I do like Eric Carle’s work and The Very Hungry Caterpillar is nice and all but film and TV rights? A MILLION pounds?
Bah…
I am getting so jaundiced in my old age *S*
Counting on the Caterpillar
By Dominic Casciani
BBC News
It’s said to have sold a copy for every minute it’s been in publication and now the film rights have been sold for a seven-figure sum. So what sets The Very Hungry Caterpillar apart from the thousands of other charming children’s books?
“Waan, tooo, foooor, five! Six, seven, ate, nine tin! Big fat caterpillar!”
Now call me a doting dad, but the minor fact that my 23-month-old daughter has a blind spot for the number three is a mere temporary obstacle.
But as we try to find out what happened to it, she has in her hands a little helper: a dozen or so pages of one of the finest children’s works of our age: Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
It’s said that one copy a minute has been sold since it was released in 1969. George Bush is said to rank as one of its most avid fans; film and TV rights have just been bought for £1m, and it’s rumoured to be part of a package of books the UK government is to send to every toddler.
But in a publishing world besieged by children’s titles, what makes this one so special?
First there’s time…
It is the story of life itself: of how a little egg, on a leaf by the light of the moon, becomes a little hungry caterpillar, who becomes a very big caterpillar and, finally, transforms into a beautiful butterfly.
Is that it? Well, no. Not by all the nibbles of pickles and pieces of cherry pie.
Eric Carle’s gift to children is a manual for the youngest of minds.
Caterpillar tells our children about time - his egg appears at night and is born under the morning sun. Each page takes us into a new day, and the final pages introduce the concept of distant time as we wait for Caterpillar to reappear from his cocoon.
There is the physics of movement and space and the psychological identification with place, home and belonging.
Then, as the toddlers become more self-aware, there is the chemistry of bodily functions as Caterpillar over-indulges on the salami and gets an upset tummy.
Carle’s visual dictionary is a riot of colour, but also an astonishingly controlled use of form that mirrors nature itself. His collage-like style succeeds where other children’s illustrators fail because he shows the budding artist how a few circles, squares and repeated sequences can lead to endless possibilities.
…maths and chemistry
And then there is the counting.
Each day Caterpillar eats one more piece of food than the day before. Each piece of fruit has a little hole through which little fingers pass.
The next number is carefully introduced on pages that become larger as the number increases, emphasising the first fundamental law of mathematics.
I will never forget my daughter’s expression on the day she first grasped this key concept, that you can place two separate units together and, in doing so, create something greater than before.
All of a sudden, as with all children, it opened up a world of possibilities (although she kept us amused for months with her conclusion that one is one, two is two and anything bigger is logically “TWOOOOOOOOO!”)
The genius of The Very Hungry Caterpillar does not however come down to its counting or its art or even the story-telling for children. It is his message for new parents.
Like the Caterpillar, our children are embarking on a long road through life. Today, they are small and at the mercy of the world but eager to consume all around them.
So Eric’s message is simple: keep stuffing them full of the important things in life and, with a little luck and a lot of hard work, they too will grow up to be butterflies every bit as magnificent as the one that flies away at the end of his tale.
