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Story & Pictures By: The Documentary You’ve Been Waiting For
SLJ:
11.03.2019 by Elizabeth Bird
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A
new Golden Age of children’s literature is here. And it matters.
Emmy®-nominated
Director Joanna Rudnick
follows three contemporary children’s book authors and sheds a light on the
artistry and industry in Story &
Pictures By. (Watch O2:02)
“The
stories that we read [children] are forming their worldview. They are the
building blocks to how they make sense of the world and how they understand
themselves. And the more diverse and expansive those stories are, the more
diverse and expansive that worldview is going to be.” – Joanna Rudnick,
Director
Director
Joanna Rudnick is familiar with taking inspiration from her life and turning it
into cinema. Her first film In the Family (PBS 2008) was a deeply personal
exploration of living with an inherited risk of breast and ovarian cancer.
Having survived breast cancer in her late 30s, coinciding with the birth of her
two daughters, she threw herself into raising them and found that one of the
most intimate experiences she had was reading children’s picture books at
bedtime. This sparked a curiosity about the creators, history, and power of
this often overlooked and underappreciated art form and became fodder for her
current feature length film in production, Story & Pictures By.
The
film explores the power of children’s picture books through the lens of three
contemporary authors/illustrators: Mac
Barnett, Christian Robinson,
and Yuyi Morales. Together, they
represent a new generation of storytellers who are working to challenge,
transform, and expand the stories and experiences portrayed in children’s
literature, marking a new Golden Age in the art form. From experimenting with
gender identity to children visiting parents in prison—all creators,
protagonists, and experiences are welcomed behind and in the pages of picture
books.
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According
to statistics from the Cooperative Children’s
Book Center (CCBC), in the past 24 years, only 13% of children’s books
featured multicultural storylines or characters. In 2002, 5% of protagonists
were African American, 3% Asian American, 3% were Latinx, and 1% were American
Indian. In 2018 these numbers slightly increased to 10% African American, 7%
Asian, 5% Latinx and 1% American Indian. While these gains in diverse
representations mark progress, we still have a long way to go. In a world where
children of color continuously face increased levels of childhood trauma, it is
incumbent upon children’s literature to represent their perspectives and
experiences. READ
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