The Country Mouse and The City Mouse: A Christmas Tale

The Country Mouse and the City Mouse: A Christmas Tale is an animated TV special from Michael Sporn Productions, which aired in December 1993 as part as the HBO Storybook Musicals series. As the title implies, the story is an adaptation of the Aesop fable that is set around Christmastime.

The special's two characters, Emily and Alexander, were voiced respectively by Crystal Gayle and John Lithgow. These two cousins would appear in the animated series The Country Mouse and the City Mouse Adventures, also on HBO.

Read more about The Country Mouse And The City Mouse: A Christmas Tale:  Synopsis

Famous quotes containing the words country, mouse, city, christmas and/or tale:

    The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
    The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
    The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife;
    And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
    And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
    And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.
    Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

    A mouse does not run into the mouth of a sleeping cat.
    —Estonian. Trans. by Ilse Lehiste (1993)

    The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.
    Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)

    Monday’s child is fair in face,
    Tuesday’s child is full of grace,
    Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
    Thursday’s child has far to go,
    Friday’s child is loving and giving,
    Saturday’s child works hard for its living;
    And a child that is born on a Christmas day,
    Is fair and wise, good and gay.
    Anonymous. Quoted in Traditions, Legends, Superstitions, and Sketches of Devonshire, vol. 2, ed. Anna E.K.S. Bray (1838)

    —I tell the tale that I heard told.
    Mithridates, he died old.
    —A.E. (Alfred Edward)