Robert Greenberger

The 2011 Winnie the Pooh animated movie is fairly strong based on the sheer amount of wordplay, visual gags, and slapstick crammed into its mere 63 minutes. With eight credited writers, I get the feeling it was like a sitcom writers' room where everyone was brainstorming jokes and situations both cheap and clever. It helps that this is another Pooh film that actually draws on the original A. A. Milne source material, loosely adapting three different chapters (see below) wherein Eeyore's show more loses his tail, a busy Backson may have made off with Christopher Robin, and a pit dug to capture the beast captures Pooh instead. (In a bit of Disney recycling, the Backson chapter was also the very loose starting point for a previous film, Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin.) My only disappointment with the film is that the songs are simply good, not nearly as catchy as the stuff written by the Sherman Brothers or Carly Simon.

This adaptation is a graphic novel that makes use of frames from the original movie for illustrations. A veritable army of creators led by Robert Greenberger clipped and pasted the art into a six-panel grid and copied the movie script word-for-word directly into the word balloons. It is a faithful recreation of the movie on paper, but actually took my daughter and me two or three times longer to read than it did for us to watch the movie.

As we read, we found scenes in the movie that lasted a few seconds elongate to minutes as each frame of action gets the exact same size panel. So, for instance, Pooh taking a couple steps can last a whole page, doffing his cap is another full page -- all as if the film is unrolling in slow motion. And since most of the film's visual gags are included, there are a lot of nearly wordless pages, but they still take a while to "read" as you decipher the pantomime from stills that were designed to have dozens of images between them to help any particular nanosecond make sense.

It is interesting though to see an adaptation that actually does a full adaptation of a film's musical sequences. Usually in this sort of thing songs are skipped entirely or are referenced with just a line or two, often pretending that the character is just saying the lines instead of breaking into song and dance. But here we get the full lyrics of every song (except, curiously, Zooy Deschanel's closing credits original song) and the full choreography. But unlike the movie I couldn't absorb the music and visuals simultaneously, so there was a bit of a dissonance as I read the words and then looked at the pictures.

So I'm going to chalk this up as an interesting failure. It's not a pleasant reading experience, but it is still at least a novel experience. And the script from the movie is good regardless of how much the pacing is thrown off in this format.

FOR REFERENCE:

Cinestory Credits:
Adaptation, Design, Lettering, Layout and Editing:
Robert Greenberger, Ester Salguero, Eduardo Alpuente, Alberto Garrido, Heidi Roux, Aaron Sparrow, Carolynn Prior, Robert Simpson, Amy Weingartner, Stephanie Alouche.

Original Film Credits:
Directed by Stephen J. Anderson (as Stephen Anderson) and Don Hall.
Story by Stephen J. Anderson (as Stephen Anderson), Clio Chiang, Don Dougherty, Don Hall, Kendelle Hoyer, Brian Kesinger, Nicole Mitchell, and Jeremy Spears.
Based on the "Winnie the Pooh" works by A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard.
Original songs by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez. "Winnie the Pooh" and "The Wonderful Thing about Tiggers" written by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman. "So Long" written and performed by Zooey Deschanel

Source material:
• Winnie-the-Pooh Chapter Four: In Which Eeyore Loses a Tail and Pooh Finds One
• Winnie-the-Pooh Chapter Five: In Which Piglet Meets a Heffalump
• The House at Pooh Corner Chapter Five: In Which Rabbit Has a Busy Day, and We Learn What Christopher Robin Does in the Mornings

(My Pooh Project: I love Winnie the Pooh, and so does my wife. Having a daughter gave us a chance to indoctrinate her into the cult by buying and reading her every Pooh book we came across. How many is that? I’m going to count them this year by reading and reviewing one every day and seeing which month I finally run out. Track my progress here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/23954351-rod-brown?ref=nav_mybooks&she... ) show less

This book collects what seems to be most, and perhaps all, of the cover art to its date (2013) for the various Dynamite comics based on the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The page size is large, about twice that of a US comic book, and all of the reproductions are in full color on glossy paper. There is a text introduction discussing the history of depictions of the Martian princess Dejah Thoris and her world, with some thoroughness and detail. But for most of the book, the only text is the show more identification of the artists and original publication info for each image.

As a comics publisher, Dynamite has the annoying practice of producing comics with alternate cover art, presumably in an effort to get fans to buy multiple copies of single issues. In this book, though, they do collect all of the alternates along with the basic cover art, and they include "risque" covers (originally available as retailer premiums), which are often variants of other cover art in which the princess is en déshabillé. However, the character (as originally delineated by Burroughs) wears so little clothing in the first place that such a difference often amounts to little more than whether her nipples are golden or flesh colored!

The quality of the art is not uniform, but the good stuff is awesome, and hardly any are miserable. Artists whose work I particularly favor include Joe Jusko, Paul Renaud, Wagner Reis, Lucio Parillo, and Jay Anacleto.

This book really is beautifully produced, and it's worth more to me than all of the original Dynamite comics combined, with its generous size and text-free presentation. The title is accurate: although there are some well-imagined tharks, Martian apes, and banths, and John Carter appears occasionally, the clear focus throughout is on the paragon of Barsoomian pulchritude herself. show less

I was surprised at how well this collaboratively written novel worked. The idea of the Ariantu and Sullurh was interesting, and it was a very pleasant departure from the standard "this planet was MADE, Jim!" story.

It's interesting how some of the Star Trek Novel writers believe that they have this great idea, and it sorta winds up that it's all the same great idea over and over. Take an alien race, and give them 20th Century equivalent technology and 20th Century problems and then have the Enterprise (and in this case the Romulans led by Sela, supposed daughter of Tasha Yar) make a first contact with the aliens, then have Picard and the Enterprise feel bad for them, but try their hardest not to judge show more the poor young race.

Yes, I get it, the alien race is us (or at least the 20th Century us). But, if you can get by the preaching, it's not a bad book. (And for the record, way back when those writing the Star Trek TV shows predicted that we'd already have had a World War Three by now. And while Earth's had our share of some humdinger wars, we've not yet had any that we've though big enough to call another World War.)

Truthfully, since the main story has been done before, both on the TV shows and other novels, I focused on the funny and interesting subplot concerning Ro Laren (she's still on the Enterprise in this story). The author seemed to have a good handle on the Ro character and all the subtlies that Michelle Forbes managed to portray on the TV show were present, as well as the humor being a good counterpoint to the highly stressful nature of the main plot. All in all a solid three stars Star Trek Novel. show less