I have wanted to share this superb animation for a while. Released in Denmark in 2012, Væsen is a wonderful homage to the Golden Age of illustration and animation, including the early work of the Disney studio – Snow White and Pinnochio in particular. Those films pulled in influences from a number of late nineteenth and early twentieth century illustrators. One artist who worked for the studio in those days, the talented and versatile artist Gustaf Tenggren (1896 – 1970), developed a style that drew heavily on the work of artists like John Bauer and Arthur Rackham (he in fact succeeded John Bauer as the illustrator of Bland tomtar och troll, the Swedish fairy-tale annual). It is a tragedy that he would later destroy many of his fabulous early paintings and go on to pioneer a flat and sterile approach that would dominate in children’s illustration for several decades.
Væsen was made for the Animation Workshop, a Danish institute dedicated to film animation and related industries. It is all the more remarkable for being the work of a group of third-year undergraduate students (for detail about the making of the film and its creators, click here). The quality of the artwork is fabulous, but what is most arresting is the weird atmosphere and myth-allegorical sub-text of the film paired with influences pulled from a number of golden age illustrators – most notably Kay Nielsen, Arthur Rackham, John Bauer and Ivan Bilibin. This era of illustration, perhaps more than anything else, solidified the visual language of European folklore: dark forests, radiant spirits gathered by dark reflective pools in mossy groves, eyes and hands peeping and creeping from the boles of rime-scoured trees, mushrooms sprouting from every crevice. Sarah Maitland tried in Gossip from the Forest to make a case for the forest as the womb of the fairy tale, suggesting that the origins of fantastical story-telling are bound up – ‘tangled’, as she would put it – with the arboreal experience. It is a seductive idea, and feels instinctively true. But I wonder whether this association has rather more to do with the enduring popularity of Rackham’s ink and watercolour evocations of Grimm’s tales than with any real relationship between trees and the genesis of fairy tale in Britain; a brief survey of Katherine Briggs’ Folk Tales of Britain reveals a surprising scarcity of woodland settings in our own domestic story-telling. It may well be that this imagery of fairy tale, mediated to a large extent through the pervasive influence of Disney in childhood, has become foundational for the western imagination; it is bound up with the powerful emotional conductors of childhood nostalgia and a longing for a natural world that probably never was.
I’ve collected a handful of images that represent a group of the most famous illustrators of the Golden Age. Their influence is most obviously felt in the work of a small number of contemporary illustrators who keep the spirit of the tradition alive – Ian Miller, Alan Lee, Tomislav Tomic, Julek Heller. Tomic’s art in particular, with its clear allusions to Dürer and Brueghel, is a reminder that the genealogy of this sort of illustration is a long one, running back beyond the origin of the printed book to the fantastical marginalia of the medieval calligraphers.
THOMAS J. T. WILLIAMS 