Jon Klassen Quotes

Jon Klassen Interview

"It’s been said that your children's books tend to be edgier than most; you avoid wrapping things up neatly with a bow. What’s your response to that impression of your work?

I never want to promote edgy things just for the sake of it. I think there's as much danger in that as going the other way and being too sweet or just too convenient. When the premise suggests that this can end more ambiguously, and if there's more to be gained there, it should be allowed to do that. I think kids are fine with that. They can’t necessarily tell you that they want sweeter things or edgier things. They just want a good story to be told as well as it can be told. They want to be entertained in a very uncomplicated way.
You could traumatize an audience with the wrong decisions. But I don't think that's inherent in scary stories. I loved being scared as a little kid -- through books particularly though. And I think that’s an important difference. With movies and television, it was too traumatic for me. I find it overwhelming when things are gratuitously violent. But with books, you can take it as it comes, trust that you can turn the page when you're ready. Children's books -- they’re supposed to be simple, and they are. A great challenge is to build the suspense with simple elements. You can condense everything about a scary story and bring it down to the language of the kid. They know that this is something for them and that they've not wandered into someplace that they're not ready for. It's amazing and it's so much fun.
You can deliver bad messages in a very sweet book, too. There's plenty of misguided stuff that sounds just as sweet as can be. These things come in many forms."

"Both of us here at Art of the Picture Book have been dog owners, and we feel that you really nail it with the eyes on your animal characters – especially in the way that their eyes move, while their expression remains the same. What's behind that subtle approach to character? 

I grew up with dogs. We have a cat now. You get used to animals showing how they feel. You can't help but look for human emotions in them. They don't have a lot of ways of showing those things, so you get attuned to smaller movements. But it's also fun as an illustrator to draw the same thing five times and then, when you change it just once, it becomes meaningful. It doesn't have to look very complicated. It's a symbol of how they're feeling.
You can't draw a frustrated dog. When the situation is frustrating, he should be frustrated. You can give just the slightest indication, like if he was frustrated, he’d be looking at us by now.
In Sam & Dave Dig a Hole, the dog has been looking down at the diamonds the boys have been missing in the dirt throughout the entire book. And then at one point they miss the largest diamond in the book—it’s almost two pages across. The dog has just had it, he’s so frustrated that they keep missing these things, that he doesn't even bother to look at the diamond anymore. He’s looking at us for the first time, like in a comedy show, where they break to look at the camera, as if to say, “Can you believe this?”
It's as if you are making a film with really bad actors. They can't stop looking at the camera or they can't help but comment on the story outside of their place in it. With this book, that was the moment to do it. In picture books, the images are so spare that there are usually some opportunities to do that.
I don't have any trouble with the idea of making up a character. But it seems so pompous to say, "I've made up this guy and I know everything about him.” You can't know a person like that. We’ve got these two cute kids and there's the dog. But they also have outside lives that we don't know or understand. We get them to say our very simple lines and make them do their actions. I can think of characters like that. Their actions are very stiff. There's one point when the boys begin to split up and Dave puts his hand on Sam’s shoulder. It's a theatrical stagey action. It's not a private moment, because we can see them making this pose, but it also is an emotional moment. Like in a play, you

Although your landscapes are often quite spartan and they make no attempt to be realistic, they do stand in for exactly what you need for your story. 

Right, they’re just symbols. They can get more complicated the better you get as an illustrator, depending on what the story needs them to be. The audience is always looking for symbols. You can have a beautiful illustration, but if it doesn't have the symbols that simply communicate what you need to communicate, then they’ll get lost. It’s the same with film. You can have a beautiful sequence of shots, but if it's not organized clearly, you get lost and the story’s gone. You've lost your audience, no matter how well you've done visually. It always has to have the idea behind it first.

You've said that illustration for you is a little scary because, unlike with animation, your drawing is not one of thousands. Each one stands on its own. The reader can hold onto the page for as long as they like. You no longer have that sense that it's going to be gone in a second. Every line and every bit matters. 

Yes, at first it is really scary, because you're used to the safety of these drawings going by relatively quickly. Once you watch a film you've worked on, you realize how quickly this work goes by and it loosens you up. It’s just a different language. It's all moving instead of holding still.
With books, at first you think, “How am I supposed to live up to the idea that this is just sitting there on the page?” It's the only image that the readers will get to represent this particular moment. But then you get used to paper and leaving something behind on the page.
With animation, you fill up the frame all the time because you want it to be immersive. There's the implication of a much broader world off the frame all the time.
But with books, it's the opposite. You want it to feel like you thought of this picture specifically for this page. They are not just getting the book version of this story. This is the only story and this is the only way you're ever going to hear it. This is the only way it makes any sense, in this particular form. You choose your trim size for that, you choose your pages for that, and you know them going in. You don't plan an illustration that wouldn't work with that. You know you have complete control over it inside those parameters. can find yourself lost in the emotions. But at the same time, the actors are shouting the whole time. You can hear them from way in the back. And they're always facing the audience, favoring the theater’s audience. So it looks fake and you know it's fake, but you are still lost in what's going on. And I love that. When you can be artificial with the audience and you've done everything you can to convince them of that, but they can't help but get into your story. They get past all of that."

Jon Klassen talks about the way he builds compositions using symbols that help to tell the story and speak to the reader. You can make a very nice intricate illustration but if it is not geared towards communicating the narrative or if it is badly thought out then the message will become lost and ultimately it will not work for the purpose it was designed for. He talks about characters expressing emotions in his work especially dogs, which is very helpful given the main character for my book is a dog. He talks about not being able to express the same emotions as human characters, instead he makes the character look at the reader like a comedy actor as if to say 'can you believe this?'. I like this as a method of communication, creating a connection between character and the audience. I really like jon klassen's work, he seems to have a similar skill to Chris Haughton in being able to make a character stand out and catch the eye even when they make up a very small section of the composition. He seems to have found a good balance between creating intriguing compositions and tailoring pages to best communicate the narrative of the book.