“I got to drive. I count loudly to ten and go look for my mother. There is a door, a corridor with rough wallpaper, a dressed up plump hanger, but no mother. I open the door to the kitchen. I'm listening. The clock is ticking, the refrigerator is grumbling, nothing else can be heard. But just in case, I reach the table and feel under it with my hand - it’s empty. Then I need to go to the living room: there is nowhere else to hide in the kitchen. There is no one outside the door in the living room. And under the sofa, and under the table. I go to the window and hear my mother’s breathing. I pull the curtain and touch my mother’s hand - I found it. Found it!..."
“...Dad takes my hand and runs it over something cold and very long.
- These are elephant tusks. Two teeth that stick out next to the trunk - a long, very long nose. Like this.
Dad puts his hand on my nose and imitates the trunk of an elephant for me. I touch my dad’s hand-trunk to imagine... And how does an elephant walk with such a nose? It's inconvenient.
“And the tusks are so valuable,” continues dad, “that elephants are hunted for them...
I run my fingers along the tusks and listen carefully. Teeth that are taller than me and dad! Nose like dad's hand! Is he really that big, this elephant?!..."
“Mom says that you need to choose the color of the coat: there is red and green.
- Which red? - I ask.
“Like a tomato,” says mom.
- Which green one?
- Like an apple.
Of course I choose the apple coat! Because apples crunch loudly, and tomatoes squish and drip.
- Does the elephant eat apples? - I ask my mother further.
- And how. He's a herbivore. Eats everything that grows. Grass, apples, carrots...
I remember the smells of grass, apple and carrots. Carrots are best suited for elephants. Dad said that elephants are gray. Probably gray is like carrot. Carrot elephant - it even sounds beautiful.”
“At art school I decide to draw an elephant. I sit separately from the other guys. It's like I'm an elephant and I need a lot of space. But in fact it’s Pashka instead of a bishop. Everything falls down: pencils, pieces of paper, even himself!
Everyone draws a still life according to the teacher’s instructions, and I draw an elephant. Everyone paints with brushes, but I use my fingers. She made a dot with the index finger of her left hand. And from the point I moved the finger of my right hand in a circle so that the fingers connected. She made a big circle: after all, the elephant is big and fat, because it eats a lot. Now big teeth. Big ears. Long trunk...
The teacher praises my drawing. Everyone surrounds me. That's why there is so much space around - so that others can stand nearby.
Pashka says:
- And I can do this too! Can I also draw with my fingers?
And drops paint on the floor!
- Pasha! - says the teacher. But others also begin to ask:
- Me too, can I?
- I want fingers too!
Everyone wants to be like me. Everyone wants an elephant."
“At night I dream that elephants are lying on the grass and looking at the sky. And I'm floating across the sky. Baby elephants ask their mothers:
-Who does this cloud look like?
But the elephants are silent: either they don’t know or are embarrassed to say.
Then I shout:
- On you! I look like you! I'm an elephant too! If you jump, you can hug me with your trunk! Like with your hand!
But the elephants don't even move. Elephants are so heavy that they cannot jump.”
Let's start reading. Together with the heroine of the book, we live through several episodes from her daily life. Hide and seek at home, going to a museum, making a cake, receiving guests... Everything is everyday and familiar, but the children listen very carefully, smile, and often giggle. Everyone is very amused by the idea of an “elephantquake” that could happen if elephants could jump.
As the text progresses, certain features of elephants are explained. My guys are educated, they can show how tall an elephant is, and they know that it is a herbivore. True, about the tusks, they believe that these are horns, not teeth - here the author corrects the listeners through the mouth of the main character’s dad. And then we all, just like her, make a trunk out of our fists to trumpet “Boo-boo-boo!” When we get to the episode where the girl gets hit in the eye by a ball, many frown in understanding.
My listeners today have a lot in common with the heroine: drawing classes, baking together with mom, bedtime lullabies, getting the right and left shoe mixed up, even a green coat - everyone has had some of this.
I ask the guys how they differ from the girl from the book. Unexpectedly for me, the audience stalls. When I was reading “The Invisible Elephant” at home, my eldest daughter guessed that the heroine was blind already on the second page. It’s surprising to me that this hypothesis is not heard at all in the library: children name some formal differences, like the color of a coat. There is even a little arrogance: “I’m watching where I’m going, and I won’t end up in a place where they can hit me with a ball!”
I return listeners to the text, because there are so many hints scattered throughout it:
“I reach the table and feel under it with my hand - it’s empty...”
“In museums we are allowed to touch any stuffed animal, various stones and things. Others can’t, but we can...”
“I stretch out my hands, my mother intercepts them and leads me to a warm baking sheet. Yeah, these lumps must be cookies..."
“I’m waiting on the balcony for Taika to appear at our entrance. I recognize her by her smell...”
“Dad said that elephants are gray. Probably gray is like carrot..."
“Everyone draws a still life according to the teacher’s instructions, and I draw an elephant. Everyone paints with brushes, but I use my fingers..."
“Dad looks at the sky and tells what the clouds look like...”
The children are silent, frowning: they are thinking. It really does seem strange. Finally, one of the older girls timidly suggests: “Maybe she... doesn’t see?”
This reading was dedicated to the Paralympics. The seniors readily answered the question of what kind of competition this was, “politically correct” calling the participants people with disabilities. True, there were no people with unlimited possibilities among those present and their acquaintances. Then the guys gave a different definition: “Disabled people are those who have some organs that do not work or are missing.”
Then we played for a long time, trying out blindness or visual limitations in different ways, even drawing elephants with our eyes closed. And I dreamed that these children would remember how much they can have in common even with that person who has a completely different view of things...
Maria Klimova
In this surprisingly bright and heart-touching book, it would seem that nothing special happens. It’s just that the girl talks very joyfully and warmly about her life. About how at home I played hide and seek with my mother and prepared a cake for the arrival of guests. About how I went to a museum with my dad, heard about an elephant there and even touched its tusks, and then cleaned the floor, and thought that the vacuum cleaner looked like an elephant, only without ears. And also about classes at art school, about clouds floating in the sky, about a real elephant in the zoo to whom she threw a carrot... And only gradually in these stories a piercing truth is revealed to the reader: The invisible elephant has become part of the big world in which it lives fully and brightly a child deprived of sight, and who is so carefully preserved by the people around the girl.
On our website you can download the book “The Invisible Elephant” by Anna Pavlovna Anisimova for free and without registration in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format, read the book online or buy the book in the online store.
Genre:
story about a girl
Subject: A child deprived of sight talks about his ordinary life and reveals the world of his own fantasies.
Keywords: special child, girl, family, game, fantasy
Knowledge and skills: The story allows you to touch for a second the world of childhood of a blind child. The book is lived without tragedies and tears, but with empathy and gratitude for the good that is in the life of every child who is loved.
For what age: 7-10 years
For independent reading
| Buy in the Labyrinth 84 rub. |
The 94th issue of the “Nastya and Nikita” series presents us with the debut book of a young author Anna Anisimova "The Invisible Elephant" . It was no coincidence that this story appeared in the series; we can say that the readers themselves asked for its publication: in the literary competition “Short Children’s Work,” which the publishers of “Nastya and Nikita” held last fall, this text received the audience award (by the way, another Anna’s story “Once upon a time, Petka and I” took second place in the competition).
"The Invisible Elephant" is a realistic story about a girl, a story consisting of many incidents, and these incidents are made up of moments and fantasies. She plays hide and seek with her mother, studies at art school, helps her mother clean and cook, enjoys the guests, gets upset because of an unexpected bump, and also thinks and dreams about elephants. The most important thing is this: this girl sees completely differently from all other people, they see... with their hands. With your hands you can see elephant tusks, a trunk made from daddy's hand, clouds and rabbit ears.
« I can see the clouds perfectly. Mom explained to me that clouds look like fluffy cotton wool. I hold the cotton wool and pull two strips out of it. I know what a hare looks like. Like a rabbit! And I saw a rabbit in the village at my grandmother’s. His ears are like rags».
Her world is sensations and smells, as well as words and touches of close, loving people.
IN In general, from a book that presents the reader with the world of a blind child, you expect something sad and difficult. And under the cover there is a good and bright, reliable and understandable world in which mom and dad love their child and accept him as he is. The child is attached to his parents and feels reliably warm and safe. In such a world, it is good for a “special” child, just like any other.
R
The story allows you to find a new angle of view and get a little closer to understanding what the universe of a blind person looks like. In this sense, the book can be considered almost mandatory reading not only for all children who have some kind of vision problems, but also for all healthy children who do not know how to play and what to talk about with a girl who is so different from them themselves. 
The illustrations for the story were drawn by Diana Lapshina; she often draws for Nastya and Nikita. In the works of this artist one can see a very careful attitude to the text (for example, Diana will never draw a green dress where the author talks about red), and also a lot of summer colors, which we all miss so much in this prolonged spring.
WITH series “Nastya and Nikita”, which this year will release its hundredth book (and this will mean that during the existence of “Nastya and Nikita” we have read 100 new stories, fairy tales, educational stories by modern authors), in this has changed a lot this year. The cover design and series logo have changed. The compilers decided to abandon the preface describing some episode from the life of the children Nastya and Nikita, which previously preceded each text in the series. Even the font of the main text has changed! I must say that all the transformations seem more than successful, so now readers will probably love these thin books even more.
Anna Anisimova. Invisible elephant. – M.: Foma, 2013. – 24 p., ill. – ISBN 978-5-91786-110-4.
Other reviews:
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A rhinoceros at home can come in handy at almost every step; it’s amazing how inventive children can be if they get their hands on... anything they come across, even a rhinoceros! |
Cartoon
Start of rental:
About the film
Traditionally, the “Premieres” block consists of Russian cartoons released over the past year. But the current program includes four films shot abroad by domestic directors: Yulia Aronova (the film “One, Two, Tree”), Olesya Shchukina (“The Elephant and the Bicycle”), Marina Moshkova (“A Man Meets”) and Alexander Geifman (“The Elephant and the Bicycle”). Zoya") - worked in France.
This year the premiere program turned out to be incredibly large - as many as six collections, something like this has never happened before at the BFM. And very diverse: from films designed for the youngest (the program “How Seals Live”) and preschoolers (“The Invisible Elephant”), to collections for teenagers of all ages (“A Very Lonely Rooster”, “Ships of Yesterday”, “A Man is Looking for woman") and only for adults ("Madame and the Maid"). This year there are again a lot of music videos, and there are also children’s videos (one of the best masters in this field is Alexey Alekseev), and films based on songs of popular performers (for example, a whole trilogy based on songs by the group “Mumiy Troll”) and even an original musical project based on poems by Dmitry Prigov. And as always, several films in the program made it to the festival straight from the editing table, so their real premieres will be at the BFM.
Don't forget that films in this block are subject to audience voting. The paintings that receive the most votes according to the questionnaires will receive a small sculpture of the emblem of our festival - the Animashi girl.
Additionally
"The Invisible Elephant"
6+/69 min. Session 17.30
BREAK A LEG
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FORBIDDEN FOOD
Director: Oleg Uzhinov, production designer: Anton Dyakov, School-Studio “SHAR”, Russia, 2015, 11 min, computer translation
A new series of the educational and entertaining series “Yin and Yana”, about a girl and an alien who feeds on information. It talks about what can happen if you trade food with a friend.
From the series “Kingdom of M” about life in the smallest kingdom in the world, but only in size, and not in the spiritual qualities of its inhabitants. In the episode "Borders" the King decided to expand his domain and return the old oak tree to its historical homeland.
GHOST
Director: Natalia Mirzoyan, production designer: Maria Yakushina, Computer Animation Studio “Petersburg”, Russia, 2014, 3 min, translation
From the series "Kingdom of M". The kingdom's palace had everything it needed: a throne room for ceremonies, portraits of ancestors, carpets and collections of weapons, secret rooms and dark staircases. There was only one thing missing from the royal palace - the palace ghost.
SCIENTIST BEAR
Director and artist: Andrey Kuznetsov, Moscow animation studio “Pilot”, Russia, 2014, 13 min, computer translation
A fairy tale from the series “Mountain of Gems.” The film tells how intelligence, ingenuity and a successful combination of circumstances allowed a poor village guy to marry the king's daughter.
BOOMERANG
Director and artist: Pavel Pogudin, A-film studio, Russia, 2015, 5 min, technology.
The Australian fairy tale “Boomerang” tells the story that good deeds always come back a hundredfold, expanding the boundaries of the world as a whole.
INVISIBLE ELEPHANT
Director: Anastasia Sokolova, production designer: Anna Kritskaya, Anastasia Sokolova, Snega studio, Russia, 7 min 25 sec, computer translation, hand-drawn animation.
“The Invisible Elephant” is a film metaphor about such a wonderful time as childhood. “We all come from childhood,” it goes away irrevocably, the time of parting comes, but at least a tiny piece of this wonderful world remains forever in our hearts.
