Animator Michael Sporn remembers the problem with Abel’s Island: “There were maybe 50 little black-and-white sketches in the book,” he says, “but we had to make the film feel like William Steig. So we got all of his books and tried to figure out how he would draw a winter scene, and how he would draw summer.” Sporn was making a half-hour animated movie from Steig’s story about a shipwrecked mouse, and he needed the books as references for the things Steig wrote about but didn’t illustrate.
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“You try to be true to the spirit of the book,” Wales says, “but you need to do some adding and subtracting of details to make it work for motion.” In Ben’s Dream, about a boy who dreams he’s traveling around the world, he added a segment at the end that identifies the places he goes, which go unnamed in the book. “I wanted to give the movie additional sense and make it a little more of a geography lesson.”
Wales made his first animated children’s film nine years ago. His company, Rainbow Productions, had been making corporate films for eight years, and he wanted to start doing something a little more creative. So he started a second company, Made-to-Order Library Productions, with the idea of making children’s films.
Sometimes duplicating the book’s style exactly is impossible. Despite all his research, Sporn added to Abel’s Island at least one element he says Steig would never use: red streaks in the sky during a fight scene that were used for dramatic tension. For The Hunting of the Snark–based on the Lewis Carroll poem, which had been illustrated many times by many people–he decided to design original animation.
Part of the problem is that there’s not much of a market for children’s films that don’t fit into TV’s time slots. Sporn’s The Hunting of the Snark, for instance, is 19 minutes long–“a completely unsalable length.” To make it more marketable, he’s also made a two-minute short from Jabberwocky and a six-minute documentary on Lewis Carroll, and hopes to sell the three as a half-hour package.
