I had my doubts though. London wasn’t ready for the crazy South African fleeing the scene of the British Library gift shop with an armful of Alice-in-Wonderland stationery and a demented but satiated look in her eye. ‘Bobby Dies of Lead Poisoning’. Peruse it was then.
And it was in these two hours of perusing/penny-less loitering (potato, tomato)that I fell in love Italian-born illustrator Sara Fanelli.
There is a certain unbridled joy in being given free licence in art class to colour outside the lines. Another in handling an art tool that won’t bend entirely to your will. (The second, however, may also be dished with the initial sheer frustration.) This is Fanelli’s gift as an illustrator, to remake the world outside the lines, recreating characters that don’t entirely bend to anyone’s will. And what better way than by (mis)representing one of our most infamously mischievous and unruly characters, Pinocchio. (The result of which made for a brief mention in my last blog...)
Asked to work together with translator Emma Rose on an edition of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio for the Walker Illustrated Classics series, it was Fanelli’s first impulse to ease up on the moralistic overtones she remembered from her Italian youth. Her sense of Collodi’s tale was revived, instead, by its surreal characters and dream-like story, a dream in which one strange moment is always enfolded within another and never feels beholden to excuse its (il)logic to the reader.
Watching Roberto Benigni’s Pinocchio (2002) a few years back, I had a similar re-encounter. The fairy I remembered from my Disney-informed youth was a bottle-blonde who routinely donned an immaculate sparkly blue dress. But Benigni’s fairy had dark, secret eyes and long, dark blue hair. And Benigni’s fairy did not disappear and re-appear with the wave of a wand and emerge from a centre of bright light. His fairy travelled by coach, a coach drawn no less by an endless expanse of white mice. It was this version of Pinocchio that returned me to the real magic of Collodi’s fantastic escapade. Like Fanelli’s work it was refreshingly unapologetic.
Returning to the Walkers Illustrated Classic, this unapologetic turn has arguably revealed a version closer to the original. Rather than making this a moralistic tale (where a once naughty boy is rewarded by the end for good behaviour), Rose and Fanelli ultimately re-tell the story of the inexhaustible love of a father for that wilful and wild creature: his son. And with their help, at twenty-seven I have fallen in love not only with Fanelli’s work but also with a tale whose watered down version never wowed me in my bedtime-story days. I have come to fall in love with Medoro, the blue fairy’s right-hand agent, a “handsome poodle” in “a coachman’s uniform,” “with jewelled buttons and two large pockets to hold the bones his mistress [gives] him for lunch.” (Although, I adore most the blue satin cover he wears on his tail.) I have fallen in love with Gepetto, the carpenter teased by the children and called “Maisy on account of his yellow wig […] exactly the colour of maize porridge.” And I have fallen in love with that incorrigible stump of wood that becomes a real boy. What I love most though, of this edition, is the reminder that the joy of story magic is for all ages. And arguably Fanelli’sgreatest contribution here is her work’s emphasis that illustration is art, the art of a magical pencil.
So here are a few magic pencils I want to tip a colourful hat to:
Ralph Steadman, Thank You. As always, you are a mad man and genius. With your help, the Firefly Books edition of an art-deco inspired Alice in Wonderland is every bit the warped and weird adventure it should always be. (As a teeny tiny digression, I would also like to tip that colourful hat here to Cape Town’s finest, The Book Lounge. In true form, you are that good bookstore and rarity, infinitely rewarding with such finds!)
Erin E. Stead, for your technique of combining woodblock printing and pencil that have sketched in my mind Amos McGee, the “early riser,” the chess-playing elephant (“who thought and thought before making a move”), the racing tortoise (“who never lost”), the pigeon-toed penguin (“who was very shy”), the sniffly rhinoceros (“who always had a runny nose”), and the bespectacled owl (“who was afraid of the dark”). You have brought the dear characters of A Sick Day for Amos McGee into my home with immeasurable tenderness.
And a thank you to Joel Stewart, for the dreamy and delightful depiction of Dr Moon in Tree Soup (A Stanley Wells Mystery).And for your Sneep, Snook, Loon and Knoo in Have You Ever Seen a Sneep? A treasure in my bookcase is your contribution to the Walkers Illustrated Classics’ collection, Tales of Hans Christian Andersen. The Little Mermaid you have rendered is hauntingly sweet, sad and beautiful, while your emperor’s nightingale remains steadfastly true and good in the face of Death.
To Timothy Basil Ering, your mouse of Kate DiCamillo’s imagination is as physically tiny and equally big of heart. It is not hard to find one’s self endeared by that small “disappointment” of the brave but minute Despereaux of large-eared fame. And where DiCamillo’s unequivocal love speaks in leaps and bounds for her unique and often misfit characters, it is matched by yours.
Likewise, to Yoko Tanaka who has so seamlessly contributed to the “dark but warm” tale in Kate DiCamillo’s The Magician’s Elephant. I could think of no more a fitting magic pencil than yours for this city of Baltese where an orphan dreams of his missing sister and elephants. Your illustrations materialise the magician’s elephant that arrives shortly after with the same tragically charming art as DiCamillo’s story. Meaning only to “conjure a bouquet of lilies”, the reconciliations that ripple from the magician’s act, both painful and uplifting, demand a maturity that you have faultlessly delivered.
And to Angela Barrett, for your illustrations in the recent Walker Books edition of Beauty and the Beast (as retold by Max Eilenberg). The vision of the Beast is unparalleled, full with the complexity and the body of longing his bedevilled form has made him. And in your artist’s truer understanding of his beastly form, you have made him other but exquisite. The double-page depiction of the penultimate moment reveals this, with Beauty’s return to the dying Beast. Her deep regret for that fateful broken promise is tangible, and the reader wants no more than her the death of this snow-covered and moonlit Beast. In the end I believe I share, too, in your ambivalence, when that Beast so beautiful is transformed back into a handsome and human prince.
My over-rated (un)happy ending...
