Posts Tagged Arnold Lobel

a sick thorn bush in the mouse soup

October 13, 2009 at 9:37 pm · Filed under film, Illustration, Tales ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

photo by Twenty Cent Mixture

We still haven’t finished watching the amazing and essential Man on Wire, but in the meantime, some more of Arnold Lobel, this time from Mouse Soup.

This book, is about a mouse that gets caught by a weasel, who wants to turn him into mouse soup. The mouse thinks quickly. He says the soup needs some stories. The weasel wants to hear them. So mouse makes up some stories.

You can see John Clarke Matthews stop-animation adaptation here:

http://www.johnclarkmatthews.com/movies/mouse_soup.php

or here’s part of it on YouTube, where an old lady has a sick thorn:

(just listening to a radio program on Radio New Zealand about Ursula Nordstrom – who “is credited with presiding over a transformation in children’s literature in which morality tales written for adult approval gave way to works that instead appealed to children’s imaginations and emotions.” She was editor for Lobel, and for quite a few other authors / illustrators I’ve blogged about. Thanks to Twenty Cent Mixture, whose flickr picture above led me to her blog entry.)

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an amphibious tradition

October 2, 2009 at 5:13 am · Filed under film, Illustration, Tales ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

LobelsHere on Yahoo! 360 I’ve mentioned Arnold Lobel and his fantastic Frog and Toad books before.

We’re lucky that his daughter Adrianne is an author-illustrator too. She took some long-lost christmas-present tiny books, and brought them back to life as “The Frogs and Toads all sang”.

She says what she learnt most from her father as an artist was “discipline and faitth -and  you got up every day and just faced that drawing table whether you had an idea or not, and just kept at it the same hours every day, until you did have an idea. And generally it was a good one.”

Here’s a radio programme about it all and here’s an audio slideshow too.

frog

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Frog and Toad, books and film

May 8, 2009 at 3:04 pm · Filed under film, Illustration, Tales ·Tagged , , , , , ,

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I have said something about Arnold Lobel before. On the occasion of reading the Frog and Toad stories with my class, I must return to him.

It impresses me no end tht in such simple language and with such subtetly of word and image he conjures up the ins and outs of friendship.

There’s another Lobel book that shows this, Owl at Home, here on flickr. Just one page is enough for now:

Owl at home, Tear Water Tea story by ollerina.
It’s not always the case that someone can turn something so gentle and particular into film, successfully. But John Clark Matthews did it with his very respectful stop-motion Frog and Toad animations.

Brilliant that in 1985 he made a film showing how he made the films. There is so much I like about this, and next time I teach stop motion I’ll show it. Especially now that digital is everywhere, I like all the details – creating the armature on the lathe, moving the characters so carefully, taking the film off to be developed!

 

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Frog and Toad again

July 14, 2008 at 12:52 am · Filed under film, Illustration, Tales ·Tagged , , , , , ,

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I never knew there were clay animations too of the Frog and Toad stories, which M pointed me to on youtube:

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