Product Description

There's never before been a book like Gallop! Employing a patented new technology called Scanimation, each page is a marvel that brings animals, along with one shining star, to life with art that literally moves. It's impossible not to flip the page, and flip it again, and again, and again. A first book of motion for kids, it shows a horse in full gallop and a turtle swimming up the page. A dog runs, a cat springs, an eagle soars, and a butterfly flutters. Created by Rufus Butler Seder, an inventor, artist, and filmmaker fascinated by antique optical toys, Scanimation is a state-of-the-art six-phase animation process that combines the "persistence of vision" principle with a striped acetate overlay to give the illusion of movement. It harks back to the old magical days of the kinetoscope, and the effect is astonishing. Complementing the art is a delightful rhyming text full of simple questions and fun, nonsense replies: Can you gallop like a horse? giddyup-a-loo! Can you strut like a rooster? cock-a-doodle-doo! Every child who opens the book will be amazed, and so will every parent!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7015 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .85 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 12 pages

Review
"Readers will gasp with delight when they open this book, produced as paper-over-board: a hidden tab in each heavy page slides an acetate layer printed with vertical black lines over an encoded, detailed image of a horse, rooster, turtle or other creature, and the layers' interaction creates the illusion of motion. The black-and-white images openly reference the motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge (an influence that Seder acknowledges on the copyright page) and they contrast with the bright palette used for the spare, reader-directed text. ("Can you soar like an eagle?/ Whoosh-whoosh-glide!/ Can you swing like a chimp?/ Swoop-swoop-slide!") This book may encourage plenty of galloping--and jumping, running and bounding--on the part of young readers; adults will find it a marvel to look at in its own right."
--"Publishers Weekly," starred review

Customer Reviews

A Wizard Book - the closest thing you will get to the books of Harry Potter's world!
Every odd page in this book has a picture which comes to life as you open the page. It's truly astounding. The title comes from the horse which gallops on the cover, but my favourite is the monkeys swinging through the trees. It's the closest you will come to the books featured in the Harry Potter stories where the pictures come to life - whilst the pictures are of necessity only black and white it is truly a magical feature. I think it makes the book suitable for all ages. I bought it for my 2 year old, but I am as intrigued and impressed by it as he is. I think its a great buy for any age. Children will view it with awe and adults will simply be incredibly impressed. Buy it now!

Barcode based scanimation!
This is a pretty short book and would probably be an accompaniment to a bed time story rather than the main story itself.

It consists of a series of bar code like images, and when you turn a page a tab inside is pulled to make an animated image. The first few times you look at this book you won't be able to stop yourself from turning the pages quickly and slowly to perfect the speed of the animation!

It is a novelty - and thankfully a pretty tough one! Unlike books which contain pull down tabs which can easily bend and tear, the pages are thick and the tab to action the action (as it were) is internal to the 2-ply tick card pages so it can't be broken.

Like the other reviewer, I also like the monkey swinging through the trees!

Really cute!
I came across this book in a farm shop and bought it for double the price here! I was so impressed by the moving pictures that I bought it for my two neices. It's a book for the very young but the pictures make it so interesting it's worth getting just for that.