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Critics pretty much couldn't stand Adam Sandler's videogame vehicle, but who couldn't see that coming?

Adam Sandler and company square off against actual squares.

This quintet of posters came out today for "Pixels," the big-budget Hollywood feature based on a two-and-a-half-minute French animated short.

This quintet of posters came out today for "Pixels," the big-budget Hollywood feature based on a two-and-a-half-minute French animated short.

Zag Animation Studios is a new feature animation outfit that plans to release two family-oriented films per year—one fully-CGI and one live-action/CGI hybrid—beginning in 2017.

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House of Secrets, #2: Battle of the Beasts

by Chris Columbus & Ned Vizzini

Greg Call, illustrator

Balzer + Bray       3/25/2014

978-0-06-219249-3

Age 8 to 12    480 pages

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“Since the siblings’ last adventure, life in the Walker household is much improved—the family is rich and the Wind Witch is banished! But no Walker will be safe until she is found, and summoning her to San Francisco brings all the danger that comes with her and puts the Walkers in the crosshairs of a mysterious journey through Denver Kristoff’s books. As the Walkers travel from ancient Rome to World War II to Tibet, they’ll be tested in ways that cut deeper than before, by Denver Kristoff, the Wind Witch, and each other.”

Opening

“Brendan Walker knew the package would be there by eight a. m. It had to be.”

The Story

Eleanor, Brenda, and Cordelia Walker return, but not ready to take on more novel-dictated adventures. Dr. Walker (dad) is secretly—and quickly—tossing away all the fortune Eleanor arranged for the family at the end of book 1. Despite defeating the Wind Witch and safely returning home to finding mom and dad alive, none of the kids is faring well. Then Denver Kristoff appears as Dr. Walker and kidnaps Eleanor, taking her to the Bohemian Club in downtown San Francisco. He really wants Cordelia, but she ran off. Soon Brendan and Will arrive and finally Cordelia. Thus begins their adventures with the Wind Witch.

The kids land, house and all, outside the Roman Coliseum, once again in the middle of a Denver Kristoff novel. Brendan envies Emperor Occipus, ruler of Rome, and stays to live—and die—as a powerful, greedy Roman Emperor-in-training. Cordelia, Eleanor, and World War I pilot Will leave without Brendan. The trio deal with three Denver Kristoff novel changes. They face robotic World War II Nazis, odd Himalayan mountain top monastery monks with a wild frozen beast to defeat, the Romans once again, and then the Wind Witch once more.

Off all the battles, that with the Wind Witch proves to be the most difficult. She may lead the kids home, but what she says in the process will shock them, mostly Cordelia, as they try to understand and accept their fates. Book 3 is the final installment of House of Secrets.

Review

I looked forward to Battle of the Beasts and torn into once it arrived. I was immediately put-off by Brendan’s attitude and that carried into the Rome story. He behaves like a spoiled, whiny, rich kid. Leaving him in Rome suited me fine. After that, the story picked up and began to zoom just as book 1 had from almost the beginning.

Not as many of the secondary characters stood out as they had in the first book. World War I pilot Will returned to San Francisco with the kids but then became homeless and lost. I do not understand the reasoning behind this and find this storyline unnecessary, especially considering how quickly Cordelia found Will (though the kids had looked for a year prior to the start of book 2). Will easily returned to his old self.

I enjoyed the gladiator Felix. Bravely he leaves Rome with the kids. This new strapping man is not the most educated and misunderstands much of the new worlds he encounters with the Walkers and Will. I wish Felix would have stayed, as Will did, ready to begin the final installment. There are many humorous moments and statements, and twists and turns to enjoy.   and loads of miscalculations by the Wind Witch, who can’t decide if she will kill the kids or if a relational endearment she feels, sI enjoyed them all.

spoiler

The strangest occurrence is not Emperor Occipus, robotic Nazis, frost beasts, odd monks, or anything else that occurs, except for one. The Wind Witch’s declaration to Cordelia that they are closely related—won’t say in what way—is the strangest, yet most logical twist. Cordelia found an old diary belonging to the Wind Witch’s mother. In it, she read more than she told the others I think she already knew but hearing it, straight from your . . . witch’s mouth, made this final and real.

That one statement explains the Walkers and their canny abilities to survive. The Wind Witch suffers many miscalculations and fights her own emotions. She wants the Walker kids dead, but her aims fail. Is it possible the relationship that exists causes an endearment toward the kids, which does not allow her to follow through? How this will play out in the final book I cannot imagine, but it should be one of the biggest sensations in middle grade novels when it does. Time will tell.

end of spoiler

The writing is great as it is in book one. I did notice a slight change, imperceptible but there, after the first half of the story. This made me wonder how much of Battle of the Beasts Ned Vizzini completed before his premature death. Something felt off, yet examples or proof elude me. I had to put the book down for a while and read something else. I enjoyed Battle of the Beasts, though not as much as the first book.

Kids who enjoyed House of Secrets, book 1 will enjoy Battle of the Beasts. The action is constant, once it begins, and the adventures unusual and varied, yet play on what seem to be the same field. None of the novels is located far from the others, or so it felt. There is nothing that will give kids nightmares, but the action is imaginative and often intense. Boys will probably like the robotic Nazis best. This group reminded me of the white soldiers in Star Wars. At 480 pages, Battle of the Beasts is a long read, making this a great book for advanced readers and those with long attention spans. Reluctant readers should stay away.

HOUSE OF SECRETS #2: BATTLE OF THE BEASTS. Text copyright © 2014 by
Ned Vizzini and Chris Columbus dba Novel Approach, LLC. Illustrations copyright © 2014 by Greg Call. Published 2014 by Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY.

Buy House of Secrets #2: Battle of the Beasts at Amazon—B&N—iTunes—Audible—HarperCollins—your local bookstore.

EXCERPT BOOK 2 BATTLE OF THE BEASTS

video is for House of Secrets, #1

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This year marks the 20th anniversary of Chris Columbus’ comedy Mrs. Doubtfire. In the opening of the film, Robin Williams plays a voice-over artist who is recording lines for a cartoon that has already been made. (Yes, that’s out of order for a standard cartoon production, but for entertainment’s sake, we’ll let it slide).

The cartoon was supervised by legendary Warner Bros. director Chuck Jones, and animated by a small team of A-list animators that included legends like Bill Littlejohn and Tom Ray, and younger animators like Eric Goldberg. Coincidentally, Goldberg was also animating to the voice of Robin Williams for another animated project around the same period—the Genie in Aladdin.

In the film, we see barely a minute’s worth of animation of the two main characters—Pudgy Parakeet and Grunge the Cat. But in reality, Chuck Jones and his crew animated five minutes of material. This was never publicly shown until it was included several years afterward as a bonus feature on the Mrs. Doubtfire DVD.

While the cartoon doesn’t break any new ground in terms of execution or gags, and doesn’t even have a proper ending (it ends with a repeating cycle of Pudgy enjoying a cigarette for thirty seconds), the short has its moments. Williams voices all three characters, and it’s enjoyable listening to his vocal delivery. The animation, being much more fluid than Jones’ typical output of the period, is lively and filled with the energy of his classic cartoons from the mid-1950s.

The story doesn’t end there, though. Apparently, Chuck Jones wasn’t too keen on the backgrounds, feeling that they were overly detailed. So Jones had the cartoon completely reshot with new backgrounds that reflected a more subdued graphic style. As an added bonus, here’s the alternate version:

And just for good measure, here is a two-minute pencil test:

A man and a woman stole a first-edition copy of Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone at the “Art You Grew Up With Exhibition” in Oxfordshire, England. It is estimated that only 300 to 500 copies of this rare book exists; this particular stolen copy was worth over $9,500.

The Sun quoted Oxford book dealer Adrian Greenwood who loaned the book to the exhibit: “It was a first edition that was library stock. A dealer in London had one offered to them by someone who left a fake phone number. It is very unusual. Whoever stole it will have a terrible time selling it. We have photos of where it is restored so it’s easy to identify.”

Bloomsbury UK first acquired the Harry Potter series, publishing Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone in 1997. A year later, Scholastic brought Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone to the American market. (Via the Economic Times)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

My husband and I braved the crowds and caught the movie adaptation of Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief last night, and I’ve got some words of advice for writer Craig Titley and director Chris Columbus: Look over Angela Ackerman’s seven deadly sins of novel writing; they’re important for screenplays too.

Percy Jackson in the book

Now, I’m a big fan of Rick Riordan’s novel series, but I know that movies and books are too very different mediums, and each has different needs as far as storytelling goes. But that’s just technique. Books and movies both need plot points that flow logically from one to the next, dialog that sounds authentic and characters that are unique and real. In the case of The Lightning Thief, the book has those, the movie doesn’t.

It’s nothing new that Hollywood makes changes to books for the movie versions, and if it works for the storytelling on the screen and keeps the intention of the book’s story, I’m all for it. For example, Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones begins differently than the original novel (although, Alice Sebold’s brilliant original beginning is used in the movie, just at a different time) and this change works better for the movie. It keeps with the spirit of the novel but introduces the characters in a way that works better when the story is being told visually.

NOTE: Spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet and want to be surprised, come back to this post after you’ve seen it. Otherwise, read on…

Titley and Columbus made many changes for the Lightning Thief movie, but unfortunately, they don’t seem to be for the good of the story. Instead, and this is just my opinion — I, of course, wasn’t in the room when the Hollywood suits made these decisions — many of the changes seem to be for money. There are the obvious changes, like Percy using the reflective back of an iPod to battle Medusa instead of a glass orb and Annabeth dialing up Luke on her Apple computer for instructions on the flying shoes instead of using an iris rainbow message, which was the preferred form of long-distance communication in the book. But, I don’t think a glass orb and an iris rainbow would have yielded the studio much money in product placement fees.

8 Comments on Percy Jackson and the movie, last added: 2/16/2010