"poop-poop!'

no, i'm not using bathroom words, as my sisters would say. the past few weeks i've had my afternoon coffee with www.dailylit.com installments of kenneth grahame's "the wind in the willows". i know i read it/had it read to me as a child, but honestly didn't remember all that much about it. it's lovely and quaint in a way that children's literature just isn't anymore. and ever since the first episode of toad's motor-car madness, i find myself wanting to shout 'poop-poop!' an awful lot.

(side note -- at disney world as a child, i went on toad's wild ride with my father, and literally burst into tears, first at the bit where it seems like a locomotive is rushing headlong at you down a pitch-black tunnel, and then with renewed terror when you go to HELL. i'd have hated to work at that ride, with sobbing children coming at you every which way.)

and maybe i even saw the 1983 stop-motion animation, but maybe the disney nightmare erased that from my memory as well. the first thing i thought as the film began was that no child in this day and age would sit through it. well, maybe a thoughtful child who only got to watch public television. be that as it may, i quite enjoyed it myself. it's very...gentle. gentler even than the book, i think, where badger seems ever so stern, and you're not really sure if toad is joking when he calls someone an ass. mole's short-sighted little face is inexpressably sweet, and i found myself looking forward to his blinks, in which his eyes don't open and close quite in sync. toad is appropriately madcap and decadent, especially when wearing his very smartly checked suit. the car scenes were much my favorite, as toad seems to go quite drunk with happiness when he crashes, shouting 'bbbbbbrrrrrrrrrr' and 'poop-poop!' and kicking his legs upside down in the hay.

quite a few scenes are unfortunately left out, but i suppose that it would have made for a very long movie, or tv show, at is was originally in britain. i have to say i found the punk-rock weasels a bit unnerving and out of place, but the band of tiny singing field mice more than made up for that.

it is nice, now and then, to watch something that you enjoyed, or might have enjoyed, when you were five, as i would have been when this came out. i was that child that only watched public television, shows like the man who would tell a story while drawing the pictures with oil pastels -- what on earth was that called?

it is....a very....comforting film. i can have the most wonderful time analyzing the most obscure little film from 1976 that even the director has forgotten, but sometimes you just need a comfort film, like sometimes you just need macaroni and cheese. i do think that turning it into a ballet, though, may have been going several steps too far.

poop-poop!