Milking the Pro's - Part 2

Mo Willems is an Emmy Award-winning animator-writer-show-creator-turned Caldecott Honor-winning children's-book author. His work can be viewed at www.mowillems.com.

JF: What's the hardest thing about being an author of children's books?

MW: Selling your books.

JF: What's the biggest perk?

MW: See answer to question #1.

JF: Why did you choose children's books and stepping away from animation?
 

MW: It's both an evolution and devolution: An evolution in the sense that after knocking out TV scripts for "Sheep in the Big City" and "Kids Next Door" week after week after week, I wanted to try a different type of story-telling with a more liberal schedule. In this, I'm following a tradition of animators like Ted Geisel, P.D. Eastman, Virgil "VIP" Parch, and Mordicai Gerstein by moving from animation to Picture Books. After years of formats (square aspect ratio, 11 minute stories, etc.), it's liberating to control the size of a page and its content in ways that are seldom possible in TV (and even festival) animation. It's a devolution in the sense that my career began by making cartoon shorts for "Sesame Street" where I could do everything (write, design, animate, ink and paint) in my home studio. There was a pleasurable solitude involved in crafting these weird little films on my own. As my career shifted to longer TV projects and I needed larger and larger crews to produce them, I found myself managing more than drawing. So, book making is kind of a return to an individual, independent period where I can draw funny pictures again. None of this is to say I've somehow abandoned TV or animation. There are several projects I hope to pursue in the future. For now books are a pleasurable sabbatical.