Brunhoff ‘s Babar Visits Another Planet (1972) begins at the start of yet another family picnic until a rocketship upsets the fun. Before they realize the situation, Babar, Celeste, their children Pom, Flora, Arthur, cousin Alexander, and Zephir, the monkey, are...
Farrell’s picnic in The Siege of Khrishnapur siege is purposely mischaracterized as entertainment for local Indians watching Sepoys attack the official Residency of the East India Company’s residence. It’s a fictional addition to a historical siege lasting five months...
Moffat’s picnics, all titled Picnic and all completed in 1963, are influenced by Fernand Leger’s Partie de champagne series o paintings. Featured Image: The Picnic at the New Bridge
Evans’s photograph of Robert Lowell and Caroline Blackwood suggests they are just another loving couple picnicking on the grass. Evans was aware of the couple’s tension but wrote to a friend, “I think they do a lot for each other, and it is a great...
Tom Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase (1972) includes the memorable simile: “Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.” A neat turn of phrase....
Goldman’s The Princess Bride takes a satiric jab at a traditional lovers’s picnic. “Indeed,” he writes in the novel, Vizzini, “had set out a little picnic spread. From the knapsack that he always carried, he had taken a small handkerchief, and on it, he has...
Lester’s The Three Musketeers is a comic adaptation of Alexandre Duma’s novel. The halte de chasse on the royal hunt portrays the lavish preparation for an outdoor meal fit for a king. Louis XIV spent many hours hunting, and there is a passing...
Casual readers usually neglect Christie’s poems, but her inner life is there and not in Marple’s or Poirot’s. “Picnic 1960” suggests Christie never lost her sense of her good life. In the final poem of the volume, Christie makes the case...
Fellini’s scampagnata, picnic, in Amarcord, a semi-autobiographical narrative, tells about an ordinary alfresco lunch set in the shade of the yard of a farmhouse. What is served is unknown, but there are bottles of raffia-bound Chianti, a bowl of hard-boiling eggs,...
Just shy of the centenary of Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Taylor and the Shermans film is a musical. Becky Thatcher’s birthday picnic is recreated as rollicking July Fourth holiday picnic. It’s not Twain’s classic, but it’s light-hearted fun....
