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Sunny Baudelaire
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Sunny Baudelaire is one of the main characters from Lemony Snicket's series of books, A Series of Unfortunate Events. In the film she is portrayed by Kara and Shelby Hoffman.
She is the youngest of the Baudelaires. Her two elder siblings are Violet and Klaus Baudelaire. She is described as being an infant throughout much of the series, and as a young (albeit advanced) child toward the end. Sunny can't talk quite as well as the others because she's only a baby, but the baby noises that she makes are often very well translated into common English words by her older siblings.
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Sunny Baudelaire is one of the main characters from Lemony Snicket's series of books, A Series of Unfortunate Events. In the film she is portrayed by Kara and Shelby Hoffman.
She is the youngest of the Baudelaires. Her two elder siblings are Violet and Klaus Baudelaire. She is described as being an infant throughout much of the series, and as a young (albeit advanced) child toward the end. Sunny can't talk quite as well as the others because she's only a baby, but the baby noises that she makes are often very well translated into common English words by her older siblings. As the series progresses, her speech begins to grow and by the end of the series she is speaking in full sentences. Sunny's favorite book is From Molars to Incisors: A Pictorial History of the Tooth, and she hates limp food. Her love of biting isn't as common late in the series, though, when she develops a love of cooking.
It is quite possible Sunny's name comes from the real-life Sunny von Bülow, whose husband's name was Claus, which is the name of the fictional character's brother. Sunny von Bülow and her husband had a horrible relationship, yet Sunny and Klaus Baudelaire have a good one which makes it quite ironic.
Biography
Sunny is a character in all of the A Series of Unfortunate Events books. Most of these involve her 4 large, very sharp teeth and utilization of them. Although Sunny is very young, her cognitive abilities are unusually developed for her age, with her comprehension of their situations generally equaling that of Violet and Klaus.
In The Bad Beginning, she is taken by Count Olaf and locked in a bird cage dangling from Olaf's tower. This act was made to force Violet to marry Olaf. Sunny is released after the fake play ends and Olaf escapes with his troupe. In The Reptile Room, Sunny lives with Uncle Monty and helps by working in the Reptile Room, where she befriends the Incredibly Deadly Viper and helps to reveal the plot of Olaf's. In The Wide Window, Sunny uses her teeth to crack Olaf's fake peg leg open, revealing his true identity.
In The Miserable Mill, Sunny works at a lumber mill and is paid with coupons and sticks of chewing gum. Ultimately, she engages in a teeth-sword fight with Dr. Orwell. In The Austere Academy she is employed at as an administrative assistant to Vice Principal Nero at Prufrock Preparatory school, this is quite foolish because if any children are in the administrative office they get their cutlery taken away and since Sunny was in there everyday she never got to use cutlery. In The Ersatz Elevator, Sunny uses her teeth to climb out of an elevator shaft and help rescue her siblings from a net that is hanging in it, trapping them. At the end of The Vile Village, Sunny and her siblings are accused of murder. From this point onwards they have no more legal guardians, and are on the run from the authorities. In this book Sunny also takes her first steps.
In The Hostile Hospital, Sunny and Klaus disguise themselves as the two white faced women who in turn are disguised as doctors in order to stall Violet's surgery which was actually going to be used to kill her by "accident". In The Carnivorous Carnival, Sunny disguises herself as Chabo the Wolf-Baby in order sneak into a carnival to discover Olaf's scheme. In this book, it is revealed that Sunny has a further interest and talent in cooking. At the end of this book, she is captured by Olaf and taken away. In The Slippery Slope, Sunny secretly discovers the location of the last safe place and signals to her siblings using Verdant Flammable Devices. Her siblings finally rescue her.
As mentioned in The Hostile Hospital and The End, despite all of Lemony's research and hard work, he still does not know the current location, position and status of the Baudelaire children, though in The Beatrice Letters, the poster depicts the ship Beatrice destroyed and her whisk among the wreckage, the siblings dissapearing into the Great Unknown. However, The Beatrice Letters also reveal that Sunny had been on the radio many times discussing her recipes, when she had grown up into a young woman.
Speaking
Though Sunny cannot speak fluently yet, her short sentences and baby babble can often be translated without help, however her siblings can always understand her and are usually quick to translate if someone cannot understand. Generally, when she uses nouns, it is clear what she is referring to. In the later books, such as The Grim Grotto, her baby noises are often 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!"
In The Reptile Room, She says Ackroid, meaning Roger.
The words she uses usually come from historical or cultural origins: in The Slippery Slop she uses the term "Rosebud" to suggest using a sleigh to escape, this being the sleigh from Citizen Kane. In The End (chapter 6) she uses the term "Dreyfus" in reference to Alfred Dreyfus when accused of a crime. (Dreyfus was himself held on an island for a long period of time and his case caused a schism in French society.)
However, in the later books, Sunny begins to improve her speaking skills. In The Hostile Hospital, she says, "Sheer terror", and in The Slippery Slope she says, "I'm not a baby". However, her speaking skills never fully develop in the books, except in the mini-book chapter 14 in The End (A Series of Unfortunate Events) and in Book the Twelfth, she rarely responded to the people around her because she was afraid that her way of speaking was going to give away her true identity.
From time to time, she also still speaks in her "baby language", but the words or phrases she uses tend to come from other languages such as "quid pro quo" which said in Book the Thirteenth.
In Latin, it means this for that, or equal trade. In the sort of "mini-book" in The End called "Chapter 14" It is shown that Sunny seems to be speaking fluently in English in full sentences and actual words.
Skills
While Violet is the inventor and Klaus is the researcher, Sunny is the biter (and later chef). The theme of children each having a particular skill that they are exceptionally good at is also shown with other characters in the series. For example, with the Quagmire triplets, Isadora is a poet, Duncan is a journalist, and Quigley is a cartographer. The Baudelaires' volatile friend Fiona is a mycologist.
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, thanks to her culinary knowledge, she is able to tell her siblings that Wasabi is a common substitute in cooking for horseradish. Violet and Klaus find a small jar of Wasabi in the kitchen of the Queequeg and quickly give her a spoon full which cures her of the deadly poison of the Medusoid Mycelium.
Disguises
Sunny's disguises include:
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