cover image Dr. Seuss's My Many Colored Days: A Story Concert with 3-D Animation

Dr. Seuss's My Many Colored Days: A Story Concert with 3-D Animation

. Minnesota Orchestral Association, $0 (45pp) ISBN 978-1-893274-01-3

This unique Notes Alive! video adaptation of a posthumously published Seuss picture book supports the idea that nothing can capture the nuances of human emotion quite like the arts. Seuss's rhyming text about how a child expresses the connections between colors, moods and feelings is given dramatic depth via an original classical symphony and computer animation. ""Some days are yellow/ some are blue./ On different days/ I'm different too,"" begins the text, narrated with equal parts deep feeling and panache by award-winning film actress Hunter. Visually, each colored day is featured in its own animated segment, which is interspersed with breakaway footage of the Minnesota Orchestra playing the music. Composer Richard Einhorn has taken jazzy, funky beats--and even hand claps and foot stomps--and incorporated them into a fun-to-hear classical piece. On a bright red day when the boy feels like a horse kicking up its heels, the music gallops along as the boy and his dog run, jump and spin around the yard; on a bright blue day when the boy feels like flying, the music soars, too, via strings, flute, harp and clarinet. Scenes from the yellow day, showing busy bees buzzing in formation, zigzagging through flowers and honeycombs, and from the pink day, when the boy and dog jitterbug and jig for joy, are particularly memorable. At story's end, viewers are treated to a special ""making of"" section, which features a peek at Dr. Seuss's home, as well as comments from his widow, Audrey Geisel. Kids and adults will be fascinated by the demonstration of the ""motion capture"" technique of computer animation, too. Ages 2-up. (Mar.)