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"The Ugly Duckling" (Danish: Den grimme ælling) is a literary fairy tale by Danish poet and author Hans Christian Andersen (1805 – 1875). The story tells of a homely little bird born in a barnyard who suffers abuse from the others around him until, much to his delight (and to the surprise of others), he matures into a beautiful swan, the most beautiful bird of all. The story is beloved around the world as a tale about personal transformation for the better. “The Ugly Duckling” was first published 11 November 1843, with three other tales by Andersen in Copenhagen, Denmark to great critical acclaim. The tale has been adapted to various media including opera, musical, and animated film. The tale is completely Andersen's invention and owes no debt to fairy tales or folklore.

Description
The Ugly Duckling is a hardcover 9.2 x 0.4 x 11 inches

Plot
When the tale begins, a mother duck's eggs hatch. One of the little birds is perceived by the other birds and animals on the farm as a homely little creature and suffers much verbal and physical abuse from them. He wanders sadly from the barnyard and lives with wild ducks and geese until hunters slaughter the flocks. He finds a home with an old woman but her cat and hen tease him mercilessly and again he sets off on his own. He sees a flock of migrating wild swans; he is delighted and excited but he cannot join them for he is too young and cannot fly. Winter arrives. A farmer finds and carries the freezing little bird home, but the foundling is frightened by the farmer’s noisy children and flees the house. He spends a miserable winter alone in the outdoors, mostly hiding in a cave on the lake that partly freezes over. When spring arrives a flock of swans descends on the now thawing lake. The ugly duckling, now having fully grown and matured, unable to endure a life of solitude and hardship any more and decides to throw himself at the flock of swans deciding that it is better to be killed by such beautiful birds than to live a life of ugliness and misery. He is shocked when the swans welcome and accept him, only to realize by looking at his reflection in the water that he has grown into one of them. The flock takes to the air and the ugly duckling spreads his beautiful large wings and takes flight with the rest of his new family.

Description
McElligot's pool is a small format book measuring 8.3 x 0.4 x 11.3 inches.

=Plot= The story begins as a boy named Marco fishes in a small, trash-filled pond, McElligot's Pool. A local farmer laughs at the boy and tells him that he is never going to catch anything. Nevertheless, Marco holds out hope and begins to imagine a scenario in which he might be able to catch a fish. First, he suggests that the pool might be fed by an underground brook that travels under a highway and a hotel to reach the sea. Marco then imagines a succession of fish and other creatures that could be in the sea and therefore the pool. He imagines, among others, a fish with a checkerboard stomach, a seahorse with the head of an actual horse, and an eel with two heads. When Marco is done imagining, he tells the farmer, "Oh, the sea is a so full of a number of fish,/ If a fellow is patient, he might get his wish!"

Description
The Three Pigs is a small format book measuring 11.2 x 0.4 x 9 inches (1.2 pounds).

Plot
The story starts with three pigs who decided to build a house. However, two of the three pigs love to play. The other is very responsible and hardworking. He advised the other two pigs to built a good house in case the wolf comes. The first pig, the laziest, made his house out of straw. The second pig, who is not very responsible made out of sticks because it was easier and faster. The third pig, who is hard-working made out of bricks. Therefore, the third one took longer to finish up his house and the other two made of him. According to Amazon Editorial Reviews, when the wolf approaches the first house and blows it in, he blows the pig right out of the story frame. Then the wolf ate the pig up. "One by one, the pigs exit the fairy tale's border and set off on an adventure of their own. Folding a page of their own story into a paper airplane, the pigs fly off to visit other storybooks, rescuing about-to-be-slain dragons and luring the cat and the fiddle out of their nursery rhyme."

Description
Mother Goose is a small format book measuring 0.5 x 8.5 x 11.8 inches.

Plot
Mother Goose is the name given to an archetypal country woman. She is credited with the Mother Goose stories and rhymes popularized in the 1700s in English-language literature, although no specific writer has ever been identified with such a name.

17th century English readers would have been familiar with Mother Hubbard, a stock figure when Edmund Spenser published his satire Mother Hubberd's Tale in 1590; as well as with similar fairy tales told by "Mother Bunch" (the pseudonym of Madame d'Aulnoy) in the 1690s.[3] An early mention appears in an aside in a French versified chronicle of weekly happenings, Jean Loret's La Muse Historique, collected in 1650.[4] His remark, comme un conte de la Mère Oye ("like a Mother Goose story") shows that the term was readily understood. Additional 17th century Mother Goose/Mere l'Oye references appear in French literature in the 1620s and 1630s. [5][6][7]

In "The Real Personages of Mother Goose" (1930), Katherine Elwes-Thomas submits that the image and name "Mother Goose", or "Mère l'Oye", may be based upon ancient legends of the wife of King Robert II of France, known as "Berthe la fileuse" ("Bertha the Spinner") or Berthe pied d'oie ("Goose-Foot Bertha" ), who, according to Elwes-Thomas, is often referred in French legends as spinning incredible tales that enraptured children.[citation needed] Another authority on the Mother Goose tradition, Iona Opie, does not give any credence to either the Elwes-Thomas or the Boston suppositions.[citation needed]

Plot
On his birthday, a boy receives a set of 25 toy soldiers all cast from one old tin spoon and arrays them on a table top. One soldier stands on a single leg, as having been the last one cast there was not enough metal to make him whole. Nearby, the soldier spies a paper ballerina with a spangle on her sash. She, too, is standing on one leg, and the soldier falls in love. That night, a goblin among the toys in the form of a jack-in-the-box angrily warns the soldier to take his eyes off the ballerina, but the soldier ignores him.

The next day, the soldier falls from a windowsill (presumably the work of the goblin) and lands in the street. Two boys find the soldier, place him in a paper boat, and set him sailing in the gutter. The boat and its passenger wash into a storm drain, where a rat demands the soldier pay a toll.

Sailing on, the boat is washed into a canal, where the tin soldier is swallowed by a fish. When this fish is caught and cut open, the tin soldier finds himself once again on the table top before the ballerina. Inexplicably, the boy throws the tin soldier into the fire. A wind blows the ballerina into the fire with him; she is consumed at once but her spangle remains. The tin soldier melts into the shape of a heart.

Publication
The tale was first published in Copenhagen, Denmark by C. A. Reitzel on 2 October 1838 in Fairy Tales Told for Children. New Collection. First booklet. Other tales in the booklet include "The Daisy" and "The Wild Swans". The tale was republished in collected editions of Andersen's work, first, on 18 December 1849 in Fairy Tales and again on 15 December 1862 in the first volume of Fairy Tales and Stories.

Development
Sendak began his career as an illustrator, but by the mid-1950s he had decided to start both writing and illustrating his own books. In 1956, he published his first book for which he was the sole author, Kenny's Window (1956). Soon after, he began work on another solo effort. The story was supposed to be that of a child who, after a tantrum, is punished in his room and decides to escape to the place that gives the book its title, the "land of wild horses". Shortly before starting the illustrations, Sendak realized he did not know how to draw horses and, at the suggestion of his editor, changed the wild horses to the more ambiguous "Wild Things", a term inspired by the Yiddish expression "vilde chaya" ("wild animals"), used to indicate boisterous children.

He replaced the horses with caricatures of his aunts and uncles, caricatures that he had originally drawn in his youth as an escape from their chaotic weekly visits, on Sunday afternoons, to his family's Brooklyn home. Sendak, as a child, had observed his relatives as being "all crazy – crazy faces and wild eyes", with blood-stained eyes and "big and yellow" teeth, who pinched his cheeks until they were red. These relatives, like Sendak's parents, were poor Jewish immigrants from Poland, whose remaining family in Europe were killed during the Holocaust while Sendak was in his early teens. As a child, however, he saw them only as "grotesques".

When working on the 1983 opera adaptation of the book with Oliver Knussen, Sendak gave the monsters the names of his relatives: Tzippy, Moishe, Aaron, Emile and Bernard.

Literary significance
According to Sendak, at first the book was banned in libraries and received negative reviews. It took about two years for librarians and teachers to realize that children were flocking to the book, checking it out over and over again, and for critics to relax their views. Since then, it has received high critical acclaim. Francis Spufford suggests that the book is "one of the very few picture books to make an entirely deliberate and beautiful use of the psychoanalytic story of anger". Mary Pols of Time magazine wrote that "[w]hat makes Sendak's book so compelling is its grounding effect: Max has a tantrum and in a flight of fancy visits his wild side, but he is pulled back by a belief in parental love to a supper 'still hot,' balancing the seesaw of fear and comfort." New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis noted that "there are different ways to read the wild things, through a Freudian or colonialist prism, and probably as many ways to ruin this delicate story of a solitary child liberated by his imagination." In Selma G. Lanes's book The Art of Maurice Sendak, Sendak discusses Where the Wild Things Are along with his other books In the Night Kitchen and Outside Over There as a sort of trilogy centered on children's growth, survival, change and fury. He indicated that the three books are "all variations on the same theme: how children master various feelings – danger, boredom, fear, frustration, jealousy – and manage to come to grips with the realities of their lives."

Based on a 2007 online poll, the National Education Association named the book one of its "Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children". Five years later School Library Journal sponsored a survey of readers which identified Where the Wild Things Are as top picture book. Elizabeth Bird, the NYPL librarian who conducted the survey, observed that there was little doubt it would be voted number one and highlighted its designation by one reader as a watershed, "ushering in the modern age of picture books". Another called it "perfectly crafted, perfectly illustrated ... simply the epitome of a picture book" and noted that Sendak "rises above the rest in part because he is subversive". President Barack Obama has read it aloud for children attending the White House Easter Egg Roll in multiple years.

Despite the book's popularity, Sendak refused to produce a sequel; four months before his death in 2012, he told comedian Stephen Colbert that one would be "the most boring idea imaginable".

Adaptations
Ub Iwerks did a 1934 Cinecolor cartoon based on the story entitled The Brave Tin Soldier. The cartoon's plot is slightly different from the original story. The antagonist is not a Jack-in-the-Box, but rather a toy king who wants the ballerina for himself. The tin soldier attacks the king, and as a result is put on trial and sentenced to death via firing squad. The ballerina pleads for his life to be spared, but her pleas go ignored. She then stands alongside the tin soldier and both are shot into a burning fireplace, where the melt into the shape of a heart. The cartoon has a happy ending, as both the tin soldier and ballerina are sent to "Toy Heaven", where the tin soldier now has both legs.

Paul Grimault (with Jacques Prévert) did a 1947 colour French cartoon Le Petit Soldat that portrayed the title character as a toy acrobat who is called to war and returns crippled but determined to rescue his ballerina.

In 1976, Soyuzmultfilm made an animated adaptation.

In 1985, Harmony Gold made an English dub of The Little Train adaptation of the story, the film was originally made in Italy in the late 70s.

In 1986, Atkinson Film-Arts made an animated adaptation featuring the voices of Rick Jones, Terrence Scammell, and Robert Bockstael, with narration by Christopher Plummer.

Children's author Tor Seidler adapted the book in 1992, with illustrations by Fred Marcellino

In 1992, it was adapted into an animated television movie which was produced by Hanna-Barbera.

1995 saw Jon Voight make his directorial debut with The Tin Soldier, a Showtime family film loosely based on Andersen's story.

In Disney's film Fantasia 2000, an adaptation of the tale is set to the first movement of the Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Major by Dmitri Shostakovich. The segment differs slightly from Andersen's tale: the ballerina appears to be made of porcelain; the soldier is disappointed to discover the ballerina has two legs, but the ballerina still accepts him; at the end, the jack-in-the-box villain is the one that perishes in the fire instead of the soldier and ballerina. Other animated films for children have been produced on the tale, and, in 1975, a science fiction fantasy feature film, The Tin Soldier.

Andersen's contemporary August Bournonville choreographed the tale for his ballet A Fairy Tale in Pictures, and George Balanchine choreographed the tale in 1975, allowing the soldier and the ballerina to express their love before the ballerina is blown into the fire. George Bizet set the tale to music in Jeux d'Enfants. Mike Mignola's graphic novel Baltimore, or The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire fuses the poignancy of "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" with supernatural Dracula myths, set in a post-World War I environment. Kate DiCamillo's The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (2006) makes use of the tale's themes.

In Stieg Larsson's thriller The Girl Who Played with Fire, the fiercely independent protagonist Lisbeth Salander compares the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who had stayed loyal to her despite her repeated blatant rejection of him, with Andersen's steadfast tin soldier (implicitly comparing herself with Andersen's ballerina).

In Anirudh Arun's 2013 bildungsroman The Steadfast Tin Soldier?, the protagonist Ashwin is compared to the tin soldier by his successful brother Abhinav (the society thus plays the part of the dangerous jack-in-the-box).

Daft Punk's music video for the song "Instant Crush" is said to have been inspired by "The Steadfast Tin Soldier".

Donovan's 1965 'Little Tin Soldier' written by Shawn Phillips is also based on the Hans Christian Andersen tale.

The Hanson song Soldier is also based on this fairy tale. The song doesn't mention the goblin at all. The tin soldier fell out the window when the wind blew and the tin soldier and ballerina melted together while dancing and the ballerina fell near the fireplace.

==See also==


 * 1963 in literature
 * List of children's books made into feature films
 * List of children's classic books