The Wind In The
The Wind In The Willows is really amazingly beautiful.
Why do I like things - stories, comic strips - about talking animals? And I do not mean badly done ones, where the animals are simply people with bunny suits on, or even quite the ones where the talking of the animals purports to be a translation of the way that they already talk to each other. I mean that strange mean, like the one struck by "The Wind in the Willows", where the characters are clearly perfectly human, and yet could be nothing other than the animals they are.
Talking animals are character distilled, character in its pure form. They have a certain purity about them, their natures are not distracted by the personal history, the social and psychological background that would be necessarily implicit in being human.
What do you think of Watership Down?
June 2nd, 2002 at 11:15 pmI really liked it. I didn’t get the same sort of feeling from it as I did from "The Wind In The Willows" - but it was a different sort of story. The characters felt at the same time more and less human. Perhaps like reading about the heroes of a particularly distant culture.
June 2nd, 2002 at 11:18 pmPlug for The Plague Dogs book and movie done by the same author (book) and filmmakers (movie) as Watership Down.
June 2nd, 2002 at 11:27 pm