Graham Base’s 1986 alphabet book Animalia has been turned into an CG-animated TV series which is premiering today at midday on the Ten network in Australia, and simultaneously on BBC1 and CBBC in the UK, PBS Kids in the US and CBC in Canada. There are 40 half-hour epidodes, and you can see a trailer here. It’s made in Australia, mostly at Photon VFX.

Remember how we scoured each drawing for the small boy hidden in the page? He has been developed into a main character, Alex, who along with a friend, Zoe, get conjured into the magical world of Animalia. It sounds promising – I just hope I remember to watch it!

Here are some links that interested me:

• animalia.tv : Website and trailer
• Digital Media World: Jami Levesque, CG Supervisor, Animalia Productions, will present a behind-the-scenes look at the Making of Animalia on Thursday 15 November at 11.15am at the Australian Effects & Animation Festival 2007 in Sydney.
• Animation Magazine: precise
• Animalia Animated and The Series that (almost) never was: longer articles in The Age
• At youtube: Graham Base talking about the series in two sections: 1, 2; and a glimpse of the character maquettes .

Liz Wong, painter and a freelance illustrator, is making a graphic novel of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It should be fun to see how it progresses. I looked around to see if there have been other Austen graphic novels, and yes there are. Anne Timmons’ Northanger Abbey is included in Gothic Classics: Graphic Classics Volume 14. Here is a sample drawing. And a manga style version of P&P, illustrated by Tintin Pantoja is due to be published in about September 2007. If you take the Sequential Art link on her site you can see her version of the first proposal.

In addition to the decisions on how to break up the page, what to zero in on, how to convey action, and what interpretations are being made through image rather than word, I was interested – but not surprised! – to see the influence of Andrew Davies’ 1996 adaptation of P&P.

Can you hear the world settling into armchairs, sofas and beds, curling up to read Harry Potter?

While my foot is in a cast I’ve picked up an old knitting project, continuing knitting squares for a blanket. I’ve done about 6 new ones, and I’m up to about 42 squares.

I’ve watched a motley collection of DVDs:

Casino Royale – a complete waste of time, apart from the animation at the beginning which was great – loved the way it played with pattern and card imagery.
Happy Feet – good animation, but crap illogical storyline
Cars – hackneyed if worthy themes, but cool and inventive concepts and animation
Robots – hackneyed if worthy themes, but cool and inventive concepts and animation. Loved all the mechanical ideas.
HP: Goblet of Fire - enjoyable, but so much missing
Starskey and Hutch – thoroughly enjoyable crap – loved it, much to my surprise
Jindabyne – an uncomfortable but really good film; sustained creepiness; feminist, though that opinion might seem odd. My haunting image is of the hooked trout, about to become the mens’ trophy, powerless and taking its final slow gasps and flaps.

And motley reading? I’ve just finished re-reading all 6 of the Harry Potter books. And Bryce Courtney’s The Potato Factory which I enjoyed though it’s not great in any sense. And an old Donna Leon. Now I’m on to The Poisonwood Bible. But I expect to go back to Harry when I get my turn with the new one next week.

I’m deep into re-reading all the Harry Potters, enjoying them.

Not sure why I thought of this photo this morning. It was taken about 18 months ago at Middleton in South Australia, and I love the washed out summer look with the orange and blue.

I had the pleasure of having lunch with fellow Canberra blogger Ampersand Duck a couple of days ago. I really enjoyed it — thanks, AD!

That day I also picked up a copy of Northern Lights, the first in Philip Pullman‘s trilogy His Dark Materials. I’ve been intending to read it since blogging about the theatrical production which featured puppetry daemons designed by Michael Curry, and now by the news that it’s being made into a film, The Golden Compass, which has a release date at the end of this year. I’ve already dived in, and I’m finding the story engrossing.

I wonder how the daemons will be done in the film?

I saw Moomin Mugs, too, recently – nice as well.

Following on from yesterday’s post about the puppet-based theatre adaptation of Shaun Tan’s picture book, The Red Tree, today I discovered that Spare Parts Puppet Theatre’s adaptation of Shaun’s new book, The Arrival, had just finished it’s season in Perth. The production, which The Australian gives a rave review, uses digital animation, puppetry and acting, and is visual theatre:

‘The absence of words not only makes the story perfect for puppetry but emphasizes the isolation that is experienced by many people arriving in a new place.’

Although The Arrival book doesn’t come out until October, there is an online preview, in which you can see some of the pages, and read Shaun’s detailed description. It looks wonderful – a 128 page book of illustrations without words, a
silent graphic novel, arranged and presented rather like a photo album, which can be interpreted rather like a silent film. ‘Through a series of connecting images, it tells the story of an anonymous migrant leaving some unfortunate
circumstances in his home country, crossing an ocean to a strange new city, and learning how to live here.’

The Lost Thing, another Tan book that was made into puppet theatre by Jigsaw Theatre Company here in Canberra a few years ago, and for which I made puppets, has been touring since, and is due to have a season in Melbourne this November at the Arts Centre.

I also came across some photos at Flickr of a Shaun Tan mural at the Subiaco Library in Perth.

Update:
Talking Squid’s review by Russell B. Farr

It makes me think of Rohinson Mistry’s novel, A Fine Balance, because the story starts with a vivid image of one of the protagonists buying a comb from a combseller on a train in India, and because hair is a recurrent theme. The book totally
mesmerized me when I read it in January – it’s the finest book I’ve read in a long time – and when I picked it up and paged through the first pages again the other day I realized that inaddition to everything else, it’s a perfect circle. I knew it ended
where it began, but everything at the begining resonates once you have read the whole.

I also recently came across an interesting Adidas advertizing campaign that was run in Berlin. The gist of it was to put up big more-or-less blank billboards, wait till they were covered in graffiti, and then paste over the top an outline of sneakers with cut-outs that showcased parts of the graffiti as the design on the shoe. If you want to trace the whole campaign, start here.

But both ads remind me of the ‘witchcraft’ of advertising in Peter Carey‘s Bliss.