BBC Four: The Beauty of Books

This evening I found an interesting series currently on BBC Four about the beauty of books, one episode in particular, Illustrated Wonderlands, about the relationship between illustration and text through the 19th Century to present. "Illustrated books set out to provide a fuller reading experience, to access deeper meanings through a synthesis of words and pictures.What a picture adds to a story and what the words leave out is key."


When talking about the illustrations to Lewis Carrol's 1865 edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland it was emphasised how important Carrol regarded the illustrations to accompany his writings. Employing John Tenniel as illustrator, Tenniel's characters were much more sophisticated and naturalistic than Carrol's original drawings, but still true to being absurd. In these ways they invited adult interpretation, allowing the book to be enjoyed beyond childhood. They even included small in-jokes between author and illustrator, such as a monkey thought to the hotly debated Charles Darwin, which the Victorian readers would also enjoy. The character illustrations in  Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are vital to accompanying the text because the characters are not much described in detail.

A modern interpretation of the illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (of which there are countless examples) by John Vernon Lord was discussed. He explained that by not including Alice in his illustrations you, the reader, let yourself become Alice. He also thinks Carrol would be furious at this as she is the heroin of the story and would have wanted her depicted. These are things I am directly concerned with in my game design.

The programme also discussed Mervyn Peake, originally for his Alice illustrations, but mainly for his passionate belief that illustrations were important for serious adult fiction, including his own books aimed at adults. Best known for his Gormenghast series, published circa 1950, where the illustrations were drawn before the descriptions were written so that he had something formed which he could describe. His characters were described as having their souls on the outside of their bodies.

"Picture books can be very deep and often more universal and more adult than the next age group [of books] up.… They can be about life and death and fear and all sorts of things." - Julia Donaldson

I enjoyed this episode very much, a great trigger for thinking about my own story and animation again after such a long break. Now that I have playtested my game (documented offline, sorry!) I am going to attempt fitting in some work on the animation around the other projects I have taken on recently. I hope I will have something to show for it within the week.