Craig would do rough thumbnail sketches to take back to Holabird. Once the story was created, Holabird would turn it over to Craig for storyboarding. "There is actually a barge museum in London," says Holabird. Since they were both living in London at the time, they would occasionally go on field trips together to research scenes - like for a story where Angelina is getting to a dance festival on a barge. Holabird says she would first spend several weeks writing the story. Unlike some author and illustrator pairs, Katharine Holabird and Helen Craig worked closely over the years. "They're very hard things to draw," says Craig. "And Helen said to me, 'Please don't ever write a story about bicycles again.'" The last full-page spread was the whole village coming out and riding bicycles with Angelina. In one story, Holabird decided that Angelina should get a bike for her birthday. "I used to go in with the roughs and say, 'Look, does this work? Is this pulley working?'"īut one thing Craig never wants to illustrate again? Bicycles. "I like the drawings to make sense."įor one book in the series, Angelina On Stage, Craig says she spent a lot of time consulting her father, who was a stage designer. "I have great respect for the children who are looking at these books," says Craig. "I think Helen's illustrations have created such a magical world for Angelina," says Holabird. It's a fully-realized snapshot of village life. It's where Angelina goes to buy balloons on her birthday. Thimble's store in the village sells dresses, potatoes, cut glass and sweets.
Bbc mouse house full#
The china has patterns, the butter melts on the table, the sink is full of dishes. "So that I could move around and always get it right, because children are very sharp." The house - and the town, and the ballet studio - are incredibly detailed. "I made a plan of Angelina's cottage," Craig says.
What's not simple, though, are her illustrations of Angelina's world. "In a small cottage without any running water. "I lived in a very small village in Essex," she says. Kids will notice if the drawings don't make senseĪngelina Ballerina is set in in the village of Chipping Cheddar - all thatched cottages and winding roads - a look from the 1940s East of England, where Craig grew up. "They've got whiskers which express motion. "They've got little hands, they've got a tail which expresses emotion," says Craig. It's sort of universal." And, while Angelina is a little white mouse, her parents are brown mice, and her ballet school classmates are also different-colored mice. "Because you often hear little girls say 'Well I'm Angelina.' and because they're mice it's not fixed in any country or anything. "It's very fortunate in a way," says Craig. Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Angelina Ballerina Holabird had originally written Angelina as a little girl, but Craig had already had some success illustrating books with mice - like The Mouse House ABC - so they decided Angelina should be a mouse. Today, there are more than 25 Angelina Ballerina books - Holabird and Craig's creation has been adapted into a television series, as well as for the stage, and the ballet. "It was a lucky break," says Craig, for both of them.Īngelina was a human ballerina - at first "And then later on they decided it would be great to do a picture book with Helen," says Holabird. "It just seemed to me this was a wonderful story about little girls and how empowering dance and music can be," says Holabird.Īt the time, she was working for her husband's publishing company - writing copy and doing interviews - when he introduced her to illustrator Helen Craig. Later, when she was a freelance writer living in London, she had two young daughters who also loved to dance. She grew up in Chicago with three sisters, and they spent hours dressing up and dancing around the house in ballet costumes, made by her set-designer father. Holabird - like a lot of children - loved to dance as a kid. "She's feisty and she has a lot of emotion. "She's this marvelous character," says Holabird of the little white mouse in a pink tutu. "She danced all the time and she danced everywhere, and often she was so busy dancing that she forgot about the other things she was supposed to be doing." "More than anything else in the world, Angelina loved to dance," writes Katharine Holabird on the first page of her classic 1983 picture book, Angelina Ballerina.
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