This is the 2011 Oscar winning short animation, ‘The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.’ It’s the first film from Moonbot Studios in Shreveport, Louisiana. It was co-directed by William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg
The film is also an iPad app that combines animation with an interactive picture book narrative.
One of the submitters to my Vimeo short films group, Robert Lyons, sent this short French stop-motion film in. He worked as the directory of photography on it. The director was Delphine Burros. It’s about a librarian who opens a magical and evil book.
This is an amazing and obsessive immersion in science fiction illustrations from what is known as the Second Golden Age. It’s mainly lots of cool science fiction imagery from the 1970s and 1980s.
Part 2
Parts 3 – 5 after the jump
Artie Knapp writes marvelous, cheerful and gently humorous tales for children. He’s been offering his stories to this site for years and I always look forward to a new one. Knapp’s latest accomplishment is an illustrated book of stories published by Mighty Book, Inc. and illustrated by Mike Motz. The stories included were previously published by Detroit Free Press/Yak’s Corner. It will be available soon and I’ll post an update when it hits the shelves!
In addition to the upcoming print collection, Knapp has begun offering his children’s stories through Mighty Book’s web site. His recent story, Stuttering Stan Takes a Stand, is available as an animated read-aloud/read-along that is a perfect way to introduce your kids to the Artie Knapp story universe. I am proud to say that I produced the audio and narration for the read-along and I think Mighty Book has done a wonderful job creating an interface for children.
It has also won some recent awards, including the Speech Woman’s Speech-Language Pathology Site of the Month Award for January 2011 and the Stop, Think, & Speak Award, which was a student nominated award from Penn State University.
You can also buy Stuttering Stan Takes a Stand from Amazon.
Mighty Book will soon publish more Knapp stories, including The Wasp and the Canary, The Hummingbird Who Chewed Bubblegum, and There’s a Crocodile in Our Pickle Jar, as fully illustrated Flash-animated books.
Oh boy have I found a great book! Poet Jim Carroll was finishing this thing up when he passed away in 2009. I have only read 73 pages so far but I recognize this as one of the greatest novels I have ever read. A New York painter reacts strongly to some paintings by Velazquez, stumbles into Central Park and winds up in the looney bin where he finds some time to think straight. Simple and magnificent. What a damn great writer! I think this will actually be the first novel I write a review of. Now back to reading.
The Art of Memory, a blog that specializes in minimal film, music, literature, poetry and art, has posted a series of images from a rare book called The Books of Anselm Kiefer, 1969-1990. Kiefer has worked on books since the sixties and incorporates many different materials in them, including photography, painting, sand, straw, cloth, and metal. The books are one of a kind artworks and are seldom seen.
There is always something fascinating about a book made by the hand of an artist. The problem with seeing books in museums is always the same though: you can only see two pages of any given book. But since most people have no experience with turning a book’s pages, you simply would not want to trust patrons with this responsibility.
One of Kiefer’s main instincts has always been to try to look directly at the horrific history of Germany in the twentieth century. These book pages contain some of his attempts to do so.