Action!
How Movies Began
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A Kirkus Reviews Best Picture Book of the Year
In this “stunning” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) picture book, award-winning nonfiction creator Meghan McCarthy tells the story of how motion pictures came to be invented and the story of the many people who helped create them.
Movies take us on adventures, introduce us to new worlds, and make us feel, but how did they start?
In her trademark easy-to-follow narrative voice, this fact-filled picture book tells the story of the evolution of movies and the people who worked hard to create them—both on-screen and behind the scenes. In fascinating detail, she shows how early photography capturing motion became silent films, which led to the first color films and how those building blocks allowed for the inspiring movies of today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McCarthy breezes through more than a century of cinematic history in this whirlwind tour of select technologies, genres, and films. Starting with Eadweard Muybridge's "The Horse in Motion," the book also touches on the creation of the Kinetograph, hand-tinted films, and talkies, as well as referencing key figures such as Josephine Baker, Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Edison, Buster Keaton, and the Lumière brothers. Embellished with oversize eyes, playful acrylic paintings have a cartoonlike appeal as McCarthy faithfully recreates stills from short clips and color-saturated moments from The Phantom of the Opera. Other spreads draw connections between classic and contemporary scenes (e.g., starring Charlie Chaplin and Johnny Depp) or make genre-specific comparisons. An author's note justifies the idiosyncratic high-level coverage, describing the book as a "jumping-off point." Extensive back matter concludes. Ages 5–8.
