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Since I’ve been
writing about what can make a manuscript or book unsuccessful, I thought I
would shift gears for a bit and write about a book and franchise that really blows
children away. Disney is by far a great standard to hold any story to. I
recently visited a bookstore after seeing Brave,
Pixar’s latest, and was surprised by the amount of movie merchandise there was in
book form. Disney offers many different Brave
books including a Big Golden Book version of Brave, a Little Golden Book version, a Busy Book which includes a
board book and figurines, and a storybook including a small plastic movie-slide
projector. And those were just what I could find in stock! Brave merchandise was being gobbled up by families, and
understandably so, the movie was pretty popular.
Disney took on the
challenge of making an amazing movie filled with hilarity, tenderness, action,
and a backstory to Merida’s narrative, and transformed it into a different
medium, children’s books. It is a true challenge to translate an hour and a
half visually stunning movie into a 32-page picture book, the standard for
children’s literature. Disney is definitely up to the task though. Their books
each featured a different writer and illustrator, but the characters came
through. In most of the books, the backstory generously provided by the movie
was lost, but the writer jumped in anyway, telling the same story more quickly,
and letting the illustrator fill in the gaps. The illustrations in each book are
beautiful, not just stills left over from the movie, but new paintings that
aided the text. In the Little Golden Book version Merida and the rest of the
cast became more cartoony and stylized, working with the shorter text. In the
books featuring figurines, the illustrations were not as artfully produced,
showing the Pixar version of the character with a generic swirl design border
and solid background. These books also had much less text, but they were made
for children to play with the characters and make their own story, so it still
worked, and the bright solid backgrounds helped. The characters Pixar created
were so strong, that even when the books lacked any part of the movie’s storyline,
they were able to pull readers in. Merida’s family, her mother, father, the
triplets, and herself, are full of life and detail in all the versions of her
story, and that consistency is to be applauded.
Written by Ariel Rosen
