THE BOOK WITH NO WORDS

Published in 1998, Quentin Blake’s Clown is an unusual book in that it has no words. The poignant story is illustrated only by the cartoonist’s sketches. ‘The inspiration came from a film called Les Enfants Du Paradis, about a 19th-century theatre in Paris,’ he says. ‘One of the characters is called Debureau, who really existed. He was a white-faced clown who was actually a mime.

‘At first I wrote one or two sentences to go with the drawings, but then I realised that, of course, this is a story about a mime and so it has to be told without words. That has its own special problems.

You need a lot of drawings if you’re to show every change of gesture.’

The film was made in just six months – a very fast turnaround for 30 minutes of animation – with cartoonists around the world from Japan to Ukraine working on it. It was decided to add words as a way of making the story longer. ‘We wanted to re-create the feeling of being in bed with your mum or granny telling the story, and Helena Bonham Carter was the first name we had in mind to tell it,’ says executive producer Massimo Fenati.