The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival season is in full swing! A few weeks ago we packed the house in San Francisco and Oakland for screenings, and it was a great time. Thanks to Newbery-winning authors Katherine Applegate (The One and Only Ivan), who co-hosted the San Francisco screening with me, and Jenni Holm (Our Only May Amelia, Penny From Heaven, Turtle in Paradise) who co-hosted the Oakland screening with me. Not only were both of them game for our goofy singing-and-dancing shtick at the beginning, but both also brought their own sparkling wit to the proceedings. I’m lucky to have such generous and talented co-conspirators for this film festival!

This upcoming weekend we’ll be doing the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival in Portland (with co-host Amber Keyser) and Tacoma (with a mystery co-host!). Details in the events sidebar. I’m looking forward to it!

To whet your appetite, I’ll be featuring 90-Second Newberys I’ve received from Tacoma and Portland all week. Let’s start today with these two completely different versions of Wanda Gag’s bizarre 1929 Newbery Honor Book, Millions of Cats. Why bizarre? Perhaps because the climax of the book involves “hundreds and thousands and millions and billions and trillions of cats” literally murdering each other in order to determine who is the “prettiest.” It is by far the bloodiest Newbery book with the highest body count (top “trillions”). Even better, it’s a picture book aimed at 4-year-olds! Everyone wins?

So check out Elliott and Jen’s (of Tacoma) version of Millions of Cats above. It’s a crowd-pleaser, from the old-tymey-film style in which they did it, to the hilarious performances of the old man and the old woman, to the tons of kids dressed as actual cats. And it really underscores the bloody absurdity of the story. Good Lord, how did this nightmare ever get published?! Who reads this to their children?

Here’s another entry from Tacoma, by the Tacoma Public Library Action Faction (Young Adult Volunteer Group) and the Tacoma Public Library Digital Media StoryLab users. It also puts its finger squarely on what makes this children’s story so disturbing—and even better, does it in Minecraft:

It’s especially appropriate to use Minecraft to adapt a book like this, because how else are you going to wrangle that many cats for your movie, especially when they’re called upon to accomplish large-scale shenanigans like drinking up a pond or devouring the countryside? Funny script too: “I know how to solve this. We’ll have a kitty thunderdome!” And when the cat-beast rose up with a sword, shouting “there can be only one” and going on a murderous rampage—I love it! And all the guts out in the field in the end, blech! And that final hideous laugh from the demon cat, as everything turns red, and the camera goes cockeyed—a nice horror-movie final touch, which really brings the sadism of this “children’s” story home.

I’m looking forward to screening these movies, and more, at the Portland and Tacoma screenings this weekend! Check out the events sidebar for more details, and to make your free reservation for the Portland show.

San Francisco and Oakland! Our 90-Second Newbery Film Festival screenings this Saturday, 2/8 are featured in articles in the San Francisco Chronicle (read here) and Inside Bay Area (read here). Check out my events page for details and reservations.

As the San Francisco and Oakland screenings of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival draw near, I thought I’d highlight some excellent movies I’ve received from the Bay Area!

The first batch is from St. Andrews Episcopal School in Saratoga, California. Check out their adaptation of Megan Whalen Turner’s 1997 Honor Book The Thief, above. Hilarious and clever! The kid who played the Magus in particular was so flamboyantly funny. “And this is your majestic steed!” and “You’re holding the wrong end of the sword” made me crack up, as well as every time I saw that little riding mower. Good beards. Good delivery of the idol joke. Good everything! (And that deliciously ridiculous freeze-frame at the end!)

I received six great movies in all from St. Andrews Episcopal School, in a variety of styles—a version of House of the Scorpion done in Minecraft, another version of House of the Scorpion done as an surreal one-man show, a version of Breaking Stalin’s Nose that is replete with lovely Russian accents, and a very good Graveyard Book. You can watch them all here.

We also received, from Isabella of Foster City (with help from her friend Briana of Round Rock, TX) this cool puppet show of Janet Taylor Lisle’s 1990 Honor Book Afternoon of the Elves:

A confession: I haven’t yet read Afternoon of the Elves, but this adaptation makes me want to. That’s a sign of a good movie! (Seriously, what was all that stuff about the mother going to the insane asylum, and the Ferris wheel that is a water wheel for elves, and making an elf village in the garage . . . I’m very intrigued.)

Thanks, everyone in the Bay Area, for your great movies this year! (And I’m not forgetting about Bennett of San Mateo’s great Sign of the Beaver, either!)

See you on Saturday for the screenings at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library (make your free reservations here), and the Rockridge branch of the Oakland Public Library! Complete info on my events page.

The third annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival premiered on Saturday, February 1! I thought the snowstorm would keep the audience away, but we filled up Adventure Stage Chicago and it was a great time.

I really lucked out with my co-host this year, the dryly witty Keir Graff, author of The Other Felix and an editor at Booklist Online. Here we are in our opening bit, in which Keir and I exchange tall tales about this mythical “John Newbery,” from “he ate every book he ever read” to “he once fashioned a pretty hat out of J.K. Rowling’s skull.” And then we break into song! YES THAT IS MY BEAUTIFUL SINGING VOICE

(The tune is lifted from “What Would Brian Boitano Do?” from South Park. Keir and I rewrote the words to make it about John Newbery.)

The movies we showed this year were a lot of fun, and so many different styles! From an animated Where the Mountain Meets the Moon to a vintage TV superhero version of Charlotte’s Web and Macklemore spoof of The Black Cauldron to a Star Wars-style adaptation of The Whipping Boy to the claymation and puppetry used to hilariously retell An American Plague and The Old Tobacco Shop. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! I’m looking forward to bringing these films to San Francisco and Oakland (this upcoming Saturday, February 8!) as well as Tacoma (3/1), Portland (3/2), and New York City (3/22).

Young blogger and filmmaker Ada Grey wowed us with her Playmobil version of The Long Winter, and so we called her up onstage for a short interview:

Thanks to Brandon Campbell and the rest of the good folks at Adventure Stage Chicago, my co-host Keir Graff, City Lit Books for selling books, Emily Schwartz for taking pictures, John Fecile for taking video, superlibrarian Eti Berland for helping out with the film festival in a hundred ways, the KidLit Foundation, and of course the young filmmakers who year after year make the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival into a success!

Before I go, here’s the montage of clips from most of the movies we showed on Saturday, which we used to close the show:

See you in at the upcoming screenings in San Francisco (2/8), Oakland (2/8), Tacoma (3/1), Portland (3/2) and New York City (3/22)!