Doll Book of the Month Club: "Puss in Boots" and Shiba Productions

    This month's Doll Book of the Month Club entry is a childhood book of mine. It's "Puss and Boots".

  This "Puss and Boots" was published by Golden Press in 1967,and features beautiful puppet illustrations.

   You'll have to excuse the condition of the book. This is the worst condition of any of my childhood books. Normally I was very OCD about my books. Most of them look unread because I took such good care of them. (My mom even told me that,as a baby, I would sit propped with pillows,being too young to sit alone,in my playpen,and look at my books, gently turning the pages, and I never tore one.) In second grade my teacher made us write our names in all of the books we got on Scholastic book order delivery day. I HATED that. I didn't want to write in my books. I tried not doing it,but when I couldn't get away with that,I wrote my name as lightly as I could,with plans of erasing it when I got home. I do still have some with my name in them though. But this book started to peel, and I'm obsessive about that too! I love to peel things. When I peeled the plastic covering off the cover of this book, I enjoyed it, and hated myself for doing it. I managed to stop myself before I completely killed it, but it's pretty bad.
   The book has a beautiful lenticular,or 3-D picture on the cover.  The picture appears to move when the book is moved or viewed from different angles.

  The first time I showed this book to Emma when she was very small, she looked at the cover in breathless amazement, her eyes large, and finally asked me, "How do you get the toys out?" After that the book became known, not as "Puss in Boots", but, "How Do You Get the Toys Out".
  The book is the familiar story of Puss, the boot wearing cat, who manages to make his master, a poor miller's son, rich. (When the Miller died he left his mill to his eldest son, his donkey to his middle son, and all our hero got was the cat. In the end, I bet the other brothers felt cheated.) 

The master ends up marrying the princess and everyone lives happily ever after...

Although the princess doesn't look too thrilled.

 

  'Everyone' that is, except the rich ogre.(When my mom read it to me when I was a kid, she mispronounced 'ogre', and, instead, read to me about the mean orgy'. Of course, as a kid I didn't know what that meant. Obviously, neither did Mom.) 

The mean 'orgy'. I remember setting up what I thought at the time was a very accurate recreation of this setting, using a ceramic planter of flowers I had as a little kid. That's the only part I can remember, so I don't know what I used as the grass, the stairs, the ogre, or Puss. The ceramic planter was an almost exact duplicate of the ogre's, but I'm sure the rest wasn't nearly so accurate as I remember!

Puss tricks the ogre into turning himself into a mouse and Puss eats him. So basically Puss murders the guy and steals his lands and castle for the miller's son. Nice lesson kids.

  There were several Golden Press books in this series, including "The Little Mermaid", "The Wild Swans", "Thumbelina", "Rumpelstiltskin", The Little Tin Soldier",("The Steadfast Tin Soldier"), and "The Snow Queen". The Golden Press books were made by Shiba Productions, and while there were many other children's books with puppet illustration, they can't hold a candle to the Golden Press/Shiba books. The Golden Press books are well written, beautifully worded stories with illustrations of such detail and colour, with beautifully made puppets.
  Shiba Productions was the name of an animation studio that created quite a few of the puppet illustrated books, known as Living Storybooks, as well as puppet based animation for commercials and print ads. It was formed in 1958 by Tadasu Iizawa, Shigeru Hijikata, and puppet maker Kihachiro Kawamoto. Kawamoto, who handmade all the puppets, set up the tableaus, and photographed them, was also an animator, and he later became a very successful filmmaker. You can see loads of his stop motion puppet films on YouTube HERE.
  Kawamoto described the puppets as “actors within the books.”  And there is a lot of life in his puppets and his posing of them. I think my favourite picture in the book is the one of Puss being threatened by the ogre-turned-lion.

Why does the ogre have a jar of pearls on a table?

It's a great picture, even if it is the one picture in the book where there's a visible wire. 

You can see it just behind Puss's ear.

  There is a very detailed post on the Shiba Productions books, which you can read HERE.
  There were a lot of other puppet illustrated Living Storybooks, and some, at least, were Shiba Productions, and some were the same guys without the Shiba name.

This one even has a lenticular cover.

No mention of  Kihachiro Kawamoto, so this must have had a different puppet maker. It looks like it. These puppets and their costumes aren't nearly as detailed as the Golden Press books'.

This is a different edition of the same book, without a lenticular cover. Inside it's the same story and illustrations.

Same shag carpet grass as Puss in Boots though!

Some of the other books available. Notice it says they have been approved for 'simple text'. The writing in the Golden Press books is more flowery. Hey look! Grosset & Dunlap was a Filmways presentation Darling! (Sorry. Too much "Green Acres"!)

Yep! Pictures without the third guy!

I want this puppet! I wonder where they all are now?

  That's the doll book for the month. See you soon.