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Elmer Fudd is chasing Bugs Bunny through the forest for the hundredth time. Around and around they run, going through the usual
routines—"chasing each other through hollow
logs, down rabbit holes, up trees—when suddenly something different happens. Bugs and Elmer run right out of the frame of film. We see the sprockets at the edge of the film strip as other frames are running by, until the characters are left standing in the middle of a blank white space. They look around momentarily, then run back into the frame of film and the chase continues.
Funny stuff. To me, though, at seven or eight years of age, it was more than funny. When I first saw this cartoon, I
laughed, and at the same time kind of gasped. The idea of the characters running out of one reality and into another left me astounded.
I later came
across this concept in comic books, science fiction stories, and movies, but this cartoon was the first time I encountered it. That idea of shifting realities became a recurring motif in my childhood drawings and went on to permeate the books I write and illustrate now.
TV brought me Bugs Bunny. It also brought me Atomically-Mutated-Giant-Bug movies. In my
favorite, a little girl walks around the desert in a daze, calling out —THEM! THEM— Well, THEM turn out to be ants the size of mobile homes. There were also movies about giant spiders, giant crabs, giant praying mantises, and, most unterrifyingly of all, giant bunny rabbits. This phenomenon worked the opposite way too: In The Incredible Shrinking Man, an Atomically-Mutated man shrinks to the size of a bug. Trying to climb onto his couch becomes like scaling El Capitan in Yosemite.
This stuff is wonderful visual fantasy, based solely on changing the size of ordinary objects.
Instead of characters physically moving into another reality, their own everyday world becomes new through a simple change of scale. Scale changes became a visual obsession that I would come back to again and again.
Television
wasn't my only source of inspiration. The library also opened my eyes to other ways of seeing. It was in the stacks of the Bound Brook, New Jersey, public library that I pored over the Time/Life series of books about the great artists. Stylistically I was drawn to the formal, carefully observed work of painters like Durer, DaVinci, and Bruegel. One of the things I particularly loved was the background landscapes in some of the portraits they painted. Have you ever looked really closely at the scene behind the Mona Lisa? There's no place like that on earth. It could be on Mars.
I eventually
found the volume on the Surrealists. There is a clear line of demarcation between the art I did before I discovered the Surrealists and, well, everything after. I was thrilled when I saw the images of Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, and Rene Magritte. Here were paintings done, for the most part, in a very formal, academic style, which I responded to enthusiastically. But the subject matter was incredibly strange and bizarre—which I responded to even more.
Once again my own imagery traveled to unusual places, and took me along. •
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About the Author:
David Wiesner was born and raised in Bridgewater, New Jersey, another major reason for his skewed take on the nature
of reality. He and his wife, Kim Kahng, and their son and daughter, currently live in Wisconsin.
David was awarded the Caldecott Medal for his book Tuesday (Clarion Books).
His books Free Fall (Lothrop Lee & Shepard) and Sector 7 (Clarion Books) were both chosen as Caldecott honor books.
Recent Books
• The Three Pigs (Clarion Books)
• June 29, 1999 (Clarion Books)
• Hurricane (Clarion Books)
• Sector 7 (Clarion Books)
The Three Pigs (Clarion Books)
Sector 7 (Clarion Books)
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