Briefly, on Babar
Several years ago I read Should We Burn Babar? by Herbert Kohl, and was surprised to find books I remembered so fondly from my childhood contained such objectionable stuff. (The book’s analysis of the construction of the Rosa Parks myth is fascinating, too). I went back to the Babar books, and the criticisms weren’t exaggerated; naked, African Babar’s mother is shot, he quickly gets over his grief with a move to Paris, where he is taken in by a lady who dresses him and civilizes him, so that when he returns to the elephants, he is quickly chosen as King.
Adam Gopnik’s piece in the New Yorker, “Freeing the Elephants,” doesn’t dispute this, but he works rather too hard to portray Babar as a comedy of the bourgeoisie rather than as an apology for colonialism. I agree with him about the art, though:
The completed Babar drawings, by contrast, are beautiful small masterpieces of the faux-naïf: the elephant faces reduced to a language of points and angles, each figure cozily encased in its black-ink outline, a friezelike arrangement of figures against a background of pure color. De Brunhoff’s style is an illustrator’s version of Matisse, Dufy, and Derain, which by the nineteen-thirties had already been filtered and defanged and made part of the system of French design.
Link from The Morning News.