Children's Books: ‘The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore’

It may be telling that "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore," a kind of totem to the unmatched joys of reading, appeared in two different screen adaptations before making the transition into print. Winning an Oscar earlier this year for best animated short after appearing, last summer, as a lauded animated app, William Joyce's story of a natty Southern loner was a feat of digital imagination, a dazzlingly polished animation and a wordless tribute to a fading literary age. Now, realized at last as a children's book, his tale gains elegance but loses depth. The print-edition "Morris Lessmore" is a stylishly paced, vividly illustrated parable for young readers, yet it somehow lacks the dreamy creativity of its animated precursors. Ultimately, Joyce's book tells us something we may already suspect: that storytelling these days has a broader canvas than the hallowed space within the ­library doors.

From "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore"

THE FANTASTIC FLYING BOOKS OF MR. MORRIS LESSMORE

By William Joyce

Illustrated by William Joyce and Joe Bluhm

56 pp. Atheneum Books. $ 17.99. (Picture book; ages 4 to 8)

• Times Topic: Children's Books Reviews

Morris Lessmore, a young bibliophile with a dapper brown suit and an unconquerable cowlick, spends his days on a porch piled high with books and his spare time jotting down his private concerns in a journal. ("His life was a book of his own writing, one orderly page after another," Joyce charmingly puts it.) But when a storm sweeps through town — toppling houses, scattering the letters of Morris's beloved texts — the world as he knows it is violently upended. Parched of narrative, Morris wanders through a black-and-white landscape, lost among ruins and disordered pages.

Then, books re-enter his life. Out walking one day, Morris spies "a festive squadron of flying books" (Joyce's illustrations are, helpfully, a good deal more precise here than his diction) guiding a beautiful young woman through the air. Seeing Morris's sad state, she offers him her favorite member of the squad, a two-legged volume who promptly leads him toward the local library. Morris is enthralled by what he finds. Books line the walls and flutter through the air like butterflies; when he starts reading, all color returns to his world. "Morris found great satisfaction in caring for the books," Joyce writes. Our hero performs restorative surgery on fragile hardback spines; when gray boys and girls and men and women visit, he offers stories to imbue their lives with vibrant hues. Each night, after composing in his journal, Morris falls asleep across the pages of a large French tome. And so it goes, up through the winter of his life. "The days passed," Joyce writes. "So did the months. And then years."

"Morris Lessmore" is filled with such elegant and well-worn turns of phrase — narrative refrains that seem imported from the land of right and proper children's books, and that give the story a sage poise. (If the book ends up as a classic, it will be, at least in part, because it feels like a classic: Joyce's tale follows the incantatory order of a high Mass in print.) Yet some burnish of originality may have been lost along the way. Joyce, a veteran of Pixar who helped to create the characters for "Toy Story," and whose "Rolie Polie Olie" books grew into a C.G.I.-animated series on TV, is best known for vivid whimsy, his oeuvre including zany robots, extraterrestrial sailboats shaped like butterflies and shrinking children.

The cinematic version of "Morris Lessmore" followed that tradition: using the sweep of the virtual camera and computer animation, it turned stock moviemaking devices (the storm scene, the dream sequence) on their heads. And although Joyce's book is as visually lush as his film — he's had some art help from the illustrator Joe Bluhm — its wildest elements haven't survived the journey to the page. Perhaps it's unfair to hold a charming illustrated narrative to the highest standard of originality. But if the books don't show kids how startling a story on the page can be, who will?

Nathan Heller is a film and TV critic for Vogue and a columnist for Slate.

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