Hannah Jayanti is the director of the upcoming documentary about the classic children's book The Phantom Tollbooth. Since Jayanti and her team have been funding the film themselves for almost a year now, they decided to start a kickstarter to help them cover the cost of post productions. Amazingly, the project was funded in only a couple of days...
Barack Obama and daughters Sasha (right) and Malia in Kramerbooks in Washington DC. Photograph: Martin H Simon/EPA
Barack Obama picked up a copy of classic children's novel The Phantom Tollbooth on a trip to an independent Washington DC bookshop on Saturday.
Check out this sweet review of The Phantom Tollbooth from 8 year old Amelia - among other wonderful reviews of children's books. "I liked this book because it was funny and a little bit scary. I rate this book 15 out of 15 stars...." READ MORE HERE
We're thrilled to thank Creative Scotland for giving our stop-motion animator, Eleanor Stewart a grant for her animation work for the documentary.
Introducing our lovely animator Eleanor Stewart, who is creating a stop animation for the documentary. Working with book pages, she's helping us tell the story of Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer and their creation of The Phantom Tollbooth.
We're honored to add her to our crew page where you can check out a short bio. She's working with us from Glasgow, putting together beautiful props against a lanscape of words - and making sure our film stays on target with the fun and style of the beloved book we're celebrating.
Here's a teaser, and we'll be posting more production shots of the animation soon, so keep posted!
Interview with Norton Juster and David Hahn for The Independent:
"Some people are very easy to interview. Norton Juster is not one of them. He's delightful and articulate, but listening to the recording of our time together, it's striking how much more interesting his answers are than my questions."
"MoMA assembles works by artists and artist’s groups who make written and spoken communication intensely physical.
Just through the main gallery doors, a selection of Paul Elliman’s “Found Fonts” — silver hoop earrings, bits of cardboard and other everyday objects shaped like letters and punctuation marks — occupies a large set of glass cases, bringing to mind the word bazaar in “The Phantom Tollbooth."
Get it? It's a bee!
This is similar to the animation that we are working on for the documentary! So great to see people thinking alike and these are just beautiful!
Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer-Prize winning cartoonist best known for his long running Village Voice comics strip, screenwriter, playwright, acclaimed adult and children’s author, and a pioneering witness to the birth of the American comic book industry, will publish Kill My Mother, his first original graphic novel, in Fall 2013 with the Liveright publishing division of W. W. Norton. More here...