The Great Fire by Jim Murphy | 90-Second Newbery Film

As you may have seen in our most recent issue, Young Adult–author James Kennedy is putting on a little film festival, full of abridged adaptations of award-winning kid lit, the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. And, as promised, we've created our own interpretation of a book that scored a Newbery Honor in 1995, The Great Fire by Jim Murphy. The book spins a rip-roaring account of the Chicago fire of 1871, relying heavily on firsthand accounts, and less on myths about cows.

We thought it might be fun to make a Ken Burns–style documentary based on the book, replacing Burns's cadre of honorary-degreed windbags with some fresh-faced talent: Toddlers. It turned out that the old adage about working with children and animals in film held true (while we didn't work with animals, toddlers are essentially animal children), but we still had a blast making it, changing up the conceit a bit. The kids were natural-born comedians, and cooperative souls. And if you look closely, you can catch my sly homage to Errol Morris's The Fog of War.