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January 28, 2004

REVENGE FOR EURODISNEY

A French author is suing Disney over Finding Nemo.

Franck Le Calvez alleges that the hero of the US movie, a clown fish named Nemo, looks very much like the main character in his book "Pierrot le poisson-clown" (Pierrot the Clown Fish), which came out at the end of 2002, well before the Disney blockbuster.

He also says there are "troubling" similarities between supporting characters in both works, notably the use of a surgeon fish and a cleaner shrimp.

I'm the last one to defend Disney but it's hard to imagine a bunch of development executives sitting around saying, "We need a new comedy idea - let's go see what the French have."

Posted at 12:08 AM |

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Comments

Paul Terwelp

your friends at Disney are having a tough time. Yesterday I heard that Eisner went hat in hand to some wealthy Saudi prince for some more millions to keep Eurodisney afloat. Who thought that the French needed the happiest place on earth.

Posted by: Paul Terwelp | January 28, 2004 at 09:44 AM

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TEV DEFINED


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SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
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    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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