Here’a a video, done about about a year and a half ago, of a very disheveled, sleepy-looking six-year-old H.o.p. (I think he was six, but it may be later than that) reciting Peter and Paul which he learned on Teletubbies. I’m putting this up because I’m always losing where this video is and love it, and this way will always have it on hand. It’s an amusing little video to me because in learning Peter and Paul while watching Teletubbies as a little child, H.o.p. learned the British accent right along with it. To him the accent was simply part of the recitation. So, whenever he did Peter and Paul he always did it with the accent.
Takes a little while to open up but relatives and friends may enjoy it.
H.o.p. likes to do puppet theater and playacting and enlists me but it gets a bit boring as he doesn’t want me to do any characters with voices as he says I dn’t get the voices right. About the only voice he thinks I can do is Raymond, Zorak’s nephew in Space Ghost. And he coaches me with that. “No, higher. Squeakier.” When I ask him if I can do certain characters he’ll look at his feet, look at the wall, then say, avoiding my eyes, “Uhm, mom, you can’t do the voice right.”
Each day we watch the animations at Animation ID and discuss some the old cartoons that are posted. Animation ID is a great blog for this as what animatior did what is broken down and some brief analysis is offered on their style, and some history given as well. Which is really very interesting and it’s been quite a boon for me in talking about animation with H.o.p.. H.o.p. memorizes the ‘toons and last night he wanted me to act out an old Woody the Woodpecker cartoon which he assumed I’d learned as I’d watched it along with him numerous times. In the cartoon, the walrus’ bed has turned into a pipe organ, which the walrus doesn’t care for and he tries to stop up the holes through which the air is blasting. When I didn’t get it right H.o.p. had me sit down and watch the cartoon again. Then he tried to direct me. “No, no, you’re doing it wrong. Like this!” He performed it several times, particularly emphatic on exactly how it should end, what the expression on my face should be, the exact body posiition I have.
I never did get it right. Not according to H.o.p. And he gave up on me.
I considered telling H.o.p. that he needed to allow his actors a little room for interpretation. (Which is something a director once told me. That I was a bit too rigorous telling the actors exactly what they should do.) But I decided to keep my mouth shut.
You’ll see in the video how H.o.p.’s mind is stuck on movies and always goes to movies. He does the recitation but it’s revealed at the end he’s simply been waiting to pull out a cut-out and do a movie with cut-outs instead. During that period of time he was making lots of cutouts and would film them on the little digital camera. Oh, and that cut-out is from back in the days when I could get away with cutting out one of his drawings so it was surrounded by white, which was easy for me and I did that because he was always handing me drawings to cut out, so I do think he was six. Later, all his cut-outs had to have no white at all around them. Zip. No white. He was meticulous about it.
Leave a Reply