Written with all the formality and eloquence of a children’s book from the nineteenth century, The Brave Little Toaster is the story about five appliances in a remote, abandoned cabin who travel across the forest to find their master. On the other hand, children do not have to understand every word of a bedtime story in order to remain engaged and it is good to expose them to unfamiliar language constructions to ensure the future literacy of the human race, which many seem to fear is slipping ever steadily downward. It makes me wonder if Disch intended it as a "kids" book best enjoyed by adults. The language and sentence structure of the book seemed unnecessarily (almost willfully) complex at times for a child, and I think most would end up switching off as a result. But from my experiences with this age group, I would say that such a reader, at such an age, is an extreme rarity. Though I suppose, if the children in question possess prodigious vocabularies and attention levels, they might fare just fine with it. However, despite the interesting conceit and the simplicity of the tale itself, I wouldn't say that it was truly written for the under ten crowd necessarily. Yet, untypically-from the books by this author which I've managed to read as yet (I plan to read all of his books sooner or later and first fell in love after reading Camp Concentration)-it is tender and very cute. Typical of Disch, the story is inventive and sensitive. I rate this book 5 stars because it gave us the movie, and the world of animation would be a dimmer place without it. It probably sounds strange to say "The Brave Little Toaster" influenced the direction of your life, but I'm going to say it-I think this movie had more influence upon me than any other media I viewed as a child. The book has a bit of an old-fashioned feel, as another reviewer has commented-at one point, the Radio even makes a Polish joke! The movie's writers added quite a bit more peril to the book, such as the climactic terrifying scene at the dump. The movie follows the book's same basic plot, although it ends quite differently. I had come to know the characters as their animated incarnations, which look almost nothing like the book's interpretation. I still remember the confusion I felt upon seeing the cover illustration. Recently, I found my yellowing copy and decided to re-read it. I still have the copy my mom and I special-ordered at a long-gone bookstore soon after I saw the film. This is the book that inspired the animated film. I'm clearly not the only kid who was thrilled by the adventures of Toaster, Kirby, and the rest-the Internet has a healthy community of now adult "Toaster" devotees. And while I no longer make construction-paper appliances as I did in elementary school, I continue to collect "Toaster" memorabilia. It was, and remains, my all-time favorite movie. I watched Toaster on the evening of its premiere in 1987 and have no doubt seen it hundreds of times since. For me, that film is The Brave Little Toaster. Disch committed suicide by gunshot on July 4, 2008.Īsk some people about an important, life-changing film, and they are likely to name something such as The Godfather. Disch's best known work, though, is The Brave Little Toaster, a reworking of the Brothers Grimm's "Town Musicians of Bremen" featuring wornout domestic appliances - what was written as a satire on sentimentality became a successful children's animated musical. In recent years, Disch had turned to ironically moralized horror novels like The Businessman, The MD, The Priest and The Sub in which the nightmare of American suburbia is satirized through the terrible things that happen when the magical gives people the chance to do what they really really want. His sf novels include Camp Concentration, with its colony of prisoners mutated into super-intelligence by the bacteria that will in due course kill them horribly, and On Wings of Song, in which many of the brightest and best have left their bodies for what may be genuine, or entirely illusory, astral flight and his hero has to survive until his lover comes back to him both are stunningly original books and both are among sf's more accomplishedly bitter-sweet works. Disch brought to the sf of the New Wave a camp sensibility and a sardonicism that too much sf had lacked.
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