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NEW YORK – “Babar” author Laurent de Brunhoff, who revived his father’s popular picture book series about an elephant-king and presided over the rise of a global, multimedia franchise, has died. He was 98 years old.
De Brunhoff, a native of Paris who moved to the United States in the 1980s, died Friday at his home in Key West, Florida, after being in hospital care for two weeks, according to his widow, Phyllis Rose.
Only 12 years old when his father, Jean de Brunhoff, died of tuberculosis, Laurent was an adult when he used his skills as a painter and storyteller to write a book about the elephant who rules Celesteville. Released dozens of books, among them “Babar et”. Circus” and “Babar’s Addition to Elephants.” He preferred to use fewer words than his father, but his drawings faithfully imitated Jean’s gentle, restrained style.
Author Ann S. Haskell wrote in The New York Times in 1981, “Together, father and son have woven an imaginary world so seamless that it is almost impossible to tell where one stopped and the other began.”
The series has sold millions of copies worldwide and was adapted into a television program and animated features such as “Babar: The Movie” and “Babar: King of the Elephants”. Admirers range from Charles de Gaulle to Maurice Sendak, who once wrote, “If he came to me, how I would welcome that little elephant and shower him with affection.”
De Brunhoff told National Geographic in 2014 about his creation, “Babar, c’est moi”, that “I’ve been drawing elephants all my life, for years and years.”
The appeal of the books was far from universal. Some parents are reluctant to tell about Babar’s mother being shot to death by hunters in the first film, “The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant.” Many critics called the series racist and colonialist, citing Babar’s education in Paris and its influence on his Africa-based rule. In 1983, Chilean author Ariel Dorfman called the books “an implicit history that justifies and rationalizes the motives behind an international situation in which some countries have everything and other countries have almost nothing. ”
“The history of Babur,” wrote Dorfman, “is nothing more than the fulfillment of the colonial dream of the dominant countries.”
Adam Gopnik, Paris-based correspondent for The New Yorker, defended “Babar” in 2008, writing that it is “not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination; it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its proxies.” “Relations to the French Domestic Imagination.”
De Brunhoff himself admitted that he “found it a little embarrassing to see Babar fighting with black people in Africa.” He particularly regretted “Babar’s Picnic”, a 1949 publication that contained crude satires of blacks and American Indians. were, and he asked his publisher to withdraw it.
De Brunhoff was the eldest of three sons born to Jean de Brunhoff and Cécile de Brunhoff, a painter. Babar was created when Cécile de Brunhoff, the namesake of the Elephant’s Kingdom and Babar’s wife, improvised a story for their children.
De Brunhoff told National Geographic in 2014, “My mother started telling us a story to distract us. We loved it and the next day we ran to my father’s study, which was in the corner of the garden. To tell him about it. He was very happy and started drawing. And thus the story of Babar was born. My mother used to call him Babe Haathi. It was my father who changed the name to Babar. But the first pages of the first book, the story of the elephant killed by a hunter and running away to the city, were his.”
The first film was released in 1931 through the family-run publisher Le Jardin des Modes. Babar was immediately well received and Jean de Brunhoff completed four more Babar books before dying six years later, at the age of 37. Laurent’s uncle, Michel, helped publish two additional works, but no more were added to the series until after World War II. Laurent, who was a painter at the time, decided to bring it back.
“Gradually I began to feel strongly that the Babar tradition existed and should be maintained,” he wrote in The New York Times in 1952.
De Brunhoff was married twice, most recently to critic and biographer Phyllis Rose, who wrote the text for several recent “Babar” publications, culminating in the 2017 release, “Babar Guide to Paris.” They had two children, Anne and Antoine, but the author deliberately did not write for the young.
“I never really think about children when I read my books,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2017. “Babar was my friend and I invented stories with him, but not with children in some corner of my mind. I write it for myself.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications to the text.
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