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Fox Animation, makers of the "Ice Age" and "Rio" franchises, has acquired the motion picture rights to the Mr. Men and Little Miss characters.

Have you ever wanted to draw your own characters from the Mr. Men and Little Miss series?

In the video embedded above, Roger Hargreaves‘ son, Adam Hargreaves, shows you how to draw Mr. Tickle, Mr. Grumpy, Mr. Funny, Little Miss Sunshin, Mr. Bump and Little Miss Naughty.

Six-year-old Adam inspired his father to create the Mr. Men series when he asked: “What does a tickle look like?” After Roger’s passing in 1988, Adam took over and continued his father’s work. What character is your favorite?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Google has created sixteen Mr. Men and Little Miss-themed Google Doodles in celebration of author/illustrator Roger Hargreaves‘ 76th birthday. As an extra bonus, the doodles change each time the Google page is reloaded.

Here’s more from The Guardian: “More than 100m books based on Hargreaves’s characters have been sold worldwide in 28 countries, while five more were completed by his son Adam, but even greater world domination may yet be on the way in the form of a big screen adaptation.”

The image embedded above stars the iconic character that started off the Mr. Men series, Mr. Tickle. Below, we’ve embedded three of our favorite Google Doodles. They feature the following characters: Mr. Happy, Little Miss Naughty,  and Little Miss Sunshine. (via Publishers Weekly)

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Lest we forget that book banning and free speech issues are conversational topics appropriate beyond the brackets of Banned Books Week, a recent news item has me lost for words.  A federal appeals court has ruled, and this is true, that an Ohio high school teacher “has no First Amendment right to make assignments about book-banning or to select particular books for her students.”  Come again?  Well apparently a teacher decided to do an assignment on banned books with her class (of high school students, recall).  So they each picked a book that had been banned. . . and then their parents found out.  So because she was distributing racy literature like, oh say, Heather Has Two Mommies, the teacher’s contract was not renewed and she lost her appeal.  You may read more about the case here.  Thanks to Leslea Newman for the links.

• Now that’s interesting.  I had not heard that Jacqueline Woodson’s novel Locomotion had been turned into a stage play.  Once in a while a book to theater adaptation just makes perfect sense.  This is one of those cases.  I suppose verse novels make excellent adaptations.  Huh!  Food for thought.

• Funniest dang thing I’ve seen all day.  Bar none.

• Feeling the absence of my Top 100 Novels poll results?  Well, much of my information came from Anita Silvey.  Now Anita turns it all around by starting a blog of her own.  Called Book-A-Day Almanac, the premise is that she will recommend a children’s book every day for a year.  At the end of the year, she’ll then turn those posts into a book.  Shoot.  That’s a good idea.  Clearly I’ve got to get around to turning my own polls into books.  Thanks to 100 Scope Notes for the link.

• I really like this habit I’ve gotten into, doing audible reviews of books for the Katie Davis podcast Brain Burps About Books.  In a given year I can properly review only so many books.  Katie’s site allows me to give some weight and consideration to I might otherwise have to ignore, like Kimberly Willis Holt’s gorgeous The Water Seeker.  That’s this week’s review on Katie’s newest podcast 6 Comments on Fusenews: I speak for the trees . . . and oatmeal, last added: 11/1/2010