Saturday, November 07, 2009

Charles Dickens' timeless work now animated

Disney has just released an animated version of A Christmas Carol. It was originally penned by Charles Dickens who also wrote Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, David Copperfield and also other works of modern English literature that are well known and well liked worldwide, including the Chinese-language part 'in the Far East'. Disney also produced an animated and English version of the Chinese legend Mulan in 1998, and it is still easily available in VCDs and DVDs.

Victor Hugo's deep message in Les Miserables

3 Comments:

Blogger Justin Choo said...

James,

Just to share with you this interesting and very surprising encounter with "The Great Expectations".

Many many years ago when I was a young boy, I followed with interest a story programme in Redifusion (In those days we had the Redifusion in Penang. I don't know whether you are familiar with it.) It was in teochew dialect and I vividly remembered the opening scene of an escaped convict threatening a very frightened young boy. And the story proceeded to narate the ideosyncracies of a mysterious old lady.

Then after many years during my secondary school, we had this literature text "The Great Expectations"!

It was then that I realized that the Redifusion "play" was from Charles Dickens.

The opening scene was so powerful that I could remember for life!!

10:03 AM  
Blogger James Wong Wing-On said...

I grew up in Ipoh also with many Mandarin & Cantonese programmes of Redifusion which told stories of Dickens and Hugo, etc. In the 70s, there were already many Chinese-language children editions of Western classics like A Tale of Two Cities. My grandmother used to keep copies of those Chinese-language Western classics published in 1930s in Beijing and Shanghai.

5:56 PM  
Blogger James Wong Wing-On said...

I just did a google search with Chinese characters 最早的狄更斯名著中译版 and found out that the earliest Chinese-language edition of David Copperfield was published in 1908 and that of A Tale of Two Cities in 1928.

3:38 AM  

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