Shakespeare: The Animated Tales

I’ve been watching recently the collection of animated Shakespeare stories called Shakespeare: The Animated Tales written by Leon Garfield and animated by Soyuzmultfilm, the brilliant animation company that served as the inspiration for a number of famous animators such as Hayao Miyazaki. Many of the voice actors and actresses come from the Royal Shakespeare Company and include screen stars such as Jenny Agutter, Brian Cox, Hugh Grant, Martin Jarvis, and Fiona Shaw.

These productions are great and deserve to be much better known. I’ve really enjoyed watching these.

Boris Karloff Reads Kipling

In a biography I’d been reading recently about the movie producer Val Lewton there’s a section about Boris Karloff who often worked with Lewton on his strangely artistic B-grade horror movies. He’s so famous for his monster roles such as Frankenstein and the Mummy that I was surprised to read how serious Boris Karloff was about good literature and drama. So when I saw that there was a new audio CD recording of Kipling’s Just So Stories by Boris Karloff I had to get it.

It’s an older recording and the sound quality is not great but it’s still worth getting the Karloff version for his unique interpretations of some great stories.