With the recent hot weather you might already be dreaming of your summer holidays with family. The mind drifts to long days spent in nature, at the beach, a waterhole or creek with your children and their friends who craft hours of play from leaves, sticks, buckets of water and the stories they imagine and tell one another. At the end of the day after you wash the sand off little feet and flop onto the sofa to read a book, a summer classic that holds a mirror to all that has transpired is Alison Lester’s ‘Magic Beach’. In her pages the Aussie mis-en-scene described above comes alive drawing out the fluid duality of reality and the imaginary world of children, a very exciting premise for a filmmaker.
And as luck would have it, after being in print for 35 years, Magic Beach is becoming a movie!
The creative team behind Magic Beach encourage you to ‘take a trip with the ones you love’. Appropriately, given how the book transports us through a liminal space from our environments to our wonderings, the audio-visual experience will be a unique mix of live action, entwined with extraordinary, animated adventures.
Director Robert Connolly brings together 10 extraordinary Australian animators (Emma Kelly, Pierce Davison, Simon Rippingale, Marieka Walsh, Lee Whitmore, Kathy Sarpi, Susan Danta, Eddie White, Anthony Lucas and Jake Duczynski), who have given new life to the classic tale through their individual perspectives on the story.
So, this summer take a reprieve from the scorching sun and limitless energy of little ones and visit the cool-air of your local cinema. Magic Beach will be playing around the country from January 16th and it promises to be ‘a captivating blend of reality and fantasy that inspires people of all ages to feel the sand beneath their toes and find wonder in the world around them.’
Get excited and watch the trailer here…
Moreover, to mark the 35th anniversary of the first publication of Magic Beach, two new books will be published by Allen & Unwin in 2025; a special anniversary edition of ‘Magic Beach’ and on 1 April 2025 another title called ‘Stories from Magic Beach’, a 96-page full-colour hardback keepsake that incorporates stills from the film creating a graphic novel like effect.