Into the Woods

Spent a rainy weekend watching kids' tapes with Mona's grandparents.

Not just any kid tapes, though. Friday before we left town, the big Scholastic Book Club order arrived at M's school. And, as we had signed up for the monthly Weston Woods delivery of DVDs and CDs, we got some toys to take on the plane with us.

Like a read-along with CD of Dav Pilkey's The Paperboy.

And an hour-long DVD of childrens' stories and songs from Chicka Chicka Boom Boom to Pete Seeger's The Foolish Frog.

I knew nothing from Weston Woods till I sat down with Mona in a dark room this weekend and began watching one illustrated classic after another, some dating from the 1960s and just as fresh now as their new siblings. the presentations were fresh and funny, the illustrations lovely, and the vocal talents ranged from Crystal Talifiero to Cyndi Lauper to Randy Travis.

The more I found out about Weston Woods and its founder, Mort Schindel, the more interested I was. He built the studio, alongside his own home, from scratch in Weston, Connecticut in 1953. His ideas about teaching children to read through animation were initially scoffed at, but he gradually broke new ground, pioneering film techniques especially suited to recording illustrations, and working with some of the century's greatest children's authors, from Ezra Jack Keats and Maurice Sendak to Simms Taback and Robert McCloskey.

Schindel met cartoonist and director Gene Deitch when Deitch was at CBS as creative director of the "Tom Terrific" black and white minimalist cartoon episodes shown on Captain Kangaroo television series. Tom and his wonderdog Manfred were drawn simply, with accordion accompaniment and one guy doing all the voices. When Deitch's brainchild was dropped in 1958, he went to Prague to direct animation for a studio there. In 1959, while still in Prague, he was hired by Schindel at Weston Woods to work with Czech animators in the state-run Kratky studio. Deitch fell in love with and married the production manager at Kratky, Zdenka Najmanová. In the 1960s and 1970s, many of Weston Woods's greatest creations bear distinct Czech visual influences such as decorative tulips, borders, playful farm themes, and traditional peasants. These can be seen in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1973) and even in such relentlessly American productions as Pete Seeger's The Foolish Frog.

Morton Schindel sold Weston Woods Films to Scholastic Incorporated in 1996 to devote his time to the non-profit Weston Woods Institute, founded in 1983 to promote innovative cultural education for children. According to the Academic Film Archive of North America, "As of this writing, 16mm films are still being sold from the Scholastic Weston Woods catalogue. Gene Deitch and Zdenka Deitchova continue to work, play, and love, in Prague."

[Graphic from Click Clack Moo by Doreen Cronin, illustration by Betsy Lewin]

categories: film home life literature miscellany teaching