The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

Some films you watch once and forget. This one you watch, then immediately want to hand to every reader you know. The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is a fifteen-minute short film that manages to be a hurricane survival story, a silent-film tribute, and a love letter to the physical book, all at once, without ever feeling like it’s trying to do three things at once.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is an American animated short film written and directed by William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg, made at Moonbot Studios in Shreveport, Louisiana — the studio’s debut project after Joyce, a veteran children’s book author and illustrator, and Oldenburg, a visual-effects artist, founded it together. The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 84th Academy Awards in February 2012, along with the Audience Award at the Austin Film Festival and Best Animated Short at Cinequest.

The story follows Morris Lessmore, a writer in New Orleans’ French Quarter, whose life and diary pages are scattered by a violent storm modeled as much on a real hurricane as on the tornado in The Wizard of Oz. A woman carried aloft by a flock of flying books leads him to a magical library, where he spends the rest of his days as caretaker, mending damaged books and lending them out to the people the storm left behind. Joyce has said the sight of displaced children reading in shelters after Hurricane Katrina stayed with him while he was writing it, and it shows: the film is as much about resilience as it is about books. Visually, it borrows Morris’s silhouette and physical comedy directly from Buster Keaton, right down to a storm sequence that echoes the famous falling-facade gag from 1928’s Steamboat Bill, Jr., and its palette shifts from black-and-white to color the moment Morris steps into the library — the same trick The Wizard of Oz used eighty years earlier.

Moonbot didn’t stop at the film. In July 2011, the studio released a companion iPad app — part interactive picture book, part animated short, part app — that let readers tap, tilt, and turn pages to send the story’s books flying, flipping, and reshelving themselves. It was an unusually early and well-reviewed example of a studio treating a tablet as its own storytelling medium rather than just a screen to display a scanned page on.

None of that matters as much as just watching it. It is completely worth the fifteen minutes it takes. Do yourself a favor.

If you love films that treat animation as a fine art rather than a kids’-matinee afterthought, browse our Watch hub for more short films worth fifteen minutes of your attention, or our Design coverage for more on how visual storytellers build a world frame by frame. And if illustration and book arts are your particular obsession, our Art archive is a good place to keep going.