#winds in the willows

[daveythedaywalker]

The gays

[gio-dude]

MERRILY MERRILY ON OUR WAY TO -

[everydaylouie]

Stargazy Pie

[myjetpack]

My cartoon for this week’s Guardian Books.

[enchantedbook]

From Kenneth Grahame's 'The Wind in the Willows' illustrated by Inga Moore.

[petermorwood]

A day or so ago, @dduane reblogged a long post - a Canadian magazine article from 1966 - about the Americanisation of Winnie the Pooh.

It's an Impressive Tirade in which the writer (Sheila H. Kieran) says what she thinks about letting Walt Disney have a free hand with a foreign Children's Classic.

There's mention of the previous Adaptation Endeavour, "Mary Poppins" (1964) but it's very brief, perhaps with an eye to limited column space - or maybe because All Was Said Already in a previous review.

There is, however, rather a lot about the English characters being given American accents, and about the inclusion of a new character, an American gopher (which, the article suggests, looked vague enough to the Kieran children - its target audience - that it might as well have been a mole or a beaver).

*****

And that reminded me of another bit of American Animalisation done by Disney, in the 1949 short "The Wind and the Willows" - though in this instance it's visual since the voices are, for the most part, suitably British.

They include Basil Rathbone as narrator, and a horse who sounds like George Formby. In some scenes the horse actually looks like Formby, so this voice may not be entirely accidental.

Badger, however, sounds like a Scotsman - the worst kind of stage Scotsman at that - rather than how I used to "hear" him as a C. Aubrey Smith-voiced crusty retired colonel.

That, however, is just personal preference.

However, Disney's Badger is not a proper British (more correctly, European) badger, Meles meles. Here's one, which though not the most amiable of beasts in reality, still manages to look fairly affable ("I say, old chap, whatever are you looking at?")

Instead he's a North American badger, Taxidea taxus, which not only has a less affable expression ("Hey, bud, you. Yeah, you. You lookin' at me? You lookin' at ME?") but, more important, different stripes.

Here's Disney's version alongside mine. The correction took about five minutes of pixel-tweaking.

Disney's animators could have got it right from the outset just as easily, because I'm pretty sure the reference library which provided costume info for Rat's tweed Norfolk jacket and britches included picture-books of natural history.

Come to that, any "The Wind in the Willows" after the unillustrated first edition would have been enough, and there must have been at least one copy lying around for story adaptation and scene-description purposes.

The first illustrated edition came out in the UK in 1931, and its artist was, at author Kenneth Graham's request, the very same E.H. Shepard who had illustrated the Pooh books just a few years previously...

...while this Arthur Rackham colour plate is from an edition published in 1940 in New York.

So those books wouldn't have been impossible for Disney to get.

The problem, however, is that if a word ("badger", for instance) is well known to mean one thing here, it may be Too Much Trouble to find out if the same word means something else there, with the result that finding out can sometimes come as rather a surprise.

Check the UK / US meaning of "suspenders" to see what I mean... ;->

[anexperimentallife]

[strawberri-draws]

beach dayyy

[forever-blondie]

Debbie Harry, 1968

[conceptualromance]

Chris Dunn

'Fetching Supper'

20 x 30cm, Watercolour,

2023

[halloweentrickortreat]

[daveythedaywalker]

Ok for the people who followed me for my "Winds in the Willows" content, I just wanted to give updates! Chapter 1 has been written, and I'm starting chapter 2 soon.

2 things just kinda got in the way. The biggest being my mental health taking a toll. I'm doing kinda better now, though. Also as everyone probably noticed I took a huge nose dive into "The Journey to the West " fandom. Crazy it started cause I randomly woke up suddenly wanting to read the book. It be that way sometimes, though.

Anyway, I plan to post more concept art soon and to post the first chapters this December on Webtoon, Tapas, here on Tumblr, and more websites.

I'll be making a blog specifically for "Winds in the Willows" stuff specifically, so keep an eye out for a new pinned post with links.

[stillgotscars]

wait who wants to talk about the connection between “life was a willow and it bent right to your wind” and “i’m the wind in our free-flowing sails” and “wise men once said, ‘wild winds are death to the candle’”

[nonsensology]

This was supposed to just be a rough sketch, but then I started getting really invested in it.

I hadn't initially intended to include so many picture book characters, but the nostalgia was overwhelming. Does anyone remember the animated short films produced by Weston Woods? My local library used to have a bunch of them on the Scholastic VHS tapes from the late 90s. (I know some shorts were released on the Children's Circle VHS tapes back in the 80s (🎶 Come on along! Come on along! Join the caravan!), and some were packaged in Sammy's Story Shop in 2008.)

Characters:

Max, from Where the Wild Things Are, written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak

Peter, from The Snowy Day, written and illustrated by Ezra Jack Keats

Brother Bear and Sister Bear, from The Berenstain Bears series, written and illustrated by Stan and Jan Berenstain

Pooh and Piglet, from the Winnie-the-Pooh books, by A. A. Milne, illustrated by E. H. Shepard

Owen, from Owen, written and illustrated by Kevin Henkes.

Mouse, from If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, by Laura Joffe Numeroff, illustrated by Felicia Bond

Louis, from The Trumpet of the Swan, by E. B. White

Mr. Toad, from The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, based on the illustrations by E. H. Shepard

Mr. Tumnus, from The Chronicles of Narnia series, by C. S. Lewis

Pippi and Mr. Nilsson, from the Pippi Longstocking books, by Astrid Lindgren

Willy Wonka, from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl, based on the illustrations by Quentin Blake

Matilda, from Matilda, by Roald Dahl, based on the illustrations by Quentin Blake (with an homage to the Mara Wilson movie)

Peter Pan and Tinker Bell, from Peter Pan, by J. M. Barrie

Merlin and Archimedes, from The Sword in the Stone, by T. H. White, based on the illustrations by Dennis Nolan

Pinocchio, from Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi, based on the illustrations by Enrico Mazzanti

Alice, White Rabbit, and Cheshire Cat, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, illustrated by John Tenniel

Rupert Bear, from the Rupert stories, created by Mary Tourtel and continued by Alfred Bestall, John Harrold, Stuart Trotter, and others.

Arthur Read, from the Arthur series, written and illustrated by Marc Brown

Tin Woodman and Scarecrow, from the Land of Oz series, by L. Frank Baum, based on the illustrations by W. W. Denslow and John R. Neill

The Cat in the Hat, from The Cat in the Hat, written and illustrated by Dr. Seuss

a frog on a flying lily pad, from Tuesday, written and illustrated by David Wiesner

Charlotte, from Charlotte's Web, by E. B. White

[everydaylouie]

windy

[enchantedbook]

'The Wind in the Willows' by Kenneth Grahame, illustration by Beverley Gooding.

kenneth grahame