Few Words Inspire Amusing Antics
This story originally appeared in Children's Bookshelf on October 26, 2006 Sign up now!
by Sally Lodge, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 10/26/2006
Just out from Simon & Schuster, Jennifer Armstrong's Once Upon a Banana, illustrated by Caldecott Medalist David Small, is a zany tale revealing what happens when a monkey jumps down from its perch on a street juggler's shoulders, steals a banana from a grocer's stall and tosses the peel on the sidewalk. What comes next? A motorcyclist slips on the peel and knocks a painter off a ladder, triggering a slapstick sequence of chaotic happenings on the streets of a city. And it all unravels wordlessly—save a rhyming series of street signs ("Please Put Litter in Its Place"; "No Parking in This Space"), many of which the residents brazenly ignore, with comic consequences.
The chain of events leading up to this chain-reaction story began "many years ago," says Armstrong, who conceived of the tale when she was writing two books for Random House's Step into Reading series (The Snowball and Sunshine, Moonshine). Once Upon a Banana (originally titled Sign of the Times), did not start out as a picture book, the author explains: "I was thinking of it as a mass-market, early Step into Reading Book. I submitted it to Random House as such and the editor didn't think it was suitable for that format. My agent, Susan Cohen at Writers House, suggested we try selling it as a picture book."
S&S recognized the project's potential as a picture book. Paula Wiseman, who took over the editorial reigns of the book after arriving at the house, recalls that she "immediately loved it," calling Armstrong's concept "inspired and really innovative."
As Armstrong shaped the book, she combined images children were apt to be familiar with—street signs and shop signs—with rhyme. "Rhyme is one of the tools for teaching reading," she says. "So I played around with signs, making them rhyme. I always wanted the signs to be the only words in the book, so that the rhyming isn't buried by anything."
Once Armstrong settled on which rhyming street signs would be included, she came up with what she calls "a series of actions that would tie this collection of signs together in a narrative. There had to be some kind of narrative, or else all it would be is a random list." The story line she created was in the form of "very simple stage directions," she explains.
Wiseman and her colleagues agreed that David Small was the ideal illustrator to work with Armstrong's directives. "We knew he was a perfect fit for the book, that he would see the genius in it and make it a tour de force," Wiseman says. "But we had no idea he would create the amazing cinematic picture book that he did."
"It was the most unusual manuscript I ever saw," says Small of Armstrong's "stage directions," calling the script "very filmic, like the rough draft for a silent slapstick short." Though he did not meet Armstrong until well after he completed the art, he did brainstorm "on a few points" with Wiseman, with his agent, Holly McGhee, and with art director Dan Potash.
And for preparation and inspiration, Small watched a number of Buster Keaton movies. "The challenge of a wordless book is that all the information has to be conveyed visually," he notes. "It's like a game of charades: you can't speak, you can only act. That's the law. Keaton was a genius at conveying things through gesture alone. I was also happy for all those old lessons in anatomy and life drawing in art school."
Small points out that, in addition to his task of creating images based on so few words, the sequence of action in Once Upon a Banana presented what he describes as "some unique challenges. Since it's an accumulation of minor accidents, each one the result of one before, things had to be prepared for well in advance." He explains that he created visual clues to "what happens next" pages beforehand and, "to make things even more complicated, I made the entire action take place in the circuit of one city block. 'What goes around, comes around' in this book, quite literally."
Armstrong is thrilled with the creative way in which Small made her tale come full circle. "I only outlined as much as was necessary to demonstrate the breakneck action of the story," she says. "Everything else was up to him. David invented the juggler and the monkey, giving the story its main characters. He also liberally adapted my art suggestions, keeping to the original spirit of madcap chain reaction which ends up right where it starts. Every time I look at the book I marvel at how well it does work and how dynamic and active the pictures are. I think he did a remarkably skillful thing with this, more skillful than the average reader will probably ever realize. And it's not only skillful, but funny. Funny, funny, funny!"
And to think that all this monkey business started with a casually discarded banana peel.
