THE THREADS THAT BIND
Torill Kove’s ode to mother’s love
A touching and quietly beautiful book about the bond uniting mother and child is the latest offering from Academy Award-winning animator Torill Kove.
Threads (Firefly Books), written and illustrated by the Norwegianborn Montrealer, will be launched Friday afternoon at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly.
The book is adapted from her 2017 short animated film of the same name, a co-production of the National Film Board of Canada and the Norwegian studio Mikrofilm AS. It was named one of the top 10 films at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.
Kove, 60, has been associated with the NFB since the start of her career. Her 1999 animated film My Grandmother Ironed the King ’s Shirts was nominated for an Academy Award; The Danish Poet, narrated by Liv Ullmann, won an Oscar in 2007 for best animated short film. She has also worked regularly in the Norwegian animation and book illustrating milieus; Threads, also published in Norwegian, is her eighth book.
Both film and book open with a woman reaching for a thread hanging, with others, from the sky. She grabs one and is pulled up and beyond until the thread pulls her along, “to you,” as the book’s protagonist tells her daughter.
The thread is stretched across new experiences as love and trust between them blossoms and the daughter grows. And then it is time for the thread to be broken and the daughter to set out on her own. Each keeps a length of the thread that brought them together; each knows they will stay connected.
Threads started out as an idea for a film about Kove’s experience as an adoptive parent, but she soon realized that the central theme of the film was the more universal one of parental love and attachment, she said in an interview this week.
“I started to draw these drawings that would metaphorically illustrate a connection between us, the experience of finding her and meeting her, and I think a lot of the process of sketching out the first drawings was intuitive,” said Kove.
“The thread would stretch and, gradually, it became a story about attachment — not just strictly about adoption,” she said. “It became more universal and I am really happy about that.”
At its core, “the film is channelling feelings that I have in my relationship with my daughter.”
The film version is wordless, featuring some sounds and gorgeous music by Kove’s husband and father of their daughter, the musician and McGill University music professor Kevin Dean.
“I thought, ‘ What would I write?’
It seemed there weren’t words that could describe things better than a simple drawing,” Kove said. “Gradually it made more sense to keep it wordless.
“The attachment that grows between parent and child is silent. It is not about words, but about touching and playing and trusting.”
The book, on the other hand, did need words — and Kove found them. “I think they must have been at the back of my mind.”
When she started work on Threads, her daughter was 13, “that age where they are sort of slipping away a little bit. You want that. But there is also that sense that it is the end of an era.”
As the time for cuddling with one’s child comes to an end, “there is a little bit of that bittersweetness in it,” she said.
“Part of what I wanted to do is document that period that is so physically tender and memorable — but ephemeral.”
Threads is marketed as a children’s book, but it is also suitable for new parents or for growing children.
“I believe that one of the most important things a child can learn from parents is to recognize what it means to be loved and respected and cared for,” Kove said. “You know what it is supposed to feel like — and it stays with you.”
Although the same images appear in both iterations of Threads, Kove redrew them for the book. “The reader will spend some time looking at the illustrations in the book whereas in a film it all just goes by so quickly. “A book is something really solid and physical,” she said. And because it feels more permanent, it is “more challenging and demanding — and more fun — to make illustrations for the book.”
Seeing her books in bookstores, she said, gives her “a thrill — a childish joy.”