Tsuru no ongaeshi ornitologico

Among the innumerable ways of telling a story, a special place belongs to kamishibai: it comes from Japan, meaning “paper theatre” or “paper show” and it is a form of narration through images which is different from the books that we are used to. All it needs is a storyteller and an audience, ready to become the protagonist and expand the fairy tale with suggestions and inventions: the story proceeds by sliding a series of sheets of paper, in a wooden theatre or simply in your hands, with the images on the side of the audience and the text on the other. For this innovative format, somewhere between theatre and reading, you couldn’t be satisfied with stories that you have already heard: here are new versions of the great classics from the European and Japanese traditions, revisited by Yocci in her unique style. One surprise after the next, kamishibai rewrites our ideas on fairy tales, and on how to tell them.

One of the most famous fairy tales in the Japanese tradition, the story of the gratitude of the crane begins on a winter evening, when an elderly man frees a crane from a hunter’s trap. Some time later a girl shows up to him and his wife, and begins to help them with housework and with their research on migratory birds... A story of reciprocal kindness and mysteries that must be respected, interpreted by Yocci in an ornithological key.