David:Sarah’s story is told through a series of letters from a little girl to her auntie back in Mexico. And there’s not any, there’s no need in a picture book for her to describe environments and costumes and with the way people look, that’s my job. But I also like to add
I guess a dimension of the reality that surrounds the child who’s seeing things through from her point of view.
Sarah: Beautiful, darling. Beautifully said.
David: So I like to have as much space as I possibly can to start this story before the actual text begins. And I do that on the end papers. And in this case we see the good bye at the beginning in Mexico, the embrace between the mother, her sister and the little girl and the men packing up the house or their belongings into a car and then leaving the town and all of this before the text begins, and then going through customs.
And what I wanted to show
I think of illustrations symphonically, musically in a way, and I look for contrasts. And the big contrast in this book obviously to me from the beginning had to be between Mexico, which Sarah and I know quite well from having lived there in the winters for the last 17 years and the industrial north, which I know very well, because I grew up in Detroit, felt always when I would drive to Chicago a kind of familiarity with that landscape around Gary too.
So the adjustment that little Isabel is making that she talks about with her auntie in her letters is bigger than what she even understands. And it’s shown through the pictures in the contrast between the beautiful kind of lyricism at the beginning of the film, I almost said, and then to the stark industrial kind of polluted atmosphere that she moves to. But she creates
but then there’s sort of a gray section in the middle, but then she creates this colorful life, she brings back her home.
Like most of Sarah’s stories it’s a no place, there’s no place like home story. And in this case the child doesn’t actually return home, at least during the course of the book but she recreates her home in this wonderful series of interlocked boxes, this elaborate playhouse that she constructs in her spare time while she’s studying English and helping her mom bake for parties and so on and so forth.
So it’s really, if you look at the book as a swell of different colors and themes conveyed through light and color and texture and so on, you’ll understand more what I’m saying, trying clumsily to say here in words.
Sarah: I think you should go into art. You speak so well about art.
David: I’ll think about it.
