Maurice Sendak, 1928–2012

It seems like a lot of icons have been leaving us lately—Levon Helm a couple of weeks ago, followed by the equally terrible news last week of Adam Yauch's death. And this morning I see that now Maurice Sendak is gone.

The loss of MCA is more associated with my teenage and adult memories, and my shocked feelings with the fact that he was more or less a contemporary from my hometown. But some of my earliest memories involve Helm (my dad used to play a particular Band album a lot back then) and Sendak (for somewhat more obvious reasons). So, as happens more and more as one grows older, I feel like another piece of my childhood has disappeared.

But that's not quite right. Sendak (and Helm, and MCA) will always be with us, really. If I think about it, he's responsible for a couple of glorious firsts in my life already: My own first favorite book (In the Night Kitchen), and then, more recently, my first taste of that marvelous experience of reading a book I'd loved to my own child. With luck, someday his work will be part of a first moment with a grandchild someday, as well. 

And so my sadness at the author's passing should, really, be tempered by my gratitude at the joy he brought me and so many others when he was alive—and, even better, will keep on bringing to countless generations in the future. 

[Cover image courtesy of HarperCollins]

New Books: Arthur's Dream Boat

A quick post about a book I meant to write about back in March but that somehow got lost in the shuffle back then: Arthur's Dream Boat, another marvelous product of British author-illustrator Polly Dunbar's imagination. We've been fans ever since she came out with the quietly hilarious Penguin, which has long held a treasured place on the bookshelf of first our older son, and now our younger one (with an occasional revisit from the seven-year-old, even now).

This time, though, Dunbar is dealing in dreams, with all their surrealism infused with perfectly sensible internal logic. The title character, a young boy, wakes up one morning and tells his family about a remarkable dream he's just had, about a "pink-and-green boat with a striped mast." He adds detail after detail as he describes the boat to various members of his family, but no one pays much attention, not even to the fact that the very ship he's describing is growing on Arthur's head as he speaks!

Finally, Arthur shouts "Listen to me!"—and a huge wave breaks over the whole family, which finds itself suddenly all at sea in the boat with Arthur, sailing off into the setting sun. As is usually the case in Dunbar's work, the text is simple and spare, but the subtext could hardly be thicker or richer.

The idea for the book, the author explains in a note, came from a trick of visual perspective: Her view from a beach of a far-off sailboat seemingly perched atop the head of a young boy sitting near her on the shore. Illustrated in pencil and vivid watercolor, and pleasingly reminiscent of, without being imitative of, the best work of Maurice Sendak, Arthur's Dream Boat is an unusual, special picture book.

[Cover image courtesy of Candlewick Press]

New Books: Night Knight

It's long been a reliable trope of picture book to switch back and forth between the reality of a child's world and how that child's imagination is perceiving and transforming that reality. Where the Wild Things Are leaps to mind, of course, but the most gifted of our modern illustrators are also doing great things with the concept, from the stripped-down simplicity of Antonia Portis's Not a Stick to the fabulous controlled chaos of Suzy Lee's Shadow.

British illustrator Owen Davey's Night Knight, like Sendak's classic, leads off with reality but soon (in fact, sooner, in this case) lets imagination take over. A boy in pajamas with a colander on his head informs us that his nightly bedtime ritual is "a great adventure"—and then, on the next page, transforms into a boy knight, complete with chain mail and helmet. The boy is right: His trip down the hallway on a white horse takes him past an inconspicuous telephone table and umbrella stand and through a leafy forest; his bath explodes with colorful fish and crabs (and a giant bath plug); his "climb into bed" involves a tall tower and a ladder.

The author cleverly slips an element or two of the boy's reality--the mundane hallway furniture, the bath plug, the dog collar on the boy's pet three-headed dragon to whom he says good night—into each step of the process. But to concentrate too much on that would be to make too little of the book's most truly wondrous aspect: Davey's resplendent, vivacious illustrations of the imaginary stuff. This is an illustrator whose panels will make adults gasp. They'll also keep young children coming back to Night Knight night after, well, night.

[Cover image courtesy of Candlewick Press]

Security Blanket: Franklin's Big Dreams

It seems all our two-year-old's favorite books right now are about dreams. (It's really kind of fascinating.) Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen—always a favorite of mine back when I was around his age, too—has become a nightly event before bedtime, along with another similarly magical book that came out last year: Franklin's Big Dreams, by David Teague, with illustrations by Boris Kulikov.

It's about a young boy who, upon going to bed one night, is confronted with a construction crew (shades of the opening of Time Bandits, though with more purely benign results). He's understandably surprised, but the workmen ignore him and proceed with their work laying tracks; when they finish, a train roars through the room. After it passes, the crew disassembles the track and our hero is left to dream of trains. The next week, it happens again, this time with a runway and a plane, and the following week it's a canal and a cruise ship. Each time, Franklin notices familiar figures on the various vehicles that he can't quite make out, including one very familiar one. Finally he gleans what's happening and is able to use the mysterious occurrences to go somewhere he's always dreamed of going.

Teague's text and Kulikov's suitably dreamy art work together marvelously. The words are as simple and matter-of-fact as dreams usually are in tone (that feeling that even when nothing makes any sense, everything is also somehow normal), while the illustrations are warmly dramatic and mysterious, full of possibility. There's a magic to Franklin's Big Dreams that's spot-on for this subject matter, and as with Sendak's classic, Griffin clearly finds that invigorating, asking for it to be read to him over and over again before settling in for his own evening of dreamscapes.

[Cover image courtesy of Hyperion Books.]

New DVDs: Where the Wild Things Are

If I’m honest, I have to admit I was resisting the movie of Where the Wild Things Are, the DVD of which is really only new-ish by now. Maurice Sendak’s classic picture book holds an especially dear place in my heart, both from my own childhood (I think Sendak, like Mr. Rogers, will always be a touchstone for our entire generation) and as one of the first favorite books of my older son. I’d heard all the good things, including the author’s own enthusiastic endorsement of director Spike Jonze’s interpretation; I’d seen the stunning previews.

Actually, the previews may have been part of the problem, because they revealed the introduction of a backstory to Max’s escape. While I recognize the necessity of such things when you’re turning a 48-page picture book into a two-hour movie, it still worried me: I really didn’t want to see Sendak’s wondrous dreamscape reduced to a banal pop-psych explanation—a kid upset with his mom for having a boyfriend. So we never did make it out to see the movie when it was in theaters.

But when we realized last weekend that we’d put off seeing How to Train Your Dragon in theaters until it was no longer in any local ones (the closest apparently being 3,000 miles away in Anaheim, California, by that point), we had to manage Dash’s disappointment somehow. Remembering that I had finally allowed Where the Wild Things Are to reach the top of our Netflix queue, I grasped the opportunity it allowed us: to rescue our all too vaguely planned Friday movie night.

I soon discovered that my main concern was overblown. The focus of the film is firmly on Max, and what’s going on inside his head, throughout; while everyday family strife (an inconsiderate older sister; a beloved but busy mom played by the wonderful Catherine Keener; and, yes, the disliked boyfriend) does fuel his wild behavior, it's dealt with quickly, and we’re off to the land of the Wild Things in fairly short order. (I am not normally happy to see Mark Ruffalo reduced to a couple of minutes of screen time, but since he played the boyfriend, this one time, I was.)

There, he meets the remarkably dysfunctional Wild Things, who include the sad, sensitive, but violent Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini); Judah (Catherine O'Hara, brilliant as ever, even just as a voice), the self-described “downer” I'd describe more as a kvetcher; and Alexander (Paul Dano), the mopey one who complains (accurately) that no one listens to him. They are about to eat Max when he saves himself by claiming he is a king, and should be theirs. Desperate for leadership, for someone who can make sense of their world for them, they quickly agree enthusiastically, at which point the famous “wild rumpus” does indeed start. Of course, after auspicious beginnings, Max cannot possibly live up to the group’s expectations of him. Soon enough, they discover he’s not a king, and in fact is just like them: unsure of himself; frustrated and often bitterly angry that things never quite turn out as one hopes they will; disappointed in others and in himself.

We’re on pretty existential ground here, you’ll notice. Which is all very well for adults, for whom the movie works well, for the most part, as a poignant look at the frustrations of being a kid in a world that’s often disappointing and confusing. But this brings me to the other reason I think we never made it to the theater last year to see this: Who’s the movie for? Is Where the Wild Things Are a kids’ movie? I wasn’t sure back then, and now I see why: I don’t think it really is.

Mind you, there’s nothing objectionable, or really frightening, that makes it explicitly not a kids’ movie, either. It held Dash’s attention all the way through, and he enjoyed it well enough. But most of the heart of the film—the existential angst, if you will—went right over his head; he’s just too young, thankfully. When he experiences the feelings of frustration that this movie is about, he just gets angry, as Max and Carol do in the film. He doesn’t get wistful or sad, or start reflecting on the imperfections of existence.

So I'm pretty sure Where the Wild Things Are won’t be one of Dash’s go-to DVDs, one of the ones he watches over and over. Based on his initial reaction, I'd be surprised if he even wants to see it a second time. In its way, it’s like the opposite of a non-Pixar animated film: a film for adults that the kids will be happy to sit through. (I suppose you could say it’s about time we had one of those!)

One last thing: Visually, the film really is astonishing, and I’m sure that fact would play a far larger role in my writeup than it has, had we seen it in the theater. It still comes across at home (on a normal-size screen—we haven’t gone to the giant TV yet), but you simply appreciate the beauty; it doesn't blow you away, as I suspect it might on the big screen. So after all my hesitations and caveats, I kind of do wish, now, that we’d gone to the theater to see it!

[Photo Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures]