The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore
| The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore | |
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| Directed by |
William Joyce Brandon Oldenburg |
| Produced by | Lampton Enochs Alissa Kantrow Trish Farnsworth-Smith |
| Written by | William Joyce |
| Music by | John Hunter,BREED |
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Running time
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15 minutes |
| Country | United States |
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is a 2011 animated short film directed by William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg, and produced by Moonbot Studios in Shreveport, Louisiana. Described as an "allegory about the curative powers of story," the film centers on bibliophile Lessmore and his custodianship of a magical library of flying books. It was created using computer animation, miniatures and traditional hand-drawn techniques.
After winning over a dozen film festivals, the film was awarded the Best Animated Short Film at the 84th Academy Awards. An official iPad app based on the film was also released in the Apple App Store. A book adaptation was released in late 2012.
Morris Lessmore sits on a balcony in the French Quarter of New Orleans writing a memoir. Suddenly a storm strikes, blowing Morris’s writing out of his book and blowing him off the balcony. While Morris frantically grabs for his book, the storm blows away the buildings.
After the storm, Morris finds the city and its residents devastated. He walks through the streets strewn with book pages and into the countryside. There he sees a woman fly past, magically suspended by flying books which she is holding with ribbons. She sends one of the books down to Morris. The book’s pages flip back and forth to animate an illustration of Humpty Dumpty, who urges Morris to follow him.
The flying book takes Morris to a library where other flying books live. Morris finds no humans there, but notices several portraits on the wall, one of which is the woman he had seen. In the story the books could talk to Morris.
Morris then becomes the proprietor of the library. He takes care of the books, even saving the life of an early French edition of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon after it suffers a catastrophic injury falling from a shelf. He also gives out books to those who visit the library from the city still suffering from the effects of the storm. Eventually Morris begins to rewrite his memoir, sharing passages with the flying books who gather around him on the grassy hill opposite the library.
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Wikipedia