Sunny Baudelaire

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Series of Unfortunate Events character
Image:Sunny Baudelaire.jpg
Sunny, as drawn by Brett Helquist.
Sunny Baudelaire
Gender Female
Hair color Novel: Black
Illustrations: Auburn or Black (Single hair on which ribbon is worn)
Film: Blonde
Age Toddler
Film actor Kara Hoffman/Shelby Hoffman
1st appearance The Bad Beginning
V.F.D. alliance Volunteer side of the schism

Sunny Baudelaire is the youngest of the Baudelaire orphans in the children's books A Series of Unfortunate Events, along with her brother Klaus and her sister Violet. She is too young to talk, but her baby noises are translated by either the narrator Lemony Snicket or her siblings. Sunny takes her first name from Claus von Bülow's wife, Sunny. The character was represented in the film Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events by Kara and Shelby Hoffman. In the movie, her baby talk is translated through subtitles. In the film, the character is much more sarcastic than Sunny is in the books. In The End she learns how to talk, but some of her words still aren't real.

Sunny in the 2004 film.
Enlarge
Sunny in the 2004 film.

Sunny plays a very significant role in all books in A Series of Unfortunate Events books. Most of these involve her large, very sharp teeth and utilization of them. She has used them for many impossible tasks, such a teeth-sword fight with Dr. Orwell. Although Sunny is very young, her cognitive abilities are unusually developed for her age, with her comprehension of their situations generally equalling that of Violet and Klaus. She cannot speak properly, yet what she says can occasionally be translated without any help. When she shouts "Velocity!" for instance, it means "Faster!" or "Quickly!". In the later books, such as The Grim Grotto, her baby noises are often clever allusions or subtextual meanings that relate to the plot as a whole, such as "Busheney!" which means "You're an evil man with no concern whatsoever for other people!", "Hewenkella" which means she is curious about being able to see, or "Scalia!" which means "The literal interpretation makes no sense!"

Pietrisycamollaviadelrechiotemexity is a very long word that is first mentioned in book 8. It is said to have been Sunny's first 'word', Sunny's first proper word being 'Bite'. It means "I must admit I havn't the faintest idea what is going on."

Sunny's favorite book is From Molars to Incisors: A Pictoral History of the Tooth, and she hates limp food.

At the end of The Vile Village, Sunny and her siblings are accused of murder. From this point onwards they have no more guardians, and are on the run from the authorities. In this book Sunny also takes her first steps.

In The Carnivorous Carnival Sunny's other skill emerges; she likes to cook. This comes in handy in The Slippery Slope, where she cooks Olaf and his troupe an entire meal by herself, and in The Grim Grotto, where her culinary knowledge helps her siblings discover a cure to a deadly poison. Sunny also dresses up in disguises:

Also, Sunny becomes intelligent enough in The Penultimate Peril to come up with the idea to burn down the Hotel Denouement to signal to Kit Snicket and the other volunteers that the last safe place is safe no more.