In my youth I fell for Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and sometime later Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Having followed the furor and then read The Satanic Verses I was very moved by Haroun knowing some of the history that caused Rushdie to write it. I also was enchanted by the lush language, the folkloric play, and the homage to The Wizard of Oz (which Rushdie first wrote about as an article for The New Yorker and then expanded as a monograph for the British Film Institute). And while last year’s Luka and the Sea of Fire did not feel as strong as those earlier works I still enjoyed Rushdie’s unique and wild imaginative style.
For me Rushdie’s writing is so much about language and imagery expressed in words so I was fascinated to come across this article in the Guardian about a competition among animation students at London’s Kingston University to come up with a concept for a film from the book.
Students from the University’s faculty of art, design and architecture visited the book’s publisher Random House to meet the author and present their ideas for visual concepts. Four of these concepts were selected to be made into four animations, which then went to a panel of judges including Rushdie and Milan, to whom the book is dedicated, to select an overall winner.
The results are fabulous and may make you want to check out the book if you haven’t already.
The winning video is by Han Byul Lee, Sam Falconer, Irsiz Heathershaw, So Hewi Lee and Dawn Smit
The first runner-up is by Zach Ellams, Moira Lam, Tim O’Leary, Sophie Powell
The second runner-up is by Frank Burgess, Angus Dick, James Lancett, Ben Tobitt, Sean Weston
The third runner-up is by John Balallo, Jun Hyoung Chun, Katie Robson, Yao Xiang
educating alice 