by Sam Juliano
“The Moon is Going to Addy’s House’ is visual storytelling at its very best. The emotional journey of the children is beautifully expressed through Ida Pearle’s stunning use of collage, color, texture, and movement.”—Martin Scorsese
Certainly there isn’t another children’s picture book about our luminous nocturnally-visible satellite that is as resplendent nor as intimately immersive as Ida Pearle’s The Moon Is Going to Addy’s House, and not since Marcia Brown’s paper collage work in the Caldecott Medal winning Shadow has an inanimate object or presence been as pervasively all-enveloping. Renowned filmmaker Martin Scorsese, a visual storyteller extraordinaire, knows what it is like to bring a visceral children’s picture book to the cinema, and asserts the aesthetic kinship between page and screen when it comes to elements like color, texture and movement. Acclaimed award-winning illustrator Brian Selznick, who wrote the book upon which Scorsese’s Hugo was based, is attuned to Brown’s 1983 work by opining that Pearle’s “cut-paper collages dance and play and come to life” in an equally spectacular response to the book. Yet Brown’s specter is one that unflinchingly shows the side in us we’re afraid to confront, whereas Pearle’s celestial spheroid is as reassuring as a guardian angel, one that engenders both glowing cognizance and a measure of celebratory veneration. Whereas the poet Alfred Noyes once wrote “the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas” its role in The Moon Is Going to Addy’s House is far more thematically benign, one that recalls the friendship between the young French boy in Albert Lamorisee’s The Red Balloon, who evinces a human connection to a supposed lifeless entity. (more…)
Click on names for archives
Writers/Founders
Wonders in the Dark 