New Books: The High-Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate

Sometimes I find myself wondering what it must have been like to read a true classic—kids' or adults' variety—right as it first came out, when no one knew, for sure, that it was a classic yet. When parents and kids cracked the binding on the first copies of Where the Wild Things Are back in 1963, or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in 1998 (okay, okay, Philosopher's Stone in 1997 in the U.K., I know), was there a dawning awareness that this was something special, not just for that year's crop of books, but for a long, long time to come—forever, really?

I think there must have been, because I recently had that feeling myself upon reading The High-Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate, a new book by Scott Nash, with my elder son. It's a pirate book, with our protagonist, Blue Jay, a good pirate captain—but the twist is, all of the pirates (and indeed, most of the book's characters) are birds, and their ship, the Grosbeak, rides not the high seas, but the winds and currents of the air.

And Nash—whose background before he got into children's books was in design and branding, including the original Nickelodeon logo—is one of those authors with the talent and imagination to create his own expansive, fully thought-out fictional universe. So the birds of Blue Jay's crew are each different types of birds, each with characteristics and abilities appropriate to its species: the hulking Chuck-Will's-Widow, for example, is one of the burly heavies of the crew, while Junco, small but fierce and scrappy, makes herself useful as the ship's navigator, and so on.

As I mentioned, Blue Jay and his crew are "good" pirates, chaotic and antiauthoritarian to be sure (the empire of the distant, unseen Thrushians is referred to as an authority of which they're particularly unfond), but essentially Robin Hood types. Their adventure begins when the captain himself decides they should rescue a particularly colorful egg from a raccoon—Blue Jay is fond of bright eggs—which eventually hatches to reveal a gosling, Gabriel.

Most of the crew is not pleased—Gabriel consumes far more food than any of the other birds, and everyone knows he'll soon grow far too large even to remain on the ship—but Jay insists that he's good luck and must remain. Which sets into motion a sequence of events that include the "sinking" of the Grosbeak; its crew's falling into the hands of a gang of, well, bad pirates led by Jay's cousin, a crow named Teach; and our heroes' taking refuge in a village of lowly sparrows (the peasants of this bird society), whom they rally to rebel against their common crow oppressors, with help from a friendly neighbor mole.

The book's characters and its language—particularly the marvelously colorful dialogue, which is grounded in classic pirate-y saltiness yet also has a bird-specific panache of its own (e.g., Jay's favorite expletive: "Crayee!")—draw the reader in from the first page, and the story flows along at just the right pace to make the book something of a page-turner. Nash's own illustrations, which resemble woodcuts, do what the best chapter-book illustrations always accomplish, filling out the characters even further, and making readers feel we really know them. In the illustrations, Jay and Teach and Gabriel come fully to life, much as Chester Cricket, Tucker Mouse, and Harry Cat will always be those Garth Williams drawings.

But it's really the whole world Nash has created that makes The High-Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate irresistible from the get-go. You get the feeling throughout that you're in good hands with this author—that he's imagined and invented a whole world of bird pirates here, well beyond the frame of this particular book and story. (And while I don't know Nash's intentions, it certainly feels like the opening book in a series—for one thing, we need to find out more about those Thrushians!) It's that, more than anything, that gives Nash's book the imprimatur of an instant classic. We loved it, and hope for a sequel soon.

[Cover image courtesy of Candlewick Press]

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New Movies: The Pirates: Band of Misfits

By now we've come to expect a certain (high) level of quality from Aardman Animation—after all, these were the animated movies we started watching back in the 1990s, well before we had kids, when the company was dominating the animated short category at the Oscars. With rare exceptions, though, we've also come to expect Wallace and Gromit, and films like Chicken Run that defied that expectations, while perfectly well executed, always seemed to me to be missing that little spark of wacky Brit inspiration that puts the W&G oeuvre over the top. (Perhaps it's unfair to hold a studio to the standard of its very highest work, when that standard is rarely matched by anyone else either—but I do the same thing to Pixar, too. So I'm consistent!)

So when I saw the previews for The Pirates: Band of Misfits—a movie whose visual style was so clearly Aardman's that the credit was unnecessary—I wasn't so sure about it. My kids, however, had no such qualms—the preview had them at "Ghost ship—ooooooooh!"—and so we marched off to see it at the first opportunity. (We are not yet familiar with the book series by Gideon Defoe upon which the movie is based, though I'm thinking now we ought to become so shortly!)

The boys—veteran W&G fans themselves, I should add—could hardly have had a better time. And, grudgingly at first, neither could we, really: The story of the titular barely competent buccaneers and their captain—actually named the Pirate Captain and voiced by Hugh Grant in his best polite-English-discomfort mode—as they try to win the coveted Pirate of the Year trophy is silly, sure, but only in the manner of Aardman tradition. (After all, it's not like Wallace and Gromit's battle against the Were-Rabbit was exactly free of silliness.)

And, like the studio's previous work, all sorts of cleverness for parents is baked into the silly, including the inclusion of a young, corruptible Charles Darwin (voiced by David Tennant) and a supervillainous Queen Victoria (the always marvelous Imelda Staunton) as major characters. For those of us missing the Buster Keaton-ish silent expressiveness of Gromit, there's even a similarly put-upon monkey named Mister Bobo that's been trained by Darwin as a butler (see above re: silly), whose deadpan communications via beautifully scripted written cards are hysterically funny.

Do I worry that I will need to clear up someday with my sons that Queen Victoria did not, as far as we are aware, chair an evil secret society that enjoyed capturing and eating endangered species? (Or, for that matter, that Darwin was not, as far as we know, romantically infatuated with that queen?) Yes. But will that be worth the rolling giggles I saw both my sons helplessly indulging in as they watched the film, some of which my wife and I were indulging in ourselves? I'd have to say yes as well.

[Image courtesy of Aardman Animation/Paramount Pictures]