Errol Le Cain is the perfect example of the magic that happens when cultures collide. Growing up in Singapore, India, and London, the British illustrator started inventing his fantasy worlds as early as early as age 11, weaving in elements of Moorish symmetry, Indonesian shadow puppets, and Baroque fantasy. Above all, he took the art of storytelling to heart. “The first task of an illustrator,” he said, “is to be in full sympathy with the writer. No matter how splendid and exciting the drawings may be, if they work against the story, the picture book is a failure”. The result was an enchanting style, charged with an etherealness makes you feel like you should be whispering…
Le Cain was born in Singapore in 1941, but his family fled just a year later from the Japanese Invasion. So the little Le Cain grew up in Agra, India, becoming fascinated with film and making his first animated short movie, The Enchanted Mouse, on an 8-mm camera before he was even a teenager. By the time he was 15, a London studio caught wind of “the Wunderkid from the East”, and paid his passage to England. Come 1965, he set up shop with Richard Williams’ animation studio, where he really got to hone his watercolour skills…
Errol Le Cain (left). Richard Williams (right).
As we were leafing through Le Cain’s digital portfolio, we couldn’t help but see a resemblance between the snaking strokes of his brush, and those of traditional Indonesian wayang kulit, or “Shadow Puppetry.” The art predates the 10th century, and calls for the Dalang (shadow artist) to carve leather figures that he holds up between a lamp and a screen to tell a story…
Indonesian Puppets, 1890
They hold a particularly strong resemblance to figures of one of Le Cain’s most notable works, Cupid and Psyche (1977), whose protagonists share the same elongated nails and curved backs…
Pretty hard to deny, no? They lend a dark romanticism to Le Cain’s eye, and that’s what makes his drawings so memorable; children may be young and naive, but that doesn’t mean their taste in storytelling is purely saccharine — sometimes, kids want something that runs a shade darker than Disney…
King Arthur’s Sword
Aladdin
Aladdin
Over his lifetime, Le Cain illustrated over 40 children’s books, from Sleeping Beauty and Twelve Dancing Princesses, to Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast. In 1976, the BBC tasked him with the creation of backdrops and animation for The Snow Queen, a movie that used a blend of Le Cain’s painted backdrops and animation, and sadly only exists as a fuzzy YouTube video today. (If you come across an OG-copy, let us know).
