A charming tale voiced by a top cast, including Martin Freeman and Jennifer Saunders.
What with these intricate, bubbling arrangements and her lightly tripping fairy-tale voice, she and the Hooves sound like a Victorian toy box coming to life.
"Beau Travail" begins and ends in Marseille, with a solitary Galoup recounting his tale in a narrative voice-over similar to Forestier's in "Petit Soldat".
The story is told with the simple authority of a tall tale, a voice familiar from Babbitt's previous works, which include the classic novel "Tuck Everlasting".
He went panting to the house of his married sister, Charlotte, and she roused her husband, Saul Fleet, who ran to the magistrate Jonas Gildart's house and blurted out the tale, his voice leaping a high whinny and sinking back with the gravity of the news.
For four or five years, Ballard was a short story writer, a period that climaxed in 1960 with the publication of his remarkable tale, The Voices of Time.
Audio journalism is a satisfying form for such tales: intimate voices, sound artistry, provocative questions phrased casually.
Spoo also appears in the "Over There" segment of the Lost Tales episode "Voices in the Dark", where President Sheridan at one point jokes that the product is "Spoo: The other gray meat".
Thus he wrote about the The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales, Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf, The Island of the Color Blind and a book which dealt with Temple Grandin, the autistic professor of animal science, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales.
Rosie's remembrance of that delirious visit is part family story, part tall tale, and her voice alternates between awed and irreverent as she describes the country she has known all her life, with farms "nestled in walnut groves like islands in a sea of grain," and the eye-opening, heart-stopping city, where the street is laid in granite blocks and riding on pavement is like flying.
Mr. Lloyd, who is interviewed throughout and serves as the movie's de facto storyteller, has a fairy tale narrator's voice, with an East Coast "society" cadence one rarely hears anymore except in old movies.
