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)!

Rick Kogan wrote a great article about the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival for the Chicago Tribune. During our interview (at the Billy Goat, no less!), he was classy about my impersonation of him back in December. Onward!

Today we have two more EXCELLENT stop-motion movies submitted to this year’s 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. The first, above, is by Max Lau and Jennings Mergenthal of Tacoma, WA, who last year did a hilarious Claymation send-up of the very first Newbery Medal winner, The Story of Mankind (1922). This year, they did a ingenious—and actually pretty educational—Claymation version of the 2004 Honor Book by Jim Murphy, An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793.

I love all the crazy little touches—the way the faces turn yellow and spotted when they have yellow fever, the spinning newspaper, and especially everything about George Washington: the way he looks peeved, his surreally lengthening arm, the way he slaps his underlings—beautiful! And I’m impressed at how Max and Jennings are so skilled at clay that they actually made George Washington look like George Washington, and Jefferson, Hamilton, etc. look like themselves too. Resourceful and talented artists! The panic in the Pennsylvania legislature was another high moment for me in a movie full of high moments.

If you want to see more of Max and Jenning’s work, check out their YouTube channel. Oh, and did I mention they’re only 15 years old?!

(Hungry for more American Plague? Last year I received a tremendous live-action American Plague from Chase Elementary in Chicago. Worth watching, especially if you want to see lots of fake vomiting.)

BUT WAIT! Here’s another amazing stop-motion 90-Second Newbery. This one is by the Thursday Thing kids of Portland Community Media. It’s of another dubious classic, the 1922 Honor Book The Old Tobacco Shop: A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure by William Bowen. The plot? A five-year-old boy smokes some “magic tobacco,” has a bunch of hallucinations about sailing on a pirate ship and finding treasure, goes on a flying carpet ride, gets ill, and wakes up to find it was all a drug-induced vision. You couldn’t get away with publishing this today:

This same group did a top-notch Frog and Toad Together for last year’s film festival. Like last year, they broke the story up into parts, each part with its own signature form of animation. That’s a canny strategy to maintain audience interest over and above the story—you’re always thinking, what great technical trick are they going to do next?

The puppet part was superbly well-done (and one of the team members behind it is the talented Jacob von Borg!), including the voices and performance, and I loved the elaborately detailed tobacco shop. And even authentic fake smoke! Brilliant! And just when we get used to that, off we go to an impressive clay-animation romp. Expertly done! Other cool moments: how they made the boat “sail” in the green-screened water, and the “splash!” when the sailor falls overboard. And then we had the wild, delirious chase with the paper-cut figures—all wrapping up back in the tobacco shop, with the father shrieking “not the magic tobacco!!!” Marvelous and funny!

(And not the first time we got a 90-Second Newbery of it. Check out this live-action version of The Old Tobacco Shop from last year, by Parker from Tacoma.)

Thanks everyone for your movies so far—see you at the screenings!