A puppet who wants to be a real boy
Best known for their design work on the Harry Potter film series, MinaLima has also acquired a following for their beautiful series of classic stories. Reimagined and illustrated in their trademark style, the books are reminiscient of fairytale volumes of old. Imagine a library in a magical castle. You pick up a book and what do you expect to find? A detailed cover? Illustrated typography? Jewel-bright illustrations? MinaLima classics have it all. What is more, they are famed for the interactive details that make reading them a fully immersive experience.
What about Pinnochio?
Say Pinnochio and many people will start whistling I’ve got no strings/hold me down from the Disney adaptation of 1940. The original work, The Adventures Of Pinnochio, dates back to the 1880s. It begins with a poor woodcarver, Geppetto, who is given a piece of enchanted wood. Hoping to make a living as a puppeteer, he begins to carve a puppet, but Pinnochio has a life of his own. After being rude to Geppetto and ignoring the admonitions of a talking cricket, Pinnochio falls in with the wrong crowd.
During a show, a crowd of puppets recognise Pinnochio as one of their own, and he is taken by the terrible showman who eventually takes pity on him and sends him home. However Pinnochio then finds himself in the clutches of a fox and a cat who are not so easily won over.
The story is more sinister than might be imagined – there is a moment, for example, where Pinnochio is hung on a noose and he comes close on another occasion to being reduced to firewood. This is a reminder that his tale began not as a novel but as series of pedagogical folk stories that preached to children about the value of obedience.
Q&A with MinaLima
To what extent did previous versions of Pinocchio inspire you?
Redesigning a classic tale that has been loved by many generations of children is a big responsibility so we try to approach it with new eyes.We actually don’t refer to existing versions in an attempt to bring a completely fresh new look.
How does illustration differ from design? Is there anything that you especially enjoy about illustration?
Designing an insert, especially if it’s an interactive element, can be a quite a technical process and that can come with its own challenges, so in many way there is a freedom in illustration – it’s simpler! And, of course, we have the flexibility of deciding whether we make it a spot or feature illustration or go all out and turn it into a double-page spread!
How do you decide which illustrations will be created with papercraft and which will be print?
The story of Pinocchio has 36 chapters and they are all very short which is why we made the decision to make each chapter opener into an elaborate illustration, this gives a flavour of what will follow in the pages ahead.
The inserts highlight key moments in Pinocchio’s journey and are a mechanism for the reader to start building a relationship with the character. With some inserts we invite the reader to tell their own stories and others, for example the shark, are such crucial junctures in the plot that we just could not leave them out!
Pinocchio is a puppet and yet he is the main character of the story. How did you show the life within this wooden boy?
This was the main challenge of the book: to give life to something made from wood. We used two techniques to achieve this. One was through expressions on Pinocchio’s face: you will notice these are very simple at the beginning of the book and become more and more defined and life-like as the story develops.
The other was through the inserts and pull-outs; it is through this interaction between Pinocchio and the reader that the puppet becomes a boy.
What is it that drew you to classics and fairy tales?
We love magical worlds and what better way to escape into them than to delve into classic tales. These are stories that have stood the test of time, that have been passed down from generation to generation and have captured the imaginations of so many. When we were presented the opportunity to give Peter Pan the MinaLima treatment, the proposition was too irresistible, and now 5 years later we have seven books published and another few up our sleeves. We also love creating new worlds and are developing original stories by MinaLima, so watch this space!
How would you describe your design style?
We are not afraid of using colour and we have a passion for typefaces. We love old ephemera and vintage books, and collect these from all over the world. We are still very analogue in a lot of our design work from sketching illustrations by hand to making paper models for the inserts. We tend not to follow modern design trends, so we feel that we have created our own look which harks back to a time past. This is why the classic tales suit us, because we can apply this look to stories from another time and place. You can see with the gold-foiled front cover of our MinaLima Classics series, we are paying homage to the beautiful vintage books from the end of 1800s and beginning 1900s.
- The Adventures Of Pinnochio (designed by MinaLima) is available now from Harper Design. RRP. £25.00 (Provided for review as part of a promotional blog tour)
