Bringing Back Storytelling

By Richard Zoglin

Jack Nicholson's best performance in the past five years? With all due respect to Batman and The Witches of Eastwick, it just may be a half-hour stint Nicholson did for, of all things, a children's video. He is narrator of The Elephant's Child, an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's whimsical story about how the elephant got its trunk. Backed by the music of Bobby McFerrin, Nicholson gives a droll, spirited reading, wrapping his tongue around Kipling's sensuous words -- "the great, gray-green, greasy Lim-po-po River" -- like a gourmet savoring oysters.

By the same token, it would be hard to imagine a funnier, better modulated comic performance from Robin Williams than the Babel of Slavic accents he brings to a Russian folktale called The Fool and the Flying Ship. Or a more touching turn by Sigourney Weaver than her reading of the pensive Japanese story Peachboy. Or a sprightlier showcase for Michael Palin's Pythonesque versatility than his rendition of Jack and the Beanstalk.

Star power has come to children's video. More important, so has the lost art of storytelling. Credit goes to a small Connecticut company called Rabbit Ears Productions, which for six years has been assembling a library of children's literature on video. Each story is illustrated by a top-flight artist, scored by a noted composer (Ry Cooder, Herbie Hancock) and narrated by a moonlighting Hollywood actor.

For kids brought up on frenetic Saturday-morning animation, these half-hour videos are leisurely paced and look comparatively low-tech. Visually, they are little more than still pictures strung together in a technique known, rather generously, as dissolve animation. Sales have been moderate (cost: $9.95 or $14.95 a tape), but titles are multiplying rapidly. Following its initial series of 18 storybook classics (Thumbelina, read by Kelly McGillis; The Emperor's New Clothes, with John Gielgud), the company has just launched a new collection of folktales from around the world, featuring stars like Denzel Washington and Max von Sydow. Also in the works: legendary American tales and Bible stories. The videos are being run on the Showtime cable network, and Raul Julia is recording them in Spanish.

The success of Rabbit Ears has a fairy-tale quality of its own. The company is the brainchild of Mark Sottnick, 46, a former high school science teacher from Philadelphia, who began making children's films in the early '80s. In 1985 he and his partner (and now wife) Doris Wilhousky produced a TV version of one of their favorite children's stories, The Velveteen Rabbit. They managed to persuade Meryl Streep -- the "friend of a friend" -- to read the narration. The tape won a passel of awards and set Rabbit Ears hopping. In the past year the staff has grown from four to 18, straining the capacity of the two-story barn-wood building in Westport, Conn., that serves as a homey headquarters.

Sottnick is quick to admit that because of the low action level and sophisticated content of Rabbit Ears tapes, "they're not going to be every kid's cup of tea." But he adds, "I think the stories should be what every parent strives for: not to sell kids short." In an age of Smurfs, Urkels and Ninja Turtles, that should be music to parents' ears.

With reporting by William Tynan/Westport