Sendak Brings ‘Little Bear’ To TV

It’s not that he loves children. Nor does he call himself an expert in what children need, or even want.

No, what bonds Maurice Sendak to youngsters, what enables him to speak so clearly to them, is a certain dead-bang sensibility he shares with the little monsters.

“There’s an unruly and tiresome 4-year-old in me,” explains the 67-year-old illustrator-author.

Another thing: You won’t find him sugar-coating childhood.

No wonder kids love him. He sees them as serious people to be taken seriously. Meanwhile, he’s almost as whimsical, subversive and brutally candid as they are. This he has demonstrated for some 40 years in 80 children’s books that have sold more than 7 million copies worldwide.

Now Sendak has brought one of his most beloved works, “Little Bear,” to television. Premiering today at noon on Nickelodeon, and airing subsequent Mondays, this little cartoon show does full justice to its formidable source.

With Sendak serving as an executive producer, it manages to apply TV’s special gifts motion; voices, noise and welcome silence; music - without overwhelming the sublime simplicity of those five “Little Bear” books whose every word and pen stroke you know like your own name.

Or do you? If you came along before the mid-1950s and haven’t been a parent since, maybe you don’t. Here’s a little background. Little Bear is an ursine tyke who has tiny adventures with his friends - Duck, Owl, Cat, Hen - and enjoys love and forbearance from his parents, all in the embrace of his forest home.

Nickelodeon’s 13 half-hour episodes include original stories, as well as tales adapted from the books … such as “Little Bear Goes to the Moon:”

“Fly?” says Mother Bear patiently. “You can’t fly.”

“Birds fly.”

“Yes, birds fly. But they can’t fly to the moon. And you’re not a bird.”

You think that shuts the little so-and-so up?

“Little Bear” is markedly different from most of Sendak’s published pictures and words, which globe-trot through a dark, wild inner world of childhood. The glowing tenderness of “Little Bear” is easily explained: It was written by someone else (namely, Else Holmelund Minarik, who is also involved with the TV series).

“It’s the only time in my life when I worked on the idealized version of a relationship with a child and his mother and father,” says Sendak. “When I draw on my own experience, that relationship is filled with conflict. But what we find in ‘Little Bear’ is what is every child’s right: to be loved totally by the parent, whatever they do, whoever they are.”

To witness “Little Bear,” then, is very reassuring - and for parent as well as child. “Both wish it could be that way between them,” Sendak says. “I wish MY childhood had been that way. Who wouldn’t?”

In contrast to the sterling example of family life that “Little Bear” provides, parents and other adults are always letting kids down, in Sendak’s view. Children are continually betrayed, misled, suppressed, patronized and used as pawns by people with things to sell.

Adults also teach children to play it safe, most grievously with ideas and art.

“Kids don’t start out reacting to things by asking themselves, ‘Hmmm, I didn’t go to Harvard, should I understand what that means?’ They have a kind of supreme courage in thinking about the world, whereas we grownups doubt our own intelligence, our worthiness to comprehend.”