More Animated Classic Novels - From Dickens to Verne to Doyle and on.

Between all the crazy snow fall, and T being accepted into college - leaving the rest of us to carry on with regular schooling without him, we've been a little off-kilter (anyone know what a kilter is anyway?).  The younger children, and I have been spending a more than usual amount of time snuggled up watching cartoons.

Thankfully, the animated Hobbit and Lord of the Rings movies we watched to mark Tolkien's birthday, led us on to a number of other animated classics.  Apparently the 70's, 80's, and early '90s were a time for highbrow cartoon classics, because there are lot of them to choose from.

We've been on a Jules Verne kick, thanks mainly to the fact, that the movie we watched together while building our geodesic dome was Journey 2: The Mysterious Island.

The girls were curious about the book it was based on, and so we followed it up with an animated version of The Mysterious Island we found on YouTube in four parts (here, here, here and here).

From there we back to Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth (found on YouTube in 5 parts - here, here, here, here and here)...

...and from there onto a strange, animal filled, version of Around the World in 80 Days (in two parts here and here).

Then, this morning we left Verne behind, and watched an animated version of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (found all in one part, here) while we munched on our muffins at breakfast.

All of the cartoons are truncated versions of the novels, and take some liberties with original stories, but from Moby Dick, to Sherlock Holmes, to Treasure Island, to David Copperfield, to...well you get the idea, they're a great way for children to become familiar with, and hopefully fall in love with some of the classic stories, before they wade into the vocabulary heavy, and let's face it, often wordy writing of the 19th and early 20th century authors.