Educational activity around the short film Giant cloud
Understand the principle of personification.
Effectively practice the expected forms of speech
Giant cloud © Y. Benedi & C.Desrumaux
TitleGiant cloud
ThemeCloud
Genre & keywordsComic, personification, rain, crying
Age (for film)3-11 years
Duration01 min 24 s
DirectorY. Benedi & C.Desrumaux
ProductionY. Benedi & C.Desrumaux (France, 2011)
Understand the principle of personification.
Personification is a figure of speech which consists of attributing human characteristics to an animal or an inanimate thing (concrete object or abstraction) that we make want, speak, act, etc.
In the film, the personification of the houses allows us to imagine ourselves in the place of a house, and, perhaps, to imagine what it might feel if it experienced the same emotions as the men.
Ask children to personify objects from our daily environment such as a fork, a broom, then invent a story and imagine the emotions of these new characters.
Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695) uses terms in his fables relating to both animals and men: animals are personified to represent human society; thus, the lion becomes an allegory of power and the fox, of cunning.
In “The Raven and the Fox”, “Every flatterer lives at the expense of the one who listens to him”. But what would be the moral of the film?
Read the fable “The Raven and the Fox”. The “Renart’s Novel” is a set of stories in which each animal is personified.
Personification can be approached in the form of games and quizzes: Print the file on personification (French literature)...
“The deafening street around me was screaming. » To a Passante, Charles Baudelaire (1855)
“The mistral was angry, and the bursts of its loud voice kept me awake until morning. » Letters from my mill, Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897)
Activity sheet written by: Christophe Defaye
