Being an English major, I find it interesting when animators and live action movie makers alike take famous novels, short stories, or poems, and turn them into either animations or live action movies.  The result of this is different interpretations that are based on the original stories, or new stories inspired by the originals.  The short story that I specifically want to look at in this post is Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Ugly Duckling,” in which I want to touch on a different interpretation of the story in animated format, one done by Disney’s “silly symphonies, and one done by an animation called “How To Grow a Carrot.”

I recalled reading Hans Christian Anderson’s version of the “Ugly Duckling” in a class two semesters ago on children’s literature.  The original story plot is of a little bird being born into a barnyard, but getting scorned and abused until he grows up to be a beautiful swan.  This occurs through his many adventures and misfortunes until he meets a group of swans who accept him because by this time he has grown up to be a beautiful swan.

We saw Disney’s version of this in class which can  be found here.  Disney changed Anderson’s plot line and made it so that the duckling was hatched into the wrong group of birds and would not be accepted, and after tries to be accepted into other families and being rejected, the duckling finally gets accepted by a swan family where he finds other ducklings just like him.

A CGI animation called “How to Grow a Carrot” copies Disney’s Cel animation interpretation of “The Ugly Duckling” but instead uses vegetables instead of animals for the narrative.  Here is a clip:

This narration uses simple shapes to create the animations, where the feet given to the vegetables are not connected, and the facial features are not that detailed.  Despite the simplicity and similar story line, the animation is still effective.

**I commented on John Gayak’s blog (#17), and Christopher DeMarco‘s blog (#11).