The Face

Inspired by the traditional Zen tale "The Magic Seed," this latest entry in the award-winning Stories to Remember series (which includes one of my all-time favorite children's videos, the exquisite Mia Farrow-narrated Beauty & the Beast) combines sterling live-action footage (35mm!!) and excellent computer animation to tell a story about...well...storytelling (good and bad). In The Face, a young boy (Alex Brightman) joins several neighborhood kids in listening to an ailing elderly gentleman's (Coy Perkins) elaborate stories about such wonderfully improbable creatures as a talking fish (top notch computer-animated). Nearing death, the storyteller offers to pass down the beautiful storyteller's mask (i.e., the face) to a worthy successor who will be determined by an odd competition: each of the children is handed a seed and told to see what they can do with it. While the film is not altogether believable (children congregating in an old man's yard to hear a story seems--sadly--a little far-fetched today), the parable-like quality of the tale nicely illustrates novelist John Gardner's paradoxical dictum that good fiction always tells the truth. Recommended. Aud: K, E, I, P. (R. Pitman)