twinkling eyes, his flowing manteau, his unfailing wisdom--Rowling made it impossible not to revere him. But here is a gay man as desexed as any priest--and, to uncomfortably extend the analogy, whose greatest emotional bond is with an adolescent boy: scarred, orphaned, needy Harry. Rowling said that in her conception of his character, Dumbledore had fallen in love with Gellert Grindelwald long ago, when the two were just teenagers. But Grindelwald turned out to be evil--Rowling's Hitler, in fact--which apparently broke Dumbledore's heart.

As far as we know, Dumbledore had no fully realized romance in all his 115 years--just a lifetime spent around children and, for the seven years we know him, a fascination with the boy Potter. That's pathetic and frustratingly stereotypical. It's difficult to believe someone as wise and sane as Dumbledore couldn't find at least one wizard his age to take to the Three Broomsticks.

Am I making too much of this? Undoubtedly. Some of the best Star Trek fan fiction involves steamy Kirk-Spock love affairs. So it will be with the Potter world, as Rowling has acknowledged. We are now all free to imagine a gay life more whole and fulfilling than the one Rowling gave Dumbledore. But it would have been better if she had just let the old girl rest in peace.

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I'm not sure I see much point in revealing the sexual orientation of a fictional character when (I'd say) it doesn't have any real bearing on the story. Why bother? I don't have a problem with gay characters, but this feels pretty arbitrary to me at this point. Why not write another story where it's pivotal, or explicit (or becomes explicit) in the text?

I think a big part of what makes storytelling an art is knowing what the audience needs to know and what they don't. Unfortunately, there's plenty of examples these days where fandom pressures creators to keep spinning and spinning the same tale until it unravels.

Wes Anderson Turns To Animation

MTV MOVIES BLOG: Wes Anderson Enlists Bill Murray For ‘The Fantastic Mr. Fox’
Published by Josh Horowitz on Wednesday, September 26, 2007 at 7:04 pm.

It will be five films in a row for the collaboration that is Wes Anderson and Bill Murray. I talked to Anderson about his upcoming animated flick based on the Roald Dahl story and he confirmed his voice cast. “George Clooney is going to be Mr. Fox. Bill Murray has a part. Jason [Schwartzman] is doing a voice. That’s our team,” he told me.

But don’t line up at the multiplex just yet…this one is still a long ways off. “It will take a couple years to do the animating,” said “The Darjeeling Limited” helmer, adding that they are about to record the voices. As for the animation, “It’s stop-motion. It’s like ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’ or those Christmas specials. These [characters] have fur, so it’s not like claymation.”

It sounds like Anderson will make this one quite unique (big surprise). “The settings will be very natural. We want to use real trees and real sand, but it’s all miniature,” he said.

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I haven't liked a Wes Anderson film since "Bottle Rocket", so I'm not thrilled about this news. It's hard for me to see how Anderson's chilly storytelling will mesh with the content and the new-to-him medium. I remember liking the book, but I'm not even sure how well it'll adapt to film - I'll have to read it again.

First "Where The Wild Things Are" Still From Spike Jonez

Well, we'll see. Maybe Jonez can pull this off. He and first-time screenwriter Dave Eggers are writing it together, so who knows?

Thanks to I Watch Stuff! and mtvmovieblog.com for the image.

My Favorite Fantasy Writer Passes Away

NY TIMES: Lloyd Alexander, Author of Fantasy Novels, Is Dead at 83
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: May 19, 2007

Lloyd Alexander, a National Book Award-winning author of fantasy novels for young people whose work was noted for its romantic locales, complex characters and barely concealed allegorical depictions of the struggle against tyranny, died on Thursday at his home in Drexel Hill, Pa. He was 83.

The cause was cancer, according to Mr. Alexander’s literary agency, Brandt & Hochman, which announced the death.

The author of more than 40 books, Mr. Alexander was best known for the five novels collectively called “The Prydain Chronicles,” published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston between 1964 and 1968. Set in a kingdom inspired by traditional Welsh mythology, the novels tell the story of Taran, a youth so humble he is not even a pig keeper but merely an assistant pig keeper. (The pig, it should be pointed out, is an oracular pig.)

Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1966, the noted children’s author Jean Fritz reviewed the first three Prydain novels — “The Book of Three (1964), “The Black Cauldron” (1965) and “The Castle of Llyr” (1966) — together, calling them “fantasy in the great tradition.” She added: “Each of the books is a complete chronicle in its own right — exciting, highly imaginative and sometimes profound.”

Mr. Alexander won two National Book Awards. The first was for “The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian” (Dutton, 1970), the story of a young man, a princess and their flight from a repressive ruler. The second was for “Westmark” (Dutton, 1981), the first novel in a trilogy of that name, about a printer’s apprentice who falls in with a theatrical troupe.

In 1969, Mr. Alexander received a Newbery Medal from the American Library Association for “The High King” (1968), the final Prydain novel.

Lloyd Chudley Alexander was born on Jan. 30, 1924, in Philadelphia and reared in suburban Drexel Hill. Though neither of his parents cared for books, he had determined to become a writer by the time he was 15, captivated by Dickens and by the Greek and Arthurian legends that would inform his work.

He announced his career choice to his parents, who did not take it well. His father, a stockbroker, had suffered huge setbacks in the crash of 1929, and the prospect of a son scribbling in a garret did not inspire fiscal confidence. So after high school, at his parents’ insistence, Lloyd took a job as a bank messenger. The work proved useful, however, inspiring his first book, “And Let the Credit Go” (Crowell, 1955), a semiautobiographical novel for adults set partly in a bank.

After enlisting in the Army in 1943, Mr. Alexander was sent for training in Wales, where he came under the spell of the country’s brooding romanticism.

“It seemed I recognized faces from all the hero tales of my childhood,” he wrote in a memoir, “My Love Affair With Music” (Crowell, 1960). “Not until years afterwards did I realize I had been given, without my knowing, a glimpse of another enchanted kingdom.”

At war’s end, Mr. Alexander was sent to Paris to work in counterintelligence. There, he studied briefly at the Sorbonne and met his wife, Janine Denni, whom he married in 1946. She died earlier this month. Mr. Alexander is survived by five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. His wife’s daughter, Madeleine, whom he adopted, also died before him. Information on other survivors could not be immediately confirmed.

In 1947, Mr. Alexander returned with his family to the United States, where he worked variously as a cartoonist, advertising writer, layout artist and magazine editor while publishing several novels for adults. In 1963, with his first children’s novel, “Time Cat” (Holt, Rinehart & Winston), he found his vocation. Mr. Alexander’s other books for children include the Vesper Holly series, about a spirited girl in 1870s Philadelphia.

His last children’s novel, “The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio,” is scheduled to be published in August by Henry Holt & Company.

For Mr. Alexander, the uses of enchantment were clear: fantasy, he often said, was a powerful way of talking about real-world injustice.

“In whatever guise — our own daily nightmares of war, intolerance, inhumanity; or the struggles of an Assistant Pig-Keeper against the Lord of Death — the problems are agonizingly familiar,” he said in his Newbery acceptance speech in 1969. “And an openness to compassion, love and mercy is as essential to us here and now as it is to any inhabitant of an imaginary kingdom.”

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A good friend of mine gave me 'The Chronicles of Pyrdain' series when I was a teenager. I didn't get around to reading them until I was in my thirties, but they held up so well, I place them alongside 'The Hobbit' as my favorite fantasy books. Now I can't help but make sure everyone within shouting distance knows about them. They're super cheap at Amazon, so pick them up for your favorite avid reader today!

The Newbery Medal Vs. The Word 'Scrotum'

NY TIMES: With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar
By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: February 18, 2007

The word “scrotum” does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter.

Susan Patron, the author of the book and a librarian, said the controversial word was just part of the character’s learning about body parts.

Yet there it is on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary schools, and reopened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children’s books. The controversy was first reported by Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine.

On electronic mailing lists like Librarian.net, dozens of literary blogs and pages on the social-networking site LiveJournal, teachers, authors and school librarians took sides over the book. Librarians from all over the country, including Missoula, Mont.; upstate New York; Central Pennsylvania; and Portland, Ore., weighed in, questioning the role of the librarian when selecting — or censoring, some argued — literature for children.

“This book included what I call a Howard Stern-type shock treatment just to see how far they could push the envelope, but they didn’t have the children in mind,” Dana Nilsson, a teacher and librarian in Durango, Colo., wrote on LM_Net, a mailing list that reaches more than 16,000 school librarians. “How very sad.”

The book has already been banned from school libraries in a handful of states in the South, the West and the Northeast, and librarians in other schools have indicated in the online debate that they may well follow suit. Indeed, the topic has dominated the discussion among librarians since the book was shipped to schools.

Pat Scales, a former chairwoman of the Newbery Award committee, said that declining to stock the book in libraries was nothing short of censorship.

“The people who are reacting to that word are not reading the book as a whole,” she said. “That’s what censors do — they pick out words and don’t look at the total merit of the book.”

If it were any other novel, it probably would have gone unnoticed, unordered and unread. But in the world of children’s books, winning a Newbery is the rough equivalent of being selected as an Oprah’s Book Club title. Libraries and bookstores routinely order two or more copies of each year’s winners, with the books read aloud to children and taught in classrooms.

“The Higher Power of Lucky” was first published in November by Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, accompanied by a modest print run of 10,000. After the announcement of the Newbery on Jan. 22, the publisher quickly ordered another 100,000 copies, which arrived in bookstores, schools and libraries around Feb. 5.

Reached at her home in Los Angeles, Ms. Patron said she was stunned by the objections. The story of the rattlesnake bite, she said, was based on a true incident involving a friend’s dog.

And one of the themes of the book is that Lucky is preparing herself to be a grown-up, Ms. Patron said. Learning about language and body parts, then, is very important to her.

“The word is just so delicious,” Ms. Patron said. “The sound of the word to Lucky is so evocative. It’s one of those words that’s so interesting because of the sound of the word.”

Ms. Patron, who is a public librarian in Los Angeles, said the book was written for children 9 to 12 years old. But some librarians countered that since the heroine of “The Higher Power of Lucky” is 10, children older than that would not be interested in reading it.

“I think it’s a good case of an author not realizing her audience,” said Frederick Muller, a librarian at Halsted Middle School in Newton, N.J. “If I were a third- or fourth-grade teacher, I wouldn’t want to have to explain that.”

Authors of children’s books sometimes sneak in a single touchy word or paragraph, leaving librarians to choose whether to ban an entire book over one offending phrase.

In the case of “Lucky,” some of them take no chances. Wendy Stoll, a librarian at Smyrna Elementary in Louisville, Ky., wrote on the LM_Net mailing list that she would not stock the book. Andrea Koch, the librarian at French Road Elementary School in Brighton, N.Y., said she anticipated angry calls from parents if she ordered it. “I don’t think our teachers, or myself, want to do that vocabulary lesson,” she said in an interview. One librarian who responded to Ms. Nilsson’s posting on LM_Net said only: “Sad to say, I didn’t order it for either of my schools, based on ‘the word.’ ”

Booksellers, too, are watchful for racy content in books they endorse to customers. Carol Chittenden, the owner of Eight Cousins, a bookstore in Falmouth, Mass., said she once horrified a customer with “The Adventures of Blue Avenger” by Norma Howe, a novel aimed at junior high school students. “I remember one time showing the book to a grandmother and enthusing about it,” she said. “There’s a chapter in there that’s very funny and the word ‘condom’ comes up. And of course, she opens the book right to the page that said ‘condom.’ ”

It is not the first time school librarians have squirmed at a book’s content, of course. Some school officials have tried to ban Harry Potter books from schools, saying that they implicitly endorse witchcraft and Satanism. Young adult books by Judy Blume, though decades old, are routinely kept out of school libraries.

Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. “I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,” she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.”

“At least not for children,” she added.

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It's a good thing she added that last comment - she probably deflected hundreds of emails (citing James Joyce or Henry Miller) in a matter of seconds.

"...in the world of children’s books, winning a Newbery is the rough equivalent of being selected as an Oprah’s Book Club title."

I think it's a little bit better than that. It might be the same in financial terms, but in terms of prestige... it's not even close. A Newbery medal is the highest honor a children's book can get. It means (and I know this sounds funny, but you know what I mean) your book is "Make Way For Ducklings" good. You're in the pantheon.