Anthony Browne

Between the lines: Kids go ape over shapes with award-winning illustrator

PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 19 November, 2013, 8:42am

UPDATED : Tuesday, 19 November, 2013, 8:51am

Annie Holife@scmp.com

Anthony Browne is a British children's book creator whose works are loved throughout the world. Bestowed with the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2000 and honoured as Britain's Children's Laureate in 2009, Browne is also the only author-illustrator to win the Kate Greenaway Medal twice.

He has published more than 40 books and is known for his illustrations of primates, from the hauntingly beautiful beasts in Gorilla to comically expressive chimpanzees in the Willy the Wimp series.

With more than a dozen books by Browne in our home, we we were excited to meet this creator of thoughtful and surreal picture books on his first visit to Hong Kong. We joined him at the Central Library for 90 minutes of storytelling and playing the Shape Game, which Browne and his brother "invented" and played in their childhood. Browne thought it was unique until he started playing the Shape Game with his fans and learned that children around the world have also played variations of it.

There were 30 children, accompanied by their parents, at the Hong Kong event.

Browne engaged the children in the Shape Game with just a whiteboard and some coloured pens. One child would draw an abstract shape, another would transform that shape into something recognisable, and all the children would try to identify the object. According to Browne, children are much better at the Shape Game than adults because they have that pure sense of imagination unfettered by self-consciousness and social norms.

As each child was given a turn at the whiteboard and parents chuckled good-naturedly at the children's drawings and guesses, I was able to distinguish children from local or international schools. For example, when presented with an inverted triangle with rounded corners, the local schoolchildren interpreted the shape more literally, as a stone or an ice-cream cone. Those from international schools, on the other hand, saw the shape as the side profile of a duck's head, or even "an upside-down princess in a ballgown".

I wondered if I was stereotyping local versus international school education by making such a distinction. After all, it could just be that those children with unconventional responses were raised by parents who valued and nurtured their creative development.

In any event, all the children were enthusiastic and eager to participate, which resulted in a highly interactive Shape Game session.

After playing, Browne read two of his stories, Into the Forest and Gorilla. Children and parents alike were enraptured. The biggest draw was having Browne pause to point out certain images and share his thought process and intentions when he created them. Often, the background to the main story illustrations held many hidden symbols and imagery.

The Shape Game, Browne's picture book, is different from the game. I expected the book to be a collection of shape drawings. Instead, the reader is treated to an intimate glimpse of the fictionalised Browne family going through their first visit to the Tate Britain museum.

When the family characters stop in front of Augustus Egg's painting Past and Present No1, they dissect the painting for its literal explanations as well as its metaphors. Through the rich narrative and introduction of a number of paintings, Browne succeeds in explaining how art is experienced through the eyes of adults and children.

In a way, Browne continues to play the Shape Game in his picture books, from a bicycle wheel that transforms into an apple in Changes, to a giant's leg among a forest of trees that is only revealed upon closer inspection inInto the Forest.

Annie Ho is board chairwoman of Bring Me a Book Hong Kong, a non-profit organisation dedicated to improving children's literacy by reading aloud to them (bringmeabook.org.hk)

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as Going ape over shapes with award-winning British illustrator

Jon Klassen 2013 Caldecott Winner

Hats off to award-winning illustrator for latest yarns

Tuesday, 26 March, 2013

Annie Holife@scmp.com

Winning one Caldecott award is reason enough to celebrate, but this year Jon Klassen took home two.

His book This Is Not My Hat won the Caldecott Medal, the most prestigious US children’s book award given to illustrators, but he also won a Caldecott Honour – sort of a runner-up award – for illustrating Mac Barnett’s Extra Yarn.

In Extra Yarn, a little girl in a drab, grey town finds a box of multicoloured yarn and begins to knit herself a sweater. She has some extra yarn, and each time she knits something for the people, animals and objects around her, she finds she has extra yarn. The heart-warming story is well-complemented by Klassen’s illustrations, rendered in sombre monochromes with injections of colour and no background detail.

Readers familiar with his style will even recognise that some animal characters that wear sweaters knitted by the little girl are similar to those in I Want My Hat Back, the first book that Klassen wrote and illustrated.

What’s unusual about Klassen is that, one year after publishing this best-selling book, he has created another book, the award-winning This Is Not My Hat, that is also about a search for a lost hat. This story of a little fish that has stolen a hat from a big fish is not a sequel but has a similar premise.
The main difference between the books is the shift in perspective, and change in our sympathies. In the new story, we see the little fish’s point of view as the thief, and in the first book, we see the bear’s point of view as the victim of theft.

This Is Not My Hat is a perfect example of illustrations amplifying the text. In one sequence, the same drawing of a fish fills four consecutive double pages, with the only difference being the change in the fish’s eyes from closed to open to looking up, and finally to narrow slits. When these illustrations are set against the narration by the protagonist, the thieving little fish, the impact is noticeable. The colours are subtle and muted against a black background, the fish in This Is Not My Hat is reminiscent of Leo Lionni’s  colourful Swimmy.

A  Canadian living in Los Angeles,  Klassen has an established career in animation. He created a  trailer for This Is Not My Hat, and was the illustrator behind U2’s animated music video for their song I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight   as well as a promotion for the BBC’s coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Klassen creates superb works of art as an illustrator, and he continues to collaborate on  other people’s stories. The wide range of his talent can be witnessed in two new releases – House Held Up by Trees   by Ted Kooser,  a former United States poet laureate,  and   The Dark by the prince of twisted humour,  Lemony Snicket.

Annie Ho is board chairwoman of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong, a non-profit organisation dedicate to improving children’s literacy by reading aloud to them (bringmeabook.org.hk)

Play-Reading: dramatizing picture books - Julia Donaldson

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Get swept up in your children's play-acting

BETWEEN THE LINES

Annie Ho familypost@scmp.com

I know there are Nobel Laureates and Poet Laureates, but I only recently became aware of Children's Laureates - an award to celebrate outstanding achievement in children's book writing and illustrating in Britain. The current Children's Laureate is Julia Donaldson. Best known as the creator of The Gruffalo, Donaldson is focusing on play-reading, that is, dramatising picture books, in her two-year term.

After studying drama and music in school, Donaldson spent her early 20s busking around Europe with her guitar-playing husband, performing songs that she had written.

She eventually settled back in Britain to write and sing songs for children's television shows. One of her songs, A Squash and a Squeeze, was made into a picture book illustrated by Axel Scheffler. And thus began a successful partnership that continues after two decades and more than a dozen books, including The Gruffalo, Tiddler and Room on the Broom.

As with Donaldson and her sister in their childhood, my daughters are always play-acting. The grown-ups in our home must either participate or sit on the floor, because the pretend play invariably involves using our sofa as a fire engine, castle, or spaceship.

Last week, we joined a group of friends and their children for KidsFest's live theatre performance of Room on the Broom.

The story is told in the easy lilting rhyme and repetition that is Donaldson's signature style. (She has joked that it's hard for her to write lines that don't rhyme.) The live show adds catchy tunes that complement the story well.

Both my daughters enjoy the book, but the older one was anxious about seeing a dragon in the theatre performance. She learned from her friend who had seen the show the weekend before us that the onstage dragon was smaller in size than the onstage witch. She was so delighted with this news that she proceeded to share it with everyone within earshot at the show, without the requisite "spoiler alert" warning.

I find KidsFest shows very appealing because they resemble play-acting. They don't have hi-tech stage sets or elaborate costumes. The Room on the Broom performance consisted of four actors using basic costumes or puppets to play a variety of characters.

After watching the show, my friend and her two daughters came back to our home to play.

We had enjoyed The Nutcracker ballet together last month, and with the added inspiration from Room on the Broom, our girls put on their own five-minute performance of Nutcracker for my friend and me.

Children are naturally drawn to participating in stories, either by acting out parts of the story or by simply joining in the chorus. Play-reading not only stimulates the imagination, but also improves children's reading skills and builds their confidence.

In recent years, Donaldson has been writing material for schools; there is no doubt that she increased the fun level in learning phonics with her Songbird series of early readers from Oxford University Press. A keen advocate of play-reading, she will soon be publishing a series of 36 short plays through Pearson's Bug Club. It is titled Julia Donaldson Plays and includes her own plays and those of other children's authors. Intended for use in schools, each play has six parts, and the idea is for six children to read and swap parts until they are confident enough with the words to perform a rehearsed reading in class.

To try play-reading at home, Donaldson's Play Time is a collection of short plays which includes tips on ways each play can be acted and simple costumes ideas to help children get into character.

Play Time has so much great material for six- to 10-year-olds, I suspect it will be at least a few more years before my husband and I can sit on our sofa however and whenever we want.

Annie Ho is board chairwoman of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong, a non-profit organisation dedicated to improving children's literacy by reading aloud to them (bringmeabook.org.hk)