Armel Gaulme - The BESTiary

As many others, I grew up with Beatrix Potter’s speech-endowed bestiary, Puss in Boots and the Fantastic Mister Fox. By the tender age of seven I was on sharp lookout at Christmas time for any movies of Wolfgang Reitherman, one of the “Nine Old Men” from Disney Animation Studios. Since then I have never ceased to be awed by artists who have delighted in seizing the personalities of their fellow men and then transposing them on to animal faces chosen precisely for the particular circumstance; first and foremost Charles Le Brun, J.J. Grandville, Heinrich Kley and Benjamin Rabier. When I think of these talking animals which enthralled me as a child,I remember realistic, plausible creatures, with genuine faces and authentic expressions. They were characters I would have loved to meet, and very different from the stylized caricatures, all angles and exaggerated scowls that we sometimes come across in contemporary “character design”… Years later, I started sketching those “animals” (but does that really define them?) myself out of pure fun and I thank my children for having asked me to give birth to a great many of them in order to amuse them in turn.