Baby Einstein - Baby Van Gogh

This title is one of the Baby Einstein series of videos created by Julie Aigner-Clark. Called "Digital Board Books", the series is designed for very young children to introduce them to concepts such as language, classical music and art. The Baby Van Gogh title is the introduction to art and color.

The video "stars" a hand puppet named Vincent Van Goat (who is, as you would expect, a goat) Although Vincent never speaks, he does paint up a storm. The video is broken into six segments, each one representing one of the primary or secondary colors. (red, yellow, blue, orange, green and purple) Each color is introduced by a poem written and read by Aigner-Clark and then short visual scenes featuring that color are shown to classical music such as Ravel's Bolero and Bizet's Carmen. Intercut with these visuals is Vincent Van Goat working on one of his paintings, which in actuality are Van Gogh's works that are predominately in the feature color. (Van Gogh's Sunflowers represent Orange for example)

Aigner-Clark's poetry is suspiciously similar to Dr Seuss's My Many Colored Days and doesn't add much to the experience, but the visual and music combinations were very pleasing. For example, Yellow. Set to March of the Toreadors from Carmen the color is represented by a parade of wind-up chicks, fields of yellow flowers and other striking images of the sunny color. Some of the colors aren't as well represented, purple is especially uninspired with its visual choices, but in all the scenes are well done. The one improvement I would have made was to cut some of the more egregious scenes of Aigner-Clark's and other staffer's children. It's obvious the producers though they were precious, but they really weren't. Also, there are a couple very abrupt and loud transitions (such as a popping balloon) that may startle younger babies.

Anyway, enough about what I thought of the video, what did my son think? At first, I thought I'd scored a winner. He sat mesmerized through the first two colors, and reacted to some of the familiar images (such as animals). After that though, he got bored and wandered off to do something else. I ended up watching the rest of the video by myself. This is the same reaction he had to the first two videos in this series, Baby Einstein and Baby Bach. Those were designed for ages up to 18 months, and since my son is 14 months, I figured that was the reason for the boredom. Baby Van Gogh is rated for ages 1-4 years though, and he still wasn't interested enough to watch the whole thing. The DVD version gives the option to set the movie for repeated play, but I can't imagine ever using it since he wouldn't even sit through it once.

This is purely a technical complaint, but the DVD version has a very irritating menu system. When you first load the DVD you can choose between the movie, listening to just the music or viewing the art gallery. Once you choose one of these however, you can't get back to that main menu to choose another unless you reload the DVD.

I have mixed feelings about Baby Van Gogh, or any of the series. On the one hand they are beautifully designed and the content is of superior quality to some of the more vapid children's videos out there. On the other hand, my son was quickly bored with them and if I'd bought them they'd more than likely be gathering dust. I would suggest renting the videos or borrowing them from a friend to see if your child will enjoy them. If they do, I highly recommend purchasing them for your personal collection.