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The illustrations are heavily rendered with hatching and cross-hatching, lovingly embellishing the story with a staggering level of detail. The artwork may look distinctly ‘70's in style and execution, but when the book travels to the Grandfather's story, the styles, fashions and architecture are pretty firmly panted in the late ‘50s/early ‘60s. The really clever thing here are the food references packed into the corners of Chewandswallow illustrations. The Rialto Cinema is playing Duck Soup and Breakfast at Tiffany's. The town's daily paper is called The Digest. A moving company van is adorned with the company name "Bowel Movers." The level of detail is remarkable. Like any good picture book, there's always something more that a reader might not have noticed that can be seen on subsequent readings.

This is kind of a carefully composed look into the life of a fantasy - from inspiration to realization, and then recognition of the negative end of things and finally acceptance of the way things really are and the understanding of the importance of that fantasy in reality. It's all very cleverly laid out. It's not difficult to see why it has had such long-lasting appeal. The only real problem here is the book's lack of volume. Ideas quickly come into view and are just as quickly discarded in the rush of the plot. This does have the effect of engaging the imagination, but there's a bit of a wistful desire to see more - and that's just a bit less than satisfying.

The Movie

The prospect of turning a very brief picture book into an 81-minute animated film poses an interesting challenge to the filmmaker. In constructing a plot around the brilliantly simple premise, one could go in a variety of different directions. Filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller (who also wrote the short-lived animated show Clone High) decided to go a pretty conventional route with the plot. Rather than treating it as a largely amorphous story designed to capture the imaginations of the children who will be going to see it, Lord and Miller had opted for a more traditional feel-good animated kids film plot that may be endearing and somewhat satisfying, but lacks much of the sense of wonder that makes the book so appealing in the first place.

Lord and Miller have dropped the grandfather/grandchildren characters in favor of a loveably wacky young inventor named Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader.) Flint deals with the usual sorts of problems that go along with being a Hollywood scientist, including public ridicule, a solitary life and generally being socially inept. The town he grows up in is an evidently American town on an island in the middle of what appears to be the Atlantic ocean. This is kind of a strange alternative to placing the town in a place east of a great mountain range (the Midwest?). The island town of Swallow Falls is constantly at odds with Lockwood, as it is often the victim of his bizarre inventions. Things turn around as he invents a device that can turn water into food. An accident causes the machine to get launched into a geosynchronous orbit over the town, which is promptly renamed Chewandswallow.

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