Thursday 7 February 2019

Ciné Book Club... And... Action!

We've embarked on a new adventure, in the comfort of our own home, over the last little while. Who knows how long it will last, but for the moment the participants are keen and hungry for more.
We have set up our own Ciné Book Club, which means that we read books and then watch the movie/cartoon adaptation and we compare.
We started off with two albums of Tintin, as the 7-year-old is obsessed with Captain Haddock (saying she can see something of herself in the hot-tempered, linguistically inventive old sea-farer would be perhaps a bit unfair; perhaps not). We read together (me doing the reading) and separately (the 7yo reading the pictures, the 10yo reading everything) The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure, both in French, as Ciné Book Club is a secret, cunning ploy to inject more French into our daily lives.
After watching the now-classic cartoons (in French, then), we had a chat about what was the same and what was different. The first episode was deemed very faithful to the original, with no glaring omissions. Red Rackham's Treasure, however, had skipped some apparently capital bits, in particular the scene where the fake descendants of the infamous pirate crowd Captain Haddock's doorstep and the scene ends in glorious slapstick mayhem involving the Thom(p)sons and a lot of swearing. Greatly missed by our young club members!
Another difference, in both cartoons, was that Snowy didn't speak! But we agreed that we could understand what the dog 'said' thanks to his movements and various doggy sounds.
We then talked about voices and music, and what they added, if anything. They loved the series' opening credits, although the 10yo found the images moving inside the comic panels a bit dizzying. It didn't help that they showed Tintin jumping off a high-speed train… But they enjoyed recognising bits from other books (they have read a few at this stage) and were keen to find out more about what wasn't familiar.

I ordered The Crab With the Golden Claws (in French) from the library straight away.
With this inspiration in stock, we moved on to the 'making' stage of our club (let's be honest, I'm making this up as we go along; there's no such things as actual 'stages'!). I had a vague idea that I would ask them to imagine their own treasure to place in Rackham's chest. They could draw it or make a list. Once the pencils were out, however, each went their own separate but parallel ways. We ended up with one treasure chest, a number of Tintins, Haddocks and Snowys, on their own or in situ, drawn from the books or from memory.
The short of it is, we had a ball! We'll see what we give the Ciné Book Club treatment to next. Any suggestions?

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