I love Quentin Blake’s drawings, and think his work on The Twits among the finest book illustrations I have ever seen, but I have never been able to fathom why Roald Dahl’s publishers have seen fit to replace Nancy Ekholm Burkert’s sensitive pencil illustrations for James and the Giant Peach with Blake’s more brash penwork.
This version of James and the Giant Peach is the one I grew up with; I was pretty disappointed with the movie as a kid, though I appreciate more as an adult.
I had a customer flat out ask me to change the colors of some icons I was making for his site because he didn’t specify race and one of the characters was black. He claimed he wanted to “avoid the race issue”. There’s also people who’ve implied to me over the years even drawing people who aren’t white while you are a white person is somehow racist. These were white people discouraging me from drawing non-white folks because “that’s racist”. Which is pretty ridiculous.
Fuck that noise. This is a lovely address to that concept.
Some cameos from “Shirobako” japanese animated series, with Hideaki Anno (Evangelion), Ichiro Itano (Mr Itano Circus), Hiromasa Ogura (background artist), Masao Maruyama (president of MAPPA), Masahiko Minami (president of BONES), Mitsuhisa Ishikawa (president of Production I.G), Seiji Mizushima (Fullmetal Alchemist director), Naoyuki Onda (Berserk character-designer), Takeshi Nogami (mangaka of Girls und Panzer), Takashi Ikehata (director of Genshiken).
