A Mouse and His Child
When I was little, the Disney Channel would show a variety of animated films that weren't from its parent company (that's where I saw Nausicaa for the first time and didn't realize til decades later--the color-changing Ohms gave me nightmares for years!) One of the films I saw was a Sanrio-produced film called "The Mouse and His Child", a strange, often dark but touching story about a mouse father and son wind-up toy that are plucked from the safety of the little toy shop they inhabit and expelled into the dangerous wide world outside.

I found out years later that it was based on a children's novel by Russell Hoban, the author of the Frances the Badger series and apparently also Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas. It was out of print for years, and when it was finally republished in 2001, I rushed out to buy it. Murder, robbery, deceit, philosophy, pathos, "science", adventure and the desire to become self-sufficient makes "The Mouse and His Child" one of my favorite stories.
(Ainadae, Sun 8 Jan 2012, 17:42, 1 reply)

I'd completely forgotten about that book until I read this
off to find a copy...
(IHateSprouts is baking a huge pie shaped like an enormous pie, Mon 9 Jan 2012, 11:47, closed)