The Inspiration

The Method behind the Madness.
Der Struwwelpeter, a German childrens book that is the inspiration for my film. Your probably wondering where I ran across such a thing. Well...

When I was a child, I distinctly remember my dad, aunts, and I going into the local German deli (because I'm half German) and I was looking for something to buy that wasn't overly sweet and chocolaty. Then I saw it, the book that would soon hold my thesis inside its pages.

The cover's horrifying! But it sparked my interest as a kid! I knabbed it off the shelf and showed my father, "I want THIS daddy!" And surprisingly, he remembered the book from when he was a child in Germany. So he bought the book for me.

Der Struwwelpeter is like something from out of a Tim Burton or Henry Selick film. All its tales are entertainingly twisted, ment to teach kids a lesson (like Aesops) only.... alittle more scary, though Aesops is pretty messed up too :\ Here's a website with pretty good translation of all the tales, just to give you a taste of what's in it: CLICK ME!

Anyhoo, out of all the tales, one had stuck with me since I first flipped through the books pages.
Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher or The Story of Little Thumb Sucker. It's about a little boy who is warned by his mother, not to suck his thumbs, or the tall tailor will come with his scissors and cut them off. You think it would end happily, but nope. The boy sucks his thumbs anyway and boom! Tailor comes, and in the end the boy has no thumbs. This was my favorite story in the whole book, probably because it was just so out there and the character of the Tailor was just interesting.

Eventually, I would present this tale to my Animation PreProduction class and it would be chosen to be my Thesis. But mine has a happy ending :) I never found the original ending fair.

And for obvious reasons...