The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

This film by William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg won the Oscar for best animated short film this year. It is difficult for me to tell you how much it moved me. For the majority of the film I found myself making that strange, juddering sound somewhere between laughing and crying and my heart ached, yes, really ached. The importance of the book, as friend, healer, and confidante is what stands at the back of all the work I do. That sounds lofty and self important, but it's not supposed to. What I mean is that it is my pure and wholehearted love of books that made me want to do a job that involved sharing that feeling. I am evangelical when it comes to reading. And so is this film. Of the (many) things that I love about this film one of the best is the way it addresses the value of reading in its place in time. The film shares the spotlight with an app, an ebook for children which is completely interactive. The rise of the ebook is a controversial one in book-lovers' circles, but here it is done so right. Here we see artists and writers embracing what is new to enhance the experience of reading, to explore what is fun and vibrant, to be playful as well as respectful. The film is a joy, watch it over and over.

One of my favourite parts of the film is the surgery scene. How perfect that it is by reading the book that we bring it to life. It made me think of one of my favourite essays on reading by Maurice Blanchot, and that perhaps his words are a good way to leave this subject.

“The book whose source is art has no guarantee in the world, and when it is read, it has never been read before; it only attains its presence as a work in the space opened by this unique reading, each time the first reading and each time the only reading.”

“What is a book that no one reads? Something that has not yet been written. Reading, then, is not writing the book again but causing the book to write itself or be written- this time without the writer as intermediary, without anyone writing it.”


“Reading transforms a book the same way the sea and the sand transforms the work of men: the result is a smoother stone, a fragment that has fallen from heaven, without any past, without any future, and that we do not wonder about as we look at it.” 
                                      ~ Maurice Blanchot, Reading