Island Girls and Faithful Elephants

I spent a gray and dreary morning doing laundry. I'd stripped the sheets and pillowcases off my bed on Saturday, so I had a bit more to do than usual. I spent the morning chatting with Dad, Uncle Ken, and Dolores and reading Sweet Revenge, which I bought on New Year's Eve and never got around to looking at. After the laundry was done, I went home, put everything away, had a quick lunch of Cranberry-Orange Muffins, celery, and peanut butter, and headed for the Haddon Township Library.

It may have been a mistake to go later in the day. For one thing, it started raining lightly on my way to Westmont. It wasn't anything like yesterday, though, and I was lucky enough to get inside before I could get really wet. Also unlike yesterday, it didn't last. It was spitting a little bit around 4, but otherwise has just been windy.

The library was busy when I came in around 2. The kids were getting out of the many schools in the area, and there were plenty of DVDs to put away and books to return. I took out a fair share myself - more Holmes on the Range, a paperback cooking mystery, the Ballroom Dancing DVD I took out last week that I never had the time to look at, and four fiction DVDs - Barbie as the Island Princess, the 2008 computer animated Horton Hears A Who!, the recent Disney version of the Broadway musical Once Upon a Mattress, and the Edward Norton The Incredible Hulk (another one I took out but never got to watch).

I needed a few things at Super Fresh on my way home. The big one was whole wheat flour. I was completely out. Their prices aren't great, but I really wanted it. Also grabbed chicken cutlets and skinless, boneless chicken thighs on sale (the Acme doesn't carry either), eggs, and light bulbs.

Though the rain had slowed to spitting by 4:30, it was cold, windy, and still not a day to be lingering outside. I spent the rest of the evening at home, baking Cranberry-Pear Muffins (using the last of the Cranberry-Pear Butter from the farm market that's been around forever), crocheting, and watching DVDs.

Island Princess falls somewhere in the middle of the Barbie pack. It's more engaging than the earlier Rapunzel or the too-cutesy Diamond Castle, but still not quite as good, either in animation or writing, as the more recent stories. Like Mermaid Tale, it's an original story - a young girl, shipwrecked on a tropical island, grows up with the animals and can speak their language. She's discovered by a young prince who longs for the outdoor adventures she finds everyday, but he's being forced to marry a sweet but definitely indoor-type noblewoman.

There's a lot of overlap here with Rapunzel. The villainess is almost the same type, a scheming mother (or mother-figure) who wants the kingdom because she can't forgive past unhappiness. Once again, the girl is searching for her family with animals who love her but don't quite understand why she's leaving her comfort zone. In this case, it's the elephant, the shy Tiki, who steals the show. She's a real charmer. While not terribly memorable, the music is a mild step-up from some of the more treacly Barbie songs.

Horton Hears a Who! also involved a very faithful animated elephant from the jungle. This time, we move to an adaptation, of one of Dr. Seuss' most famous stories. Horton is a sweet pachyderm who spends his days teaching the kids in the Jungle of Nool about bugs. He discovers a strange speck on a clovernand learns that this speck contains a whole universe. The residents of Whoville go about their daily business, not realizing that their world is barely bigger than a pinprick. Only the Mayor can hear Horton, and thanks to his large ears, only Horton can hear the Mayor. Everyone around them thinks they have screws loose, including a very nasty kangaroo who seems to be the head of the jungle and the stern Whoville City Council, who are determined to let the good times roll, despite warnings that their world is about to be shaken down to its core.

I was quite impressed with this sweet, good-natured tale. Unlike the previous live-action Seuss adaptations, the story remained reasonably faithful to the book. Animation is a far better medium for Seuss-ian fables than live-action film, and it shows here, from brilliant colors of the Jungle of Nool to the very Seuss design of Whoville. My only mild complaints are a few out-of-place pop-culture references (including an odd but brief switch to 2-D Anime for a Horton dream sequence) and revised characters (JoJo now looks like he belongs in Coraline, not a Dr. Seuss story). And what was with that weird ending with everyone singing REO Speedwagon's "Can't Fight This Feeling Anymore"?