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readallthenewberys2013-04-08 11:04 am
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2013-04-08 11:04 am
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Newbery Honor: Millions of Cats (Wanda Gág)
How do you liveblog a picture book you already know pretty much by heart? I DON'T KNOW. Let's try it and see! ;P
* Well, presumably one starts with the front cover. :D Wanda Gág (pronounced with an "ah") has an extremely distinctive artistic style - sort of lithographic, a little more fluid than woodcuts (I think it's actually pen-and-ink or sometimes brush-and-ink), with strong black-and-white contrasts, and an interesting jaggedy edge on the shading. I hesitate to say "cartoony", because that brings to mind a different distinctive style: there are a lot of sharp edges and pointy noses here, compared to Disney-esque or animé cartoons; there are a lot more rounded shapes than a Bruce-Timm-style "superhero" cartoon, and except for the strange shapes of the trees, really very little in common with Dr Seuss at all. It's just... a fairy-tale style of illustration.
* Enough stalling. Open the book. ;-)
* Everything in the book except the copyright notice is hand-lettered; if I recall correctly, the lettering was done by one of Ms Gág's brothers.
* I think summarizing pages instead of chapters is about the right scale... *deep breath*
* Okay. A lonely little old man and woman live in a very pretty cottage. We see the cottage on one side of the page and the man and woman, at much larger scale, on the other; they're both dressed in some sort of traditional garb - I'm assuming German / Northern European? Simple clothes, cheery faces, non-American headgear, the man has a pipe. There's smoke sort of taking an excursion out of the pipe.
* The old woman asks the old man to get her a cat so they will be less lonely. *looks dubiously at housemate's cat, which is ignoring me completely* ;-) Anyway, so the little old man sets off on a VERY LOOOOOONG journey over the hills and far away, look at this picture which I sadly can't find to link - the book is done on a "landscape" format, wide and short, rather than the conventional "portrait" layout, and the path the old man is following runs from the wee cottage at the extreme left, AAAAAAAALL the way across both pages full of detailed farms and forests and towns, with a stripe of cloudy sky swooping along over the path, all the way to the right where the little old man is getting ready to walk off the page. The text below tells us what we'll find when we turn the page: "a hill which was quite covered with cats".
* Ding-dong! Time to turn the page, children. (What, did you never have any of those books-with-associated-tape when you were a kid? Maybe it was an '80s thing. Like the plastic karaoke cassette players with built-in microphone.)
* LOOK AT ALL THESE CATS. The little old man is very surprised! "Cats here, cats there, Cats and kittens everywhere, Hundreds of cats, Thousands of cats, Millions and billions and trillions of cats." (That will be the refrain of the rest of the book - because a good read-aloud fairy tale, a Märchen as Ms Gág called it in the introduction to her Tales from Grimm, needs a refrain - and what do you know, it's magic. Housemate's cat just walked over and plonked his fuzzy posterior down across my ankles while I was typing it out. ^_^)
* This whole hill in this picture is literally COVERED IN CATS. It's like one of those tesselated quilts; they're in overlapping rows like the scales of plate-mail.
* The old man tries to choose the prettiest cat. But every time he's about to leave, he sees another cat which is just as pretty as the others. "And before he knew it, he had chosen them all."
* We wend our way home back across another two-page spread, left-to-right again because that's how time runs in books, and this time there's another temporal element to the representation: the little old man appears on both pages! The sky in the image is continuous, but the road is not.... I don't think I'm doing a very good job of liveblogging this book. NEEDS MOAR PICTURES. And fewer words. ;-)
* And if I try to explain everything that happens, I'll just quote the whole book! :P But the cats drink up a whole pond of water when they get thirsty on the way home, and eat the hills bare of grass when they get hungry (don't ask me why cats are eating grass, I think the point is to demonstrate HOW MANY CATS is millions and billions and trillions of cats) and fiiiiinally they get home.
* And the little old woman says "My dear! What are you doing? I asked for one little cat, and what do I see?" (Cue refrain. You know, I've never read this book aloud to a kid of the right age, but I bet it would be fun.) The old woman points out that there's no way they can feed all those cats; the old man concurs, and because this is after all a fairy tale in the Grimm tradition, they ask the cats themselves which cat is the prettiest.
* Hands, anyone who didn't expect what happens next. ;-) Yup, the cats start to fight, so loudly that the old couple run into the house to hide. ("They did not like such quarreling", the author notes, making a little hit for good manners and indoor voices while the topic's relevant. *g*) And when they look out again, the cats are all gone! They have eaten each other up!
* But down in a bunch of tall grass sits one thin, scraggly, little frightened kitten. This kitten knew it wasn't the prettiest, so it didn't say anything, and none of the other cats bothered about it.
* The little old woman and little old man take the kitten inside and bathe and brush it, and feed it lots of milk every day - this in a pictorial double-page spread that starts with a scraggly scrawny little kitten falling face-first into a bowl of milk, and ends with a sleek plump kitten smirking over an empty bowl. Why is there not a Caldecott medal for this book? Oh right, because this was one of the first American "picture books" properly speaking (and the oldest one still in print, according to Wiki) and the Caldecott wasn't established yet. :S
* Anyway, and the kitten grows up to be the most beautiful cat in the whole wide world and we finish on a lovely little tableau of the happy family: little old woman, little old man, and cat playing with yarn. :D
* Well, presumably one starts with the front cover. :D Wanda Gág (pronounced with an "ah") has an extremely distinctive artistic style - sort of lithographic, a little more fluid than woodcuts (I think it's actually pen-and-ink or sometimes brush-and-ink), with strong black-and-white contrasts, and an interesting jaggedy edge on the shading. I hesitate to say "cartoony", because that brings to mind a different distinctive style: there are a lot of sharp edges and pointy noses here, compared to Disney-esque or animé cartoons; there are a lot more rounded shapes than a Bruce-Timm-style "superhero" cartoon, and except for the strange shapes of the trees, really very little in common with Dr Seuss at all. It's just... a fairy-tale style of illustration.
* Enough stalling. Open the book. ;-)
* Everything in the book except the copyright notice is hand-lettered; if I recall correctly, the lettering was done by one of Ms Gág's brothers.
* I think summarizing pages instead of chapters is about the right scale... *deep breath*
* Okay. A lonely little old man and woman live in a very pretty cottage. We see the cottage on one side of the page and the man and woman, at much larger scale, on the other; they're both dressed in some sort of traditional garb - I'm assuming German / Northern European? Simple clothes, cheery faces, non-American headgear, the man has a pipe. There's smoke sort of taking an excursion out of the pipe.
* The old woman asks the old man to get her a cat so they will be less lonely. *looks dubiously at housemate's cat, which is ignoring me completely* ;-) Anyway, so the little old man sets off on a VERY LOOOOOONG journey over the hills and far away, look at this picture which I sadly can't find to link - the book is done on a "landscape" format, wide and short, rather than the conventional "portrait" layout, and the path the old man is following runs from the wee cottage at the extreme left, AAAAAAAALL the way across both pages full of detailed farms and forests and towns, with a stripe of cloudy sky swooping along over the path, all the way to the right where the little old man is getting ready to walk off the page. The text below tells us what we'll find when we turn the page: "a hill which was quite covered with cats".
* Ding-dong! Time to turn the page, children. (What, did you never have any of those books-with-associated-tape when you were a kid? Maybe it was an '80s thing. Like the plastic karaoke cassette players with built-in microphone.)
* LOOK AT ALL THESE CATS. The little old man is very surprised! "Cats here, cats there, Cats and kittens everywhere, Hundreds of cats, Thousands of cats, Millions and billions and trillions of cats." (That will be the refrain of the rest of the book - because a good read-aloud fairy tale, a Märchen as Ms Gág called it in the introduction to her Tales from Grimm, needs a refrain - and what do you know, it's magic. Housemate's cat just walked over and plonked his fuzzy posterior down across my ankles while I was typing it out. ^_^)
* This whole hill in this picture is literally COVERED IN CATS. It's like one of those tesselated quilts; they're in overlapping rows like the scales of plate-mail.
* The old man tries to choose the prettiest cat. But every time he's about to leave, he sees another cat which is just as pretty as the others. "And before he knew it, he had chosen them all."
* We wend our way home back across another two-page spread, left-to-right again because that's how time runs in books, and this time there's another temporal element to the representation: the little old man appears on both pages! The sky in the image is continuous, but the road is not.... I don't think I'm doing a very good job of liveblogging this book. NEEDS MOAR PICTURES. And fewer words. ;-)
* And if I try to explain everything that happens, I'll just quote the whole book! :P But the cats drink up a whole pond of water when they get thirsty on the way home, and eat the hills bare of grass when they get hungry (don't ask me why cats are eating grass, I think the point is to demonstrate HOW MANY CATS is millions and billions and trillions of cats) and fiiiiinally they get home.
* And the little old woman says "My dear! What are you doing? I asked for one little cat, and what do I see?" (Cue refrain. You know, I've never read this book aloud to a kid of the right age, but I bet it would be fun.) The old woman points out that there's no way they can feed all those cats; the old man concurs, and because this is after all a fairy tale in the Grimm tradition, they ask the cats themselves which cat is the prettiest.
* Hands, anyone who didn't expect what happens next. ;-) Yup, the cats start to fight, so loudly that the old couple run into the house to hide. ("They did not like such quarreling", the author notes, making a little hit for good manners and indoor voices while the topic's relevant. *g*) And when they look out again, the cats are all gone! They have eaten each other up!
* But down in a bunch of tall grass sits one thin, scraggly, little frightened kitten. This kitten knew it wasn't the prettiest, so it didn't say anything, and none of the other cats bothered about it.
* The little old woman and little old man take the kitten inside and bathe and brush it, and feed it lots of milk every day - this in a pictorial double-page spread that starts with a scraggly scrawny little kitten falling face-first into a bowl of milk, and ends with a sleek plump kitten smirking over an empty bowl. Why is there not a Caldecott medal for this book? Oh right, because this was one of the first American "picture books" properly speaking (and the oldest one still in print, according to Wiki) and the Caldecott wasn't established yet. :S
* Anyway, and the kitten grows up to be the most beautiful cat in the whole wide world and we finish on a lovely little tableau of the happy family: little old woman, little old man, and cat playing with yarn. :D
no subject
My brother had a book (a version of Little Red Riding Hood) with an associated teddy bear. There were buttons on the bear's feet (it was sitting down) marked with page numbers: press the button and the bear would recite the page. Does that count?
the cats are all gone! They have eaten each other up!
Ouch. (Course, there's eating-up in Little Red Riding Hood too.)
no subject
no subject
I remember some Sesame Street, some Disney, and some Ladybird Books that matched a piece of classic literature with a piece of classical music used as underscore ("Snow White" with Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, "The Snow Queen" with the Winter from Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and "Peter Pan" with something less famous that I couldn't name but can still sing from memory).
And then there was the one (I think it was a Disney) about Davy Crockett defeating an Injun uprising, only the narrator's enunciation was a bit unclear in places and one of my sibs was convinced it was about Davy Crockett rescuing a stolen horse.