A Box of Treasures: The Limits of Iconic Drawing Styles

Launched in December 2023, the TV series Quentin Blake’s Box of Treasures features six figures from Sir Quentin Blake’s newly animated drawings. Blake’s team are far from the first to move away from classical methods of disseminating artwork; Axel Scheffler’s drawings that accompany Julia Donaldson’s children’s books were on stage only two years after the book’s first publishing in 1999. The cultural clash of television and hand-drawn art is not necessarily a negative one, but given the ever-declining rates of children’s reading and increasing turn to technology to placate meltdowns, making Blake more ‘accessible’ does not seem to be a justified reason for this animation. For an artist that most conflates exclusively with the stories of Roald Dahl, Blake has tremendous scope and range. His sketch-handed style blends into the background when the storytellers who enlist him attempt to set themselves centre-stage, yet his drawings are irrefutably suffused with the mode of Quentin Blake. Staring up at Blake’s ‘Mrs Armitage On Wheels’ on a tiny black screen in a waiting room last month, I was transfixed and transported. 

Mrs Armitage, one of Blake’s most iconic characters, is at once familiar and estranged to my eye. I follow her movements from the Cream Horn shop to the Noisy Horn Emporium, convincing myself I know what is coming, purely because her designer is Blakean. The fluidity she gains from animation is startling; there is something lost in this anthropomorphising. She becomes not just a representation of a married English woman always on an errand, but an unexpected still-image in movement. Blake, at the age of 92, is no longer illustrating. This animation of his shelved drawings, then, feels oxymoronic; Blake’s designed universe is at an end, but he has allowed them to be brought to life again in a new medium, given voices and intonations that once existed only in the minds of the children pouring over his books.

I wonder how much of my childhood was spent on the physical act of reading and designing for myself a world behind these drawings. Indeed, illustrations in children’s books are quintessential and undeniable; children are convinced to read the books on account of the interesting, often fantastical in Blake’s case, drawings. Nowhere else in literature is this tradition so readily accepted and expected. The move of a classic artist like Blake into a television set is a transgression of these boundaries. By bringing these stories ‘to life’ through animation, the parameters within which these characters exist become smaller, and children's ability to imagine is less encouraged. 

The success of Quentin Blake’s Box of Treasures is largely due to Blake’s pre-existing fame — the stories are perhaps more for the parents of today’s children who grew up with his drawings and are used to the sublime interest produced by a long protruding nose in a Dahl book. Indeed, despite the ‘live’ (ironically online) sessions set to take place this year to teach children ‘art and literacy’ by the BBC, children may not be the target audience for this TV series. The episodes retell stories that are already in print: Angel Pavement and Loveykins, both ridiculously named, evoke my childhood desire to delve into Sir Quentin Blake’s beautiful drawings long before I could read. This nostalgia, I believe, is what brings people back to Blake’s artwork and visual storytelling; the animation is haunting rather than captivating. It is possible that children aged between seven and ten are not interested in these animations, instead faced with an era of increasing social media access with which drawings, even when animated, cannot quite keep up. 

Illustration by Isabelle Holloway