u/hugopthomas

I’m a French filmmaker and for the last two years I’ve been making picture books of great classics for 4-7 year olds. Monte Cristo, War and Peace, Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet… around ten in English now.

My rule is basically: if the book seems easy to adapt, I’m not interested.

And now I’ve arrived at Proust.

I thought War and Peace was the hard one. I was wrong.

The problem is simple: all the others have a story a five year old can follow. Proust… not really. The real subject is memory, lost time, the past coming back. And a five year old doesn’t have much of a past yet. They have yesterday.

There is Combray, waiting for the mother’s kiss, the madeleine obviously has to be there… but I always end up with a cute little story that doesn’t really feel like Proust and, worse than all, that is quite boring. I know because I tried telling it to my kids and they never asked for it again.

So: how the hell would you do it?

Has anyone ever tried adapting À la recherche du temps perdu for very small children, in any language? Even a bad version would interest me at this point.

(Not selling anything, I genuinely need ideas!)

I'm a French filmmaker. I directed two feature films, Willy 1er and Juniors, both of them went on Netflix, and I'm working on the third one now. I also have twins who are five, and a few years ago I was getting slightly bored at bedtime. I loved reading with them, I was just less excited to read random children's stories every single night. One evening I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could read them The Count of Monte Cristo?

So I looked for a version for four year olds. To my surprise, there wasn't one, and I swear I looked thoroughly.

So I made it myself, then another one, then another, and now there is a small series of them called My Very First Classics, for which I partnered up with a different illustrator every time. 80 Days is the last one I did.

The whole idea is to stay as faithful to the original as possible, without traumatizing any kid, and on that side 80 Days was not the hardest. I could keep a lot of the things I like: the rails that stop in the middle of the jungle, the elephant that costs the price of a house, the bison sitting on the track, the steamer that Fogg buys and then burns to feed its own boiler. The Aouda storyline was harder (the fact that she is a widow about to get burned alive on the pyre of her husband, you know...) but there is always a way to tell things like these, and also children are pretty used to cruel parts in stories. I always think about the Lion King to get reassurance. Anyway, in my version she is a young woman that men are taking away by force in the night, and they save her.

The final twist with the extra day works really well with my children by the way, because they feel smart and they like to learn stuff about planets, even though it's not 100% clear to them obviously.

What I couldn't decide is what the book is really about. Fogg goes around the entire Earth and sees almost nothing of it, he plays cards, he looks at his watch, and he comes home having spent almost all his money on a bet nobody asked him to make. Verne ends on the woman he brings back, and I still don't know if he is sincere there, or if the whole novel is a joke about a man who travelled around the world without ever looking at it once.

I went with sincere. My last image puts the two things side by side, what he left for and what he actually came back with, which is a family, and my last line says that what you find on the way is worth more than what you went looking for.

Did I get him wrong? I'd like to know how you read that ending.

Isn’t it a bit awkward, but also very funny, when you hear a new song by an artist and during the whole song you feel like it’s fighting against one of their previous hits?

Let me explain

The guy probably had a huge song. Then years later he is composing something new, playing the kind of chords he naturally likes to play, and suddenly he finds a melody that sounds dangerously close to his old hit.

And you can almost hear the entire creative process:

“Okay… yes, it sounds a little similar, but not too similar.”

Then the old hit comes back again:

“Oh hello, remember me?”

And the new song is like:

“NO! I WILL NOT BECOME YOU!!!”

Obviously, I imagine that a lot of these songs simply don’t make the cut. At some point, someone probably says: “Guys, this is literally the same song.”

But sometimes it passes. The song gets released and maybe even sometimes it becomes a good song. But you can still hear this little battle inside it, like the artist spent the whole time trying to escape from his own melody.

Recently I was in Italy and heard Zucchero’s I Won’t Let You Down on the radio, and I could feeel it fighting against Il volo, the “ho bisogno di qualcosa di verrrooo” song.

Maybe I’m imagining all of this, but I don't think so. Do you have other examples of songs like this?

I'm a french filmmaker and I make picture books from classics for my twins, they are 5. Romeo and Juliet is the one I was postponing again and again.

My first instinct was to soften everything. But actually it's the opposite. Everything I read about how you talk about death with young kids says the same: be concrete, say died, don't say "passed away" or "we lost him", and never ever say the person is sleeping, because after that they are scared to go to bed themselves

So in the end the deaths were fine. I said it plainly and my twins were totally ok with it. What they wanted to know after was why, not if.

The potion is the moment where it's a bit awkward, because it is literally a sleep that looks like death. So I just showed her drinking it, like that the reader knows what Romeo doesn't know. It becomes suspense instead of a trick I guess.

after doing some research, my understanding is that it's a question of period more than a question of taste. Victorian children books were full of death and pretty blunt about it, and then it kind of disappeared from children's books. Shakespeare buried a son at eleven himself.

Curious how you would do it, or if you think this play should just not be told to a 5 year old at all.

Hi all,

On my extension's listing, the screenshots show as one large image at a time with a thumbnail strip and left/right arrows. But many other listings show two screenshots side by side at once. I want that side-by-side layout and can't work out what triggers it. What I've already ruled out:

- Not the Featured badge. Non-featured extensions (e.g. Translation Comparison, Wooclap for Google Slides) show two side by side.
- Not the image size. I've used 1280×800 (and also 640×400), still single-large either way.
- Not the video. It was the same before I added a promo video, and some listings with a video still show two items side by side.
- I have multiple screenshots uploaded, not just one.

One thing I notice: my listing shows a "You might also like" sidebar on the right, while some of the side-by-side listings used the full page width. Could that sidebar / column width be the trigger? Or is it locale-related, viewport width, or something else?

So: what actually determines the two-up screenshot gallery vs the single-large carousel on the redesigned Chrome Web Store, and how do I get the side-by-side layout?

Thanks!