| Review by RaeAnne Marsh Author: Mo Willems; 396 pages; Hyperion Paperbacks; $12.99 When most of us return from a travel vacation, the record we have is in snapshots: "self (insert name) standing in front of the Eiffel Tower" or "self standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon." Animator Mo Willems' book, You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When It Monsoons, is a different animal. Not only are sights and sites seldom seen in his "one cartoon a day" travelogue, neither is anyone simply standing. "I'm a character artist," Willems says. "I like drawing people more than buildings." His book allows readers to share his travel experiences and insights. The artist behind the Caldecott Honor-winning book Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and animated films such as the short Life (2000) opens to us the private journal he kept on his around-the-world adventure to which he treated himself after graduating from art school in 1990. A journal entry on 9/07 depicts a man in Egypt "beating the water to scare the fish into the nets." And 2/17 captures a precarious livelihood in "Cabbage farmer lives his life on the edge (Ngadisari, Java, Indonesia)." Primitive drawings, to be sure, but these were penned as sketches intended to capture the rhythms of the lands he visited. And it captured the rhythm of his own evolution, as the entries reveal. The same impartiality penned in the 6/26 sketch of a baton-wielding figure captioned, "Park employee requests the patrons keep off the grass (Paris, France)" is found almost a year later in the 5/12 one drawn in homeland U.S.A.: "Regulars discuss sports, politics, & spring gardening plans (Chicago, IL, USA)." And his explanatory text on 4/14 baldly presents the broadening perspective extended travel imparts: "Even though I was revisiting my favorite local sites (in his home town of New Orleans), I felt like a tourist. It was disconcerting for everything to be so familiar yet foreign." Around-the-world travel included visits to locales where "I was out in the desert, in places completely different linguistically and religiously, and I'd [still] be accepted," recalls Willems. Yet the hardest border to cross on this adventure was U.S./Canada: "5/14 - refused entry to Canada by inspector #1508 (Detroit, MI, USA)." "The daily sketch might not have been the most relevant or even funny event of the day. It was simply the one that stood out the most when I sat down in the evening and pulled out my paper, ink, and pens," says Willems in the book's introduction. Indeed, he now admits, "Sometimes things would happen to me on the trip in a day, and I wouldn't immediately process their importance or didn't quite understand." Fifteen years later, having some distance from the trip, he has added explanatory text to the sketches' terse captions and given the events a sequential perspective they lacked in their initial "in the moment" creation. Even so, Monsoons is impressionistic and improvisational in its presentation. Unlike his professional work created with an audience in mind, this travelogue is direct, raw and bluntly honest. "Not until late in the trip did it start to occur to me this was something others would want to see," says Willems, adding he's happy to have it public - "even the embarrassing things." |
