The Gruffalo, The Gruffalo's Child, Room on the Broom and Stick Man

"Silly old snake. Doesn't he know? There's no such thing as a Gruffalo."

The adaptations of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler's children's classics The Gruffalo, The Gruffalo's Child and Room on the Broom have been a staple part of Arya's TV viewing for some time now, thanks to their ready availability on Amazon instant video. They feature beautiful animation closely based on Scheffler's original illustrations and top-notch voice acting, but their greatest strength is the way that they expand on the original story with little or no additional speech beyond the text of the source.

The Gruffalo features a small framing narrative with a mother squirrel telling the story to her two children, but the body of the story is filled out with a wordless dance of life and death as a multitude of background creatures are gobbled up as the Mouse goes on his way. I'm pretty sure it has as high a body count as The Bourne Identity. In the sequel, The Gruffalo's Child the titular sprog's journey through the deep, dark wood is transformed from a simple starlight stroll to a rollercoaster ride of peril. Perhaps most impressively, the straightforward story of Room on the Broom is masterfully expanded with the rivalry between the various animals without actually adding a single word to the text.

"I'm your number one fan."

"I'm Stick Man! I'm Stick Man! I'm Stick Man, that's me."

We were, therefore, delighted to see that this year the same production company would be offering an adaptation of Stick Man, a favourite of Arya's for some time, forgetting that even the basic story is... Well, frankly a tale of woe and horror, and while the adaptation adds some whimsical adventure between each of the violent assaults on Stick Man's person, it's still almost brutal. Arya wept noisily each time she watched it, although she insisted on watching it many times. I worry that she might be getting hooked on violent emotional catharsis.

Don't misunderstand me: Stick Man is still a very good adaptation, but the source material makes the visual version just that bit more horrifying than the others. Arya still loves it, but I hope she'll go back to Room on the Broom as well.