Customer Reviews

Midsummer Night's Dream [VHS]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The videos are a great way to share Shakespeare's stories with kids. Each video in the series is created differently and my class has enjoyed viewing the different media as well as the stories.

My 10 year old daughter loved this movie. The dialogue took just a little concentration (no goofing around or you'll miss something) but she absolutely loved it. The animation was beautiful, classic and adorable. Younger viewers will probably like it just for that. Wish I could find it for sale.

We've owned this video and the companion book since my daughter was 3, but she didn't watch it until she was 9. And then she watched it over and over. After watching it she was able to watch the full length movie version and really get it. It captures the humor of the story and introduces the viewer to Elizabethan English. Now that she's 10 she wants to see and read them all, having discovered she really likes Shakespeare!

This beautiful presentation, the product of an international collaboration between England, Wales, Russia, and Japan, provides the perfect introduction to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

For classical homeschoolers, this series serves perfectly as the grammar-stage introduction to Shakespeare. The substance is presented delightfully, faithfully, in a form which is readily accessible by young students. Both play (animated film) and text (book) are available for coordinated study. My daughter and her friends, both male and female, love this series.

As is typical with the other titles in this "Animated Tales" series, every element has been carefully designed. The academic panel ensures that this abbreviated version is an appropriate and faithful representation of Shakespeare's original.

For each film in this series, the style of the animation is selected to provide an appropriate interpretation of the particular story. For example, the animation for Midsummer Night's Dream features brilliant hues in fluid watercolors, with sparkling fairy dust and shapeshifting forms.

The actors -- the voices behind the animations -- are masterfully light-handed and convincing, fully believable, delightful. There is none of the woodenness which can so unfortunately accompany a modern telling of Shakespearean language.

From the back jacket: "Shakespeare's most powerful plays come to life in a visually stunning dramatic series designed especially for young audiences. Prepared under the supervision of prominent Shakespearean scholars, these adaptations were animated by leading Russian artists and feature brilliant performances by world-renowned actors, including many members of England's Royal Shakespeare Company."

Enthusiastically recommended.

Shakespeare's playful comedy is given an appropriately hallucinatory rendering here, with the drably colourless and draconian world of Athens giving way to the equally capricious laws of Fairyland, the difference being the former demands rigid identities and roles, while the latter thrives on tranformation and dissolution.

The play's final conservatism - order restored by the ultimate father, the King, and behind him, Shakespeare - is undermined by the protean animation, creating the first truly convincing fairyland on film (although I have great affection for the 1935 Reinhardt/Rooney/Dieterle version), whole sequences of which seem like out-takes from 'Yellow Submarine', hippying up the mind-altaring forest. Hermia's father's attempt to control her body - 'you must marry the man I choose' - is contrasted with the fluid sexuality of nature.