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Monday, Sep 14, 1998 8:41 AM UTC

Words that sing

A child's life is full of music, from 'Happy Birthday,' to 'Hickory, Dickory, Dock.' What better way to capture the delight of childhood than with picture books built around the magic of music? Polly Shulman reviews five new books who's words leap and sing in harmony.

By

Picture books belong to the age of music, the era when children learn
to mark their most important triumphs with song: “Happy Birthday to
you”; “Nyah, nyah, I know something you don’t know.” Sadly, though,
books can’t sing — unless you consider one of those maddening novelties
with a whining chip wedged in its spine a book. Rather, they depend on
the human voice for their music. Even when you read them to yourself, children’s
books refuse to be silenced. Again and again, their authors find ways of
capturing the drama, self expression and power of song in their flat,
still pages.

One way to borrow a musical voice is to illustrate a song, as Kathy
Jakobsen does in “This Land Is Your Land.” A small, upright Woody
Guthrie strides through Jakobsen’s folk-arty paintings while his song
plays itself out in the reader’s inner ear and perhaps even aloud if
there’s a parent around who can carry a tune.

Like the music, the
illustrations in Jakobsen’s book draw strength from their seemingly
naive passion, keeping just this side of sentimentality. As Guthrie does
in his lyrics, Jakobsen alternates sweeping natural images — that endless
skyway, those diamond deserts — with busy scenes populated by people like
you and me. Her pages illustrating the chorus are particularly clever
and intricate: She fits together carefully posed snapshots into spreads
laid out like antique postcards. She lines the margins with vertical or
horizontal images of quintessential America — the Washington Monument, a
great sequoia, Yosemite Falls, a space shuttle launch, the Brooklyn
Bridge, a train, a dog sled.

Song and book include the freedom to protest and a social conscience
in their celebration of America. Woody sits by a New York City subway
entrance playing a guitar marked “This machine kills fascists.” Soup
kitchens put in an appearance, as do picket lines. But Jakobsen readily
turns back to blossoming fruit trees and sing-along picnics before it
gets too political.

Like Jakobsen, Miguelanxo Prado draws power from a musical work
popular among children, transforming Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the
Wolf” into a graphic novel. Building up his pictures from layers of
saturated color, he creates a shadowy, frightening, yet slightly goofy
atmosphere that’s in keeping with Prokofiev’s world. Peter’s animal
friends — the sneaky cat, the slow, plump duck, the quick-moving bird —
are illustrated the same way their theme music sounds. The bird even
leaves behind a visible trail to show how it darts through the air, much
the way Prokofiev’s music trills and leaps when the bird enters the
story. Peter’s grandfather, warning the boy to stay home where the wolf
can’t get him, seems almost as threatening as the vast forest. And the
scenes where the wolf plunders, gulps and gloats remind me that I
always ran out of the room halfway through the Leonard Bernstein version
of the piece when this section played. As is fitting for our
environmentally guilt-ridden age, Prado adds a note of regret once the
wolf is safely dead, but Peter quickly gets over it and learns to
delight in his kill like any successful predator.

Another musical number ripe for an update is “The Sorcerer’s
Apprentice.” Artist Ted Dewan has reinterpreted Goethe’s Romantic
ballad, adopting the pacing of Paul Dukas’ famous scherzo — a
sprightly humorous instrumental musical — and ignoring Disney altogether. In Dewan’s hands, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is clearly a
tale for our time. A musician and former physics teacher, Dewan uses the
story to raise an eyebrow at technology. His sorcerer sports
shoulder-length gray hair and a baseball cap, and it’s not hard to
imagine the next generation’s answer to the personal computer coming out
of his cluttered workshop.

Dewan gives his sorcerer-geek the requisite sense of mysterious
antiquity by filling the workshop with machine-age tools and parts. The
magician-techie’s lamps have goose necks, his electrical cords are
wrapped in cloth, and he keeps his nuts and bolts in an oak drawer file.
To reduce the clutter, he builds himself a robot assistant whom he asks
to vacuum and straighten up. The disk he slips into his apprentice’s
head is a 45 RPM — you can almost hear him flick the dust off the needle
before lowering it gently and letting it play.

Naturally, the assistant sees the blueprints that created him and
decides to build helpers of his own. One robot becomes two, two become
four and four become eight, while illustrations of a whole note, two half notes, four
quarters, eight eighths and so on dance
across the page. Like the audible scherzo, the book builds to a boom.
Dewan’s housekeeping hint in an age of mechanical reproduction seems to
be: Do your own dirty work.

In “Music Over Manhattan,” author Mark Karlins and illustrator Jack
E. Davis use a different tactic to bring music into their story. Instead
of cribbing from musicians, they use them as characters. Bernie, a
Brooklyn youngster plagued by a cousin so talented at penmanship that
the family can’t stop kvelling, takes up the trumpet in hope of
consolation. Uncle Louie, his teacher, is such a talented musician that
he can make the pigeons strut and coo when he plays. Even the laundry
dances in time. In fact, Uncle Louie plays so well that the music lifts
him into the air. Inspired, Bernie practices diligently. The story ends
with a fanfare of fantasy: When Uncle Louie invites Bernie to play at a
family wedding, his talent floats the whole party over Manhattan to
their homes. Jealous Cousin Herbie of penmanship fame lands in a trash
can (nyah, nyah).

For the young narrator of “My Friend the Piano” by Catherine Cowan,
an artist’s life is not nearly so straightforward or triumphant. “It all
started the first time I hauled myself onto the piano bench, touched the
keys, and began to compose. As I grew and my feet reached the pedals, my
music swelled with passion. At times the piano wept. At other times it
shrieked with laughter.

“One day Mother announced it was time I took lessons and learned how
to play. ‘But I already know how to play,’ I said.

“‘That is not playing,’ said Mother. ‘It’s noise.’”

The piano, it turns out, doesn’t take kindly to lessons. When the
heroine tries to practice her scales, the instrument immediately goes
out of tune. Kevin Hawkes’ illustrations show its lid growing spiky and
its keyboard curling in distaste. It’s only really happy when the girl
plays her own “symphonies.”

The narrator’s parents soon lose patience and decide to get rid of
the piano. The heroine pleads in vain and when the piano is on its way
out the door, she decides to rescue her friend. She hops on the lid and
off they speed together down the driveway, out through the neighborhood
and over the highway. At last, in a heroic dash for freedom, the piano
flings itself over a cliff into the sea while the heroine stays behind,
clinging to a tree branch. In the last picture we see the piano leaping
with dolphins in the moonlight.

At the end, the piano is free and our heroine is glad to have it out of the reach of interfering teachers and unappreciative parents: “If you go to Symphony
Rock, you will see where my friend the piano escaped to the sea with my
music safe inside,” says the narrator. “Now I compose concertos for pots
and pans.”

Music needs a different kind of freedom — the freedom to jangle and annoy, to get stuck in a listener’s ear, to repeat itself over and over, to call up a lost thought from long ago, to be seen as well as heard. And picture books provide it with the perfect soundproof auditorium.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

B O O K++I N F O R M A T I O N


“This Land Is Your Land”

Words and Music by Woody Guthrie, paintings
by Kathy Jakobsen

With a tribute by Pete Seeger

Little, Brown, 1998, 34 pages

“Peter and the Wolf”

By Sergei Prokofiev, adapted by Miguelanxo Prado

Nantier Beall Minoustchine Publishing, 32 pages

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”

By Ted Dewan

Doubleday, 32 pages

“Music Over Manhattan”

By Mark Karlins, illustrated by Jack E. Davis

Doubleday, 32 pages

“My Friend the Piano”

By Catherine Cowan, illustrated by Kevin Hawkes

Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books, 32 pages

Polly Shulman edits news articles for the journal Science. More Polly Shulman.

Tuesday, Feb 28, 2012 8:45 PM UTC

Disney’s fat-shaming fail

The mouse misfires with an ambitious, awful health campaign

By

You wouldn’t think the people whose theme parks feature a binge-eating bear with a honey gut would put itself in the business of fat shaming, but that’s exactly what Disney did this month. In a boneheaded stab at promoting healthy lifestyle choices, the happiest place on earth became a considerably less hospitable environment when it debuted a new interactive “Habit Heroes” exhibit at Epcot. Guess who the villains were?

A collaboration between Disney and Blue Cross and Blue Shield to help teach kids to “fight bad habits,” the Epcot attraction and tie-in app and Web page featured buff, virtuous characters Will Power and Callie Stenics squaring off against nemeses like the lazy, grotesque “Lead Bottom” and the self-explanatorily named “Glutton.” Apparently, when a company famed for its meticulous crafting of exactly what children want and one of the largest health insurers in the nation pool their talents, they come up with “Fat people are bad.”

Earlier this month, Tony Jenkins, regional market president for Blue Cross and Blue Shield, told the Orlando Sentinel that “Our challenge was to tell that story in a fun, engaging way, which is what Disney does better than anyone.” So imagine Disney’s surprise when some patrons did not take kindly to their “fun, engaging” message. As Weighty Matters blogger and assistant professor of family medicine Dr. Yoni Freedhoff told the Calgary Herald, “It’s so dumbfounding it’s unreal. I just can’t believe somebody out there thought it was a good idea to pick up where the school bullies left off and shame kids on their vacation.” On her “Dances With Fat” blog, Ragen Chastain condemned the “Disney Fat Shame Ride” and admitted she “couldn’t stop the tears” when she’d heard about it. And nutritionist and author Marion Nestle tweeted, agog, “You can’t make this up.”

It didn’t take long for the Magic Kingdom to do some hasty damage control, taking HabitHeroes.com “down for maintenance” and closing the exhibit just three weeks after it launched. The mouse is currently remaining conspicuously silent on whether it will return.

With 12.5 million children and teens now obese, the health problem in this nation is a real and growing one, one that will play in serious long-term health problems like diabetes and heart disease and short-term ones like bullying. Kids – and parents – need direction and encouragement to make healthy eating choices and develop an active lifestyle. But like Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta’s similarly in your face campaign, the Habit Heroes approach compounded the problem by making it seem like emotional, cultural, genetic and economic factors can be overcome with simple “Will Power” and a few broccoli spears. Worse, it demonized the obese, equating size with poor habits. Kind of ironic for a place that entices visitors to “Satisfy your sweet tooth at Storybook Treats” or “Wake up with treats like freshly made funnel cakes and delicious waffle sandwiches.” You want to promote good heath? Start by looking at your own sugar and animal fat-laden menus. And go on by respecting children of all shapes and sizes. Because they’re the ones who trust in the mouse to see them not as Lead Bottoms and Gluttons but as princesses and pirates. As beautiful.

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Mary Elizabeth Williams

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

Wednesday, Jul 13, 2011 1:05 AM UTC

Can “Winnie the Pooh” save Disney from Pixar?

An utterly charming new adventure with the Bear of Little Brain offers a delicious antidote to digital animation

By

Can a Bear of Very Little Brain redeem the tarnished reputation of Walt Disney’s venerable animation studio and stake his place on the cultural landscape alongside Buzz Lightyear and Lightning McQueen? That’s a lot to ask of a tubby little cubbie whose principal concern is finding a pot of honey — sorry, hunny — but Disney’s whimsical and charming new “Winnie the Pooh” feels simultaneously like a return to the company’s more innocent past and a refreshing new direction. Specifically recalling the hand-drawn animation style of the widely beloved 1966 “Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree” and its sequels (anthologized in the 1977 collection “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh”), and delivering only the faintest contemporary tweak to the Milne material, Stephen J. Anderson and Don Hall’s “Winnie the Pooh” will thoroughly delight both the under-10 set and their nostalgic parents. Look for this to be a surprisingly potent sleeper hit; I’m going a second time this weekend.

Sterling Holloway, who provided the classic Pooh voice in the ’60s, has been dead almost 20 years, but Jim Cummings (who also voices Tigger) has amiably filled the role in numerous lower-budget Disney productions and sounds uncannily similar. With John Cleese as narrator, Craig Ferguson as Owl and Jack Boulter as Christopher Robin, this production also has the right degree of authentic British-ness. (It’s somehow fine with me that Pooh, along with Bud Luckey’s Eeyore, sounds a bit more American.) But the real star of “Winnie the Pooh” is the imaginative animation, which features not one but two classic Disney surrealist sequences and a bit of playful postmodernism: Pooh frequently interacts with Cleese’s narrator, or wanders out of the Hundred Acre Wood into the paragraphs of the book, accidentally bringing letters and punctuation marks back with him.

Of course the Mouse has been relentlessly cashing in on A.A. Milne’s dimwit ursine hero ever since acquiring the rights from Milne’s widow in 1961, and much of that output doesn’t bear (ha!) thinking about: Piglet and Tigger got their own spinoff movies; there were Christmas and Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day specials and a seemingly endless series of tot-oriented “Winnie the Pooh Learning” and “Winnie the Pooh Playtime” titles. Let’s not even bring up “Franken Pooh.” Well, you can forget about all that stuff; Anderson and Hall have banished the insipid primary colors, not to mention the third-rate outsourced animation, and this film has the lovingly crafted, storybook feeling that was once Disney’s specialty.

“Winnie the Pooh” feels like a turning point in the brief tenure of Walt Disney Animation Studios head John Lasseter — whose other company, Pixar, effectively destroyed Disney’s old in-house animation unit. Lasseter has said frequently that Disney Animation should have its own identity, one that draws on the company’s glorious past and doesn’t simply ape Pixar’s success, and maybe now we can see what that means. “Winnie the Pooh” doesn’t look or feel anything like a Pixar movie, and it is specifically not trying to be a “kidult” crossover success, after the fashion of almost every Pixar production. But it also feels mercifully free of the combined calculation and sloppiness that have plagued so many Disney features in recent years, and one could argue that the painstaking attention to animation and storytelling reflect Lasseter’s stewardship.

Let’s take to the way-back machine for a minute. Ever since the Walt Disney Co. began its partnership with Pixar, then an upstart digital-animation studio run out of an industrial park in Emeryville, Calif., the Mouse’s own in-house animation unit has struggled to keep up. Actually, that’s being euphemistic; what really happened was that Pixar kicked Walt Disney Feature Animation’s butt so badly that the division was ultimately dissolved and renamed. In 1995, “Toy Story,” the first Disney-Pixar release, grossed $354 million worldwide, which represented at least a tenfold return on its production costs. Walt Disney Feature Animation also had a big hit that year with “Pocahontas,” which premiered outdoors in New York’s Central Park and went on to its own $300 million-plus worldwide take. (Mind you, it also cost several times more to make than “Toy Story” did.)

Not even Lasseter, who co-founded Pixar and directed “Toy Story,” would have predicted 16 years ago that Pixar would go from one massive success to the next, becoming one of the most beloved brands in entertainment history, or that “Pocahontas” was the last big hurrah, or next-to-last, for Walt Disney Feature Animation, which had created such massive hits as “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King.” When Pixar released “Toy Story 2″ in 1999, another huge worldwide hit, WDFA’s big release was “Tarzan,” a wildly expensive production (not to mention an entirely forgettable film) that probably ended up in the red. Disney’s in-house studio had one more sizable hit, with “Lilo & Stitch” in 2002. But that movie earned $100 million less than Pixar’s “Monsters Inc.” had a year earlier and took in less than one-third the worldwide gross of Pixar’s huge 2003 hit, “Finding Nemo.”

At that point the writing was on the wall: Pixar engaged an enormous public with cutting-edge animation technology and appealing characters and stories, and reaped untold billions in box-office receipts, tie-in merchandise and ancillaries. Disney’s in-house animation studio, on the other hand, was an embarrassing albatross. There were straight-to-video quickies, cashing in on existing properties in the most unfortunate Disney tradition: “Mickey’s Twice Upon a Christmas” and “Mulan II” and “Tarzan II” (with “new songs by Phil Collins,” apparently meant as an inducement). The last release under the aegis of Walt Disney Feature Animation was “Chicken Little” in 2005, a work of supremely crappy-looking fake-Pixar animation that features 11 credited writers and Zach Braff in the title role. I would have been happy to completely forget that movie’s existence. (In fact I had, until now).

Lasseter has been at the helm of the reconstituted Walt Disney Animation Studios for almost five years, while continuing to run Pixar, and the results of this seemingly contradictory role are still a bit unclear. The first two Disney features made on his watch, “Meet the Robinsons” and “Bolt,” felt way too much like Pixar movies, with substandard animation and the rough edges sanded off. I’m aware there’s a critical constituency for both films, but that didn’t extend far into the public, and both were box-office flops. With the hand-drawn “Princess and the Frog” and the digital “Tangled,” Disney tried to breathe new life into its classic tradition of adapting fairy tales. Neither performed as well as expected, but they displayed more craft, integrity and audience appeal than any other Disney animated feature in years. (“Tangled” was reportedly so expensive to make that even its worldwide gross of almost $400 million might not have returned a profit; “The Princess and the Frog” failed to click with American audiences but did well overseas.)

It’s almost not worth mentioning that “The Princess and the Frog” was artistically and financially eclipsed by Pixar’s “Up,” and that “Tangled” was obliterated by the astonishing billion-dollar worldwide gross of “Toy Story 3,” the biggest animated feature in history. The same thing is likely happen again this summer; even though many Pixar-friendly critics have turned against Lasseter’s “Cars 2,” audiences don’t seem to mind. But coming as it does after those two films, “Winnie the Pooh” feels like more than a small summer surprise that will utterly charm 3-year-olds and 93-year-olds. It feels like a Walt Disney animated film, in the best possible sense of that term, and another significant step toward restoring that company’s dignity and sense of purpose.

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Andrew O

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Tuesday, Jun 28, 2011 12:29 PM UTC

Pixar releases trailer for upcoming film, “Brave”

The movie, which comes to theaters next summer, is a fairy tale set in the Scottish Highlands

By The heroine of Pixar's forthcoming film, "Brave."

The big box office news this past weekend was the success of Pixar’s latest release, “Cars 2,” in the face of less-than-friendly critics. In the wake of this triumph, the studio has released the trailer for its next film, “Brave,” which is due to hit theaters next June.

The movie — which takes place far from “Cars’s” Radiator Springs, in the Scottish Highlands — brings us Pixar’s first-ever female protagonist: a flame-haired princess called Merida. Entertainment Weekly has more:

It’s Pixar Animation Studio’s first fairy tale fantasy, and it marks yet another change of pace for the venerable dream factory. “What we want to get across [with the teaser] is that this story has some darker elements,” director Mark Andrews tells EW. “Not to frighten off our Pixar fans — we’ll still have all the comedy and the great characters. But we get a little bit more intense here.”

The film will use the voices of Emma Thompson, Billy Connolly, Julie Walters, Kevin McKidd, Craig Ferguson and Robbie Coltrane, and stars Kelly Macdonald as Merida.

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Emma Mustich is a Salon contributor. Follow her on Twitter: @emustich. More Emma Mustich.

Thursday, Jun 23, 2011 4:41 PM UTC

Today’s must-see viral videos

Watch: America gets its Susan Boyle, a Southwest pilot's anti-gay rant, a touching Ryan Dunn tribute, and more

By Landau Eugene Murphy Jr. wows audiences on "America's Got Talent."

1. The U.S. gets its own Susan Boyle

“America’s Got Talent” contestant Landau Eugene Murphy Jr., a car washer from West Virginia, was chided by Piers Morgan for chewing gum onstage. Then he opened his mouth so the ghost of Frank Sinatra could come out singing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Goosebumps!

2. A tribute to Ryan Dunn that will last a lifetime

“Jackass’” Wee-Man, (aka Jason Acuna) cuts through all the anger and flame wars surrounding his friend’s death and gives him a uniquely touching memorial.

 3. Southwest Airlines pilot loses it on the mic

I don’t know if it makes it better or worse that this guy’s homophobic tirade was supposed to be a private cockpit conversation instead of being broadcast across the entire Texas airspace. Maybe he should get a job doing standup in Nashville?

4. Culture clash

Amazing footage, just uploaded to YouTube yesterday, of a tribe in Papua New Guinea meeting a white man for the first time in 1976.

5. Trippy Disney mashup

Pogo, the foremost expert and creator of Disney remixes, has come out with his latest creation. “Bloom” focuses not on one specific film, but several different animated classics.

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.

Thursday, Jun 2, 2011 7:03 PM UTC

Are we OK with Miley Cyrus in her underwear now?

Is the former Disney star old enough, at 18, to strip down without it becoming a scandal?

By Miley in her everyday outfit for "So Undercover."

Miley Cyrus … can I ever look at you without feeling like a lecherous old man? From the time you were 15 and appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair wearing only a sheet, it’s been a battle not to see you partially clothed everywhere I go.

Sometimes you’re just the victim of a bad situation, like when those hackers leaked racy photos you took in 2008 for Joe Jonas, and posted them all over the Internet. Or when this happened again in 2010 and the FBI was called in.

Other times, you’re shoving your post-Hannah Montana B-cups in my face so hard that I can almost hear you screaming, “I’m an adult now! Take me and my breasts seriously!” For example: your music videos for “Can’t Be Tamed.”  Or “Who Owns My Heart.“  Or when you pretended to kiss one of your female dancers on “Britain’s Got Talent.” And that’s not even mentioning those party shots of you involving lap dances, salvia and more half-naked, girl-on-girl kissing. Which has less to do with your sexuality, Miley, and more with the fact that you were 17 and acting like Paris Hilton on a bender.

So please forgive me for feeling weird about these new, semi-innocuous stills for your latest film “So Undercover.” If it weren’t for your dramatic history with underwear, these photos wouldn’t seem so bad. But with you Miley, the pictures carry three years of associated guilt and anxiety that the government is going to come arrest me for having child pornography on my computer.

You’re 18 now, which is the age when the sexy vs. too sexy debate usually begins to get interesting for Op-Ed writers and TV pundits. But you’ve been scandalized and scandalizing for awhile now; you’ve made your stance clear about rebelling from your Disney image, and at this point it’s barely news when you walk out of your house in only lingerie. If anything, these photos for “So Undercover” are way more conservative than the bra and short-shorts you’ve been wearing to the supermarket for the past 24 months. (The Supermarket is a hot new club in London, FYI.)

But it still feels weird. Legal, but weird.

Then again, maybe I should just be glad you’re so fond of underwear that you literally spend $3K at a time shopping for panties and bras. It will really cut down on the number of paparazzi upskirt photos we’ll have to see in the future.

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.

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