HAPPY SMEKDAY (Now HOME) Trailer
Adam Rex’s chapter book, The True Meaning of Smekday, (Disney/Hyperion; Listening Library) has been changed to the more prosaic Home (following an earlier attempt to call it Happy Smekday!) for the animated movie adaptation and its world is very colorful, as shown by the first trailer:
The original received a rapturous review in The New York Times Book Review when it was published in 2007; “a story so original, so absorbing and so laugh-out-loud funny that the minute I read the last page, I want to start at the beginning again … [it] will captivate fans of the wordplay and characters in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld and of the outrageously entertaining satire of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
Written in the form of an essay for a time capsule by an 11-year-old girl nicknamed Tip (her real name is Gratuity), it begins after aliens called the Boov, have invaded the earth and changed the name Christmas to Smekday (after one of the Boov leaders). It was illustrator Adam Rex’s first novel (the sequel, Smek For President, is coming in Feb, 2015)
It happens that the rave NYT BR review was written by EarlyWord Kids Correspondent, Lisa Von Drasek. As such a fan of the book, we wondered how she’d feel about the trailer. Looks like it scores with her as well:
I LOVE this! The animators really captured how the alien Boov should look. The section of the story featured in the trailer is exactly the one one that I read aloud when I book talk Smekday. I am really looking forward to this one.
The movie is scheduled for release on March 25, 2015.
The main character, Tip, is voiced by singer Rihanna and the Boov alien, named Oh, by Jim Parsons (star of The Big Bang Theory). Fans of the book will remember that character was originally named J.Lo In a twist worthy of the wordplay of the book, the real J.Lo, Jennifer Lopez, voices a different character in the movie.