THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE

A handsomely illustrated retelling of the classic cautionary tale, brooms and all.

Muller fleshes out Goethe’s sketchy ballad so that it follows the familiar course of Mickey Mouse’s adventure in Disney’s Fantasia but with a named and all-human cast. Having fetched up hungry and homeless at the door of kindly old sorcerer Alfred, Oliver, a young country lad, is kept busy with chores while learning how to make potions and, after some begging, a few words of magic that he promises never to use when his master is absent. When he breaks that promise and animates the brooms to fetch water, he floods the village. Alfred, returning from a sorcerer’s convention, sets all to rights and, seeing that Oliver is genuinely sorry, makes him help with the cleanup but lets him stay. Striking more conventional notes then Leo and Diane Dillons’ sumptuous art for Nancy Willard’s 1993 retelling or Ted Dewan’s science-fictional take (1998), dress and details in these finely detailed illustrations set the tale in a small, tidy, seemingly all-White Renaissance-era European village. Aside from sporting tiny heads, the busy brooms look very much like the ones in the film; a skeleton coat rack is just one of several humorous visual touches, and a climactic elevated view of villagers sloshing and playing in the muddy street has a festive Bruegel-esque air.

A benign, low-key rendition with art that repays second looks.