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Award-winning animator Mikey Please on his first solo picture book
Charlotte Eyre is the former children’s editor of The Bookseller magazine, and current children's books previewer. She has programmed ...more
Charlotte EyreCharlotte Eyre is the former children’s editor of The Bookseller magazine, and current children's books previewer. She has programmed ...more
Mikey Please, the BAFTA-winning, Oscar-nominated animator and writer, is very excited about his first solo picture book. We are speaking over video call, he from a book-linked study in Bristol, and he holds up an early handmade copy of his story about a café and its monstrous customers that looks remarkably like the finished version that HarperCollins is releasing in September.
The Café at the Edge of the Woods grew out of a game Please played with his wife and son during Covid-19 lockdowns and it is about a woman who builds a café then hires a creature called Glumfoot to act as a waiter. When the hoped-for customers don’t arrive, Glumfoot manages to persuade an ogre to come for some food, although problems ensue when the ogre doesn’t fancy Rene’s truffle stew or gravlax and asks for pickled bats and buttered mice instead.
In the game Please used to play with his son he would be the demanding mythical creature asking for something disgusting, or a pixie asking for dandelion salad with raindrops from the sky, and his wife was a pompous chef. “It was my son’s job to mediate between these two parties,” he says. “It was delightful. He would absolutely love my repulsive requests, and seeing the frustration and outrage of his mum.”
There is no one definite answer to anything. Compromise and adjusting is a really important part of being a
happy human
Please is a successful animator and writer, and is one of the creators behind the festive film “Robin Robin” (released on Netflix and nominated for an Academy Award in 2022). His Royal College of Art thesis film “The Eagleman Stag” won a BAFTA for best short animation and he is now developing projects for Aardman, the Bristol-based animation studio. So why turn his hand to picture books? Please says he has been “dreaming and scheming” about making books for years, being a big fan of Raymond Briggs, especially Briggs’ work in the “grey area between the classic picture book and the graphic novel panel”, and Calvin and Hobbes’ creator Bill Watterson. Watterson was “the jewel in the centre of the cave I grew out of” with his gross-out humour, emotional resonance and absurdism, all of which can be found in The Café at the Edge of the Woods. There is also a nice little reminder that life improves when you bend with the circumstances you find yourself in. Rene’s restaurant is a success when she adapts to her monstrous and mythical clientele, because, as Please says, “change is important”. “There is no one definite answer to anything. Compromise and adjusting is a really important part of being a happy human.”
Once he started on the project, the text came fairly quickly, but Please spent another two years refining the book, and then sent this early version to agents.
Luke Ingram at Wiley signed him up and took the book to publishers, four of whom were interested, but HarperCollins pulled out all the stops to persuade Please to go with them. “We had this wonderful meeting where I went into the room and they had re-created the café. They had jars of pickled bats, they had made papier mâché bats, there was a little bell above the door. It would have been outrageous to have not gone with HarperCollins after those theatrics,” he laughs. “It was quite moving.”
The work that went into turning the dummy into a final picture book was “immense”. “I’d given myself four months alongside my other job to produce it. It really floored me in terms of the volume of work there is in making a picture book. “I’m not an illustrator,” he says, even though his work involves drawing and writing as an animation writer and director. “Generally, I don’t animate much. Most of my day-to-day job is writing and drawing, but the difference between producing a rough outline
and a finished illustration that’s going to hold up on its own is substantial.”
He is full of praise for HarperCollins, including publisher Alice Blacker and art director Candice Turvey, who made suggestions about page turns. “Everything was practical and about refining and making it better,” he says. In animation, conversations are often about tearing everything up and starting again, but with Café… the team focused on “refining the iterations”. It was a “wonderful editing experience”.
The success of “Robin Robin” enabled him to “create a bit more balance” in his working life. He says: “I’ve been making books for my own pleasure and had hopes and dreams of them breaking through into the world for a very long time, but never quite had the sort of space perhaps to get them to a professionally presentable standard.”
The Café… was acquired in a “major” two-book deal by HarperCollins in the UK and in the US, and book two, which is currently under construction, will delve a bit more into Glumfoot and how he ended up applying to work at Rene’s restaurant.
Please will continue dividing his time between book projects and animation work (“long may it continue”), and on launch he will decorate a bookshop window in Bath. He has also enjoyed meeting the wider book world, talking enthusiastically about an event HarperCollins put on to showcase its upcoming titles, where he met picture-book and YA authors. “When it comes to conversations in the book world, everything is about story. That’s just delicious.”
Metadata
Imprint HarperCollins Children’s Books
Publication 26.09.24
ISBN 9780008639013
Format pb (£7.99)
Rights Sold into 10 territories (and co-publication with HarperCollins in the US)
Editor Alice Blacker
Agent Luke Ingram, The Wiley Agency
