A Companion to Children's Literature - Группа авторов

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David Wiesner also specializes in wordless picturebooks, many of which have won international acclaim. He is the only picturebook artist to receive the Caldecott Medal three times, in 1991 for Tuesday (1991), in 2002 for The Three Pigs (2001), and in 2007 for Flotsam (2006), thus demonstrating that wordless picturebooks meet high aesthetic standards and tell an interesting story by means of a textless picture sequence.

      Blurring the Boundaries between Art Forms, Media Formats, and the Audience

      A special case is those picturebooks that are influenced by Japanese manga. Although popular among comics and manga aficionados since the 1970s, Japanese animation films (animes) and manga captured the international market in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. Some Western picturebook artists exemplarily referred to manga aesthetics in their artwork, the most prominent being Allen Say, who spent his childhood years in Japan and immigrated to the United States at the age of 16. Schooled by the renowned manga cartoonist Shinpei in Japan, Say created a wealth of picturebooks that are distinguished by a hybrid mixture of manga and Western aesthetics. This is evident in his first picturebook, The Boy of the Three-Year Nap (1988), with a text by Dianne Snyder, and also in the award-winning Grandfather’s Journey, published in 1993 (Kümmerling-Meibauer 2013).

      Other picturebook artists turned toward film as a possible source of inspiration, using typical aspects associated with films to enhance the narrative and aesthetic quality of their books. Camera movements and camera perspectives dominate the wordless picturebooks by Istvan Banyai: Zoom (1995a) and Re-Zoom (1995b). Comparable to the zoom of a camera, each visual depicts settings, figures, and objects moving from close-up to middle distance and a panorama shot, thus revealing surprising and unexpected views. Different perspectives, such as worm’s eye view, bird’s eye view, and a view from the characters’ angle, distinguish the picturebooks by Chris Van Allsburg, such as Jumanji (1981) and The Polar Express (1985). Not surprisingly, both picturebooks featured as movies, the former as a live action film (released in 1995), the latter a live action-style movie created with the motion capture technique in 2004 (Tydecks 2018).

      While the Van Allsburg adaptations created their own cinematic visual style, some picturebook stories were adapted into children’s movies that ventured to capture the atmosphere and illustrative style of the originals, such as Granpa (1989) and Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman (1993). Picturebooks are increasingly sources of transmediation, with books launching franchises, promoting a merchandising industry with toys, gadgets, and computer games. While this development initially focused on long-popular and canonized picturebooks, such as the Railway series by Rev. Awdry, the picturebooks on Curious George (1941–1966) by H.A. Rey and Margaret Rey, and the series on Pettson and Findus (1984–2012) by Sven Nordquist, newly released picturebooks created by prominent picturebook-makers are increasingly marketed as multimedia products from the beginning. This tendency swelled in the twenty-first century but predecessors are already discernible in the 1990s (Hamer 2018).

      Yet another developing trend was picturebooks based on the author–illustrator’s autobiographical memories. Groundbreaking works are War Boy (1989) by Michael Foreman, dealing with the author’s wartime experiences, and Tibet Through the Red Box (1998), by Peter Sís, which combines the author’s childhood reminiscences with a biographical account on his father’s secret mission to Tibet (Kümmerling-Meibauer 2010). Picturebooks like these raise the abiding question of whether they are targeted at children only or whether they squint at an adult audience as well. That picturebooks can be interpreted on different levels, however, is not a new phenomenon in the development of the picturebook. This tendency already emerged with the picturebooks created by avant-garde artists in the 1920s and 1930s. However, the crossover appeal of picturebooks intensified in the last decades of the twentieth century for manifold reasons. In line with the popularity of crossover fiction for young people, picturebook-makers and publishers found a market for picturebooks addressing multiple audiences, thus calling attention to the picturebook’s potential crossover effect (see Beckett 2012 for a comprehensive survey on this topic).

      The capability to attract adult readers is a characteristic that crossover picturebooks share with artists’ books (Drucker 2018). It is therefore not surprising that several artists, such as Warja Lavater, Enzo Mari, and Bruno Munari, created art works in both realms. The “folded stories” by Warja Lavater, the wordless picturebooks by Mari, and the sophisticated Libro illeggible N.Y. 1 (Unreadable Book N.Y. 1, 1967) and I prelibri (The Pre-Books, 1980) by Munari are situated at the interface between crossover picturebooks and artists’ books, since the artists creatively use the intricate book design, typography, and playful character of the material quality, which are typical features of the artists’ book (Beckett 2012, pp. 19–50). Yet they do so by openly addressing children as potential readers, thus paying tribute to the child’s capacity to deal with complicated picturebook concepts.

      In the final decades of the twentieth century, postmodernism led to significant changes in the field of picturebooks, particularly in the Western world. Picturebook scholars have described the typical features of postmodern works of art, pointing to their arbitrariness, discontinuity, hybridity, and eclecticism (see Allan 2012 for an extensive survey on this discussion). Other features mentioned in this respect are playfulness, intertextuality, the arbitrariness between signifier and signified, and parodic recycling of popular genres like fairy tales and nursery rhymes (Sipe and Pantaleo 2008). These characteristics can be found in picturebooks such as Black and White (1990) by David Macaulay – winner of the Caldecott Medal in 1991, Shrek (1990) by William Steig, and The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (1992) by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith. Other picturebooks emphasize the metafictive devices of the picturebook story; a prominent example is Jörg Müller’s Das Buch im Buch im Buch (A Book in a Book in a Book, 1990), which relies on the mise en abyme strategy, or they point to the multiplicity of perspectives, as is evident in Anthony Browne’s Voices in the Park (1998). By these strategies, postmodern picturebooks call attention to their status as works of art; they invite the reader to reflect on the conditions and structures of narratives as a whole and on how a perusal of texts and images may evoke different interpretations. Considering these complex issues, the dual readership of postmodern picturebooks comes to the fore. Due to their playful character and ironic nature, they often appeal to adolescents and adults, although children remain their primary audience.

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