daadirty.blogg.se - We are growing mo willems

“They are both about big emotions.Welcome to Episode 9! Where do you get your ideas? Please join us with author Mo Willems. “I know very precious little about opera, but I found these commonalities between opera and picture books,” Willems said. This weekend at the Kennedy Center, Willems and soprano Renée Fleming will present “ The Ice Cream Truck Is Broken! & Other Emotional Arias,” featuring famous arias with his “Mo-ified lyrics”. Those processes now span a multitude of disciplines, including opera. So when I got the opportunity to have a career in books, I was very conscious of the idea that I should enjoy all of the processes as much as I could.” Looking back, he added, “I just felt too pressured, I was working too hard trying to keep the team together, and I think some of the joy of the project didn’t make it to the screen because I wasn’t able to translate that. What did he learn from the experience? “You can survive failure,” Willems said, and laughed. It was called “ Sheep in the Big City,” and it was about a nonverbal sheep wanted by a top-secret military organization for a sheep-powered ray gun - “and he was the only sheep that fit in it,” Willems said. He recalled an animated television series he created for Cartoon Network when he was in his early 30s.

“I mean, look, there are a lot of failures,” he said. Many of Willems’s characters experience failure and grow from it, an arc he knows well. Illustration from “The Pigeon Will Ride the Roller Coaster!” Art © Mo Willems In 2004, Willems published “Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale,” about a toddler, Trixie (named after Mo and Cher’s son, Trix), who loses a beloved stuffie on a trip to the laundromat but doesn’t yet have the words to let Dad know, instead crying: “AGGLE FLAGGLE KLABBLE!” Instead, it went on to become a New York Times bestseller, earn a Caldecott Honor, and embed itself in the shelves and psyches of kids who are now grown. Willems reworked “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!,” expecting it would go directly to remainders.

I didn’t think about pages, I thought about surfaces,” he recalled, adding that he saw the book itself as “a physical sculpture that is on a kid’s lap.” “I looked at the book differently than maybe some other people. He’d worked as a writer and animator for television, including “Sesame Street,” but he’d never published a children’s book.

Growing up in New Orleans and later attending New York University, Willems was always writing and drawing.