Babar Returns to the USA via Flickr

Image via WikipediaBy guest contributor Jason Jones.

GeekDads love Flickr.  In addition to being a dead-simple way to organize and share one’s own digital photos, it’s a great way to research places you’re planning to visit, or would just like to.  (This concept has already been monetized by Schmap and others.)  As a result, it might not be a surprise to learn that someone has used Flickr to illustrate a children’s book along just these lines: A Flickr-enabled travelogue of the United States, with crowdsourced photographs illustrated by a famous author.

What might be a little surprising is that the book is Babar’s USA, by Laurent de Brunhoff.  That’s right: The resplendent elephant-king is back in the United States, reprising his 1965 visit, documented in Babar Comes to America. You can see the difference between the two books on the cover: In the 1965 book, the resplendent elephant-king is sitting, in a bespoke green suit of course, atop the Statue of Liberty.  In 2008, however, the Statue has been converted to an elephant, and there are photographs on the cover, allegedly by Zephir.

It turns out that “Zephir” is elephant-speak for Flickr.  The acknowledgements page gives “Thanks to the Flickr community for helping us to extend the range of this book beyond what one photographer, even a monkey backed up by elephants, could handle.” The Flickr users are cited by name, and so it’s not hard to track down the photos: here’s Stacy Lynn Baum, for instance, and here’s Patrick Dentler.  And the “Art Note” explains that the illustrations were “prepared as watercolor cutouts collaged onto digital photographs.  Laurent [de Brunhoff] placed the photos on his light box, traced them, and drew in the figures to scale.  Then he elaborated the figures, doing them in color and inking the outline.  These he cut out and pasted onto the photographic images.”

On the one hand, my Flickr-loving, folksonomic soul loves the premise.  The various photographers naturally have somewhat different eyes, and so there’s a refreshing diversity of visual interest on the pages.  On the other hand, it’s also hard not to see this as a bit of a money-grab: “I’ll grab some photos for free, sketch in some elephants, and rake in the cash from nostalgic parents.”  (Though in this vein it’s not much worse than Babar’s Yoga for Elephants!)

Laurent de Brunhoff celebrates the consumerist paradise of digital culture in the book’s final pages.  Unlike Babar Comes to America, which ended with Babar, Celeste, et al., sailing off to Celesteville with only their memories, this time Babar’s return is sponsored by Best Buy:

two more planes flew overhead and dropped big crates by parachute.  Babar had arranged a surprise.  The crates were filled with boxes and the boxes were filled with more boxes, and inside were presents for everyone: computers and video games, cell phones and iPods, and many, many digital cameras.  The elephants danced with joy.

One oddity about this ending:  it downplays the technology that made Babar’s USA possible.  According to de Brunhoff, “Everyone in Celesteville now loves to take photographs and to send and receive them by e-mail.” No slick web 2.0 photo sharing for these elephants!  They prefer to choke everyone’s inboxes with attached photos.

I can’t honestly recommend this book very highly, but the concept is worth a look.  And if you’re really interested in the art of Babar, then the Morgan Library has an exhibit for you, opening Sept. 19 and running through Jan. 4.   You can also read Adam Gopnik’s take on the exhibit here, which is I think reprinted from the exhibit’s catalogue.

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