Did the kid in your life love Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur?

The film included the Academy Award-nominated “Sanjay’s Super Team,” a brief animated movie that told the story of a boy learning to appreciate his father’s religious traditions.

The animated short ended with an epic superhero-style mythological battle inside the kid’s imagination, and all the art was literally inspired by “The Little Book of Hindu Deities” by Sanjay Patel.

The author of the book also directed the Pixar short, so the book makes the perfect companion to the movie.

My five-year-old daughter wanted to know the names of all the Hindu deities flying across the screen, so we checked out the book for reference. It’s a gorgeous introduction to Hindu mythology, and helped us match the characters from the movie with the classic stories.

There is also Pixar’s “Making of Sanjay’s Super Team” video for free on YouTube. In the video, kids can meet the book’s author and see the real-life family that inspired the animated short.

This post was adapted from the Born Reading Newsletter, my free email newsletter that features one book, one app, and one craft on a semi-regular basis.