Asking Dangerous Questions, A Success Story
Plus: News About Book Bans, Accountable, My New Substack, and Upcoming Events
One day, early in 2014, I received a message on Facebook.
My name is Alba Garcia, I am a stopmotion animator, I recently saw for the first time your book, Dangerously ever after, I was fascinated on how beautifully done the story and illustrations are. Congrats on that wonderful book. . .It will be awesome that your book come to life as an animated film. . .If you are interested on this kind of animation, let me know....
Reading over it now, I’m a little surprised that I replied. So many weird things come my way via social media, and in another frame of mind Alba’s informal style and modest track record might have put me off. But her message arrived at a time when I was all about taking risks. My father had died a few months before. I hadn’t sold a book since 2008 and was beginning to fear I never would again. The magazine world where I made my living was still on a shaky ground after the carnage of the 2008 recession. I was in my Year of Yes, welcoming whatever opportunity came my way. It was a reckless, maybe even dangerous frame of mind, but I was eager to embark on new adventures—much like Princess Amanita, the heroine of Dangerously Ever After.
Plus, Dangerously Ever After is one of those books that has always had to work a little harder to find its audience. It’s a weird book, and while weird children’s books have their passionate fans, some of the parents and reviewers who weighed in on Amazon and Goodreads have had trouble with Princess Amanita’s danger-loving ways.
But Alba clearly got my haughty, reckless princess. In a follow-up message, Alba told me that her daughter could recite the entire book by heart and had begged her mother to make it into a film. Who was I to get in the way of such devoted fandom?
When I watched Alba’s most recently-completed film, I was impressed by what I saw. The next time I was in New York, I arranged to meet her for coffee.
We hit it off immediately. A beautiful Borinqueña with magenta hair and an exuberant laugh, she revealed herself to be a force of nature: funny, fierce, intelligent, and absolutely unstoppable. Her Fantasiation Studio was based in the basement of her home in the Bronx, with her husband Julio Garay as the lead animator. Like many people before and since, I walked away from that first meeting convinced by her conviction. Somehow, Alba makes you believe that anything is possible.
I walked away from that first meeting convinced by her conviction.
We agreed to collaborate and eventually launched an Indie Go-Go campaign to fund the film. Before long, Alba’s efforts attracted the notice—and the support—of some of the giants in the film and animation worlds, people like Peter Lord (Wallace and Gromit, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and Chicken Run), Kirk Thatcher (Muppets, Star Wars, Gremlins, Star Trek), Fon Davis (Star Wars, Matrix, Terminator, Coraline, Nightmare Before Christmas), and Toby Froud (a puppet fabricator at Laika Studios who played the baby abducted by David Bowie’s Goblin King in the Jim Henson classic, Labyrinth). They too were convinced by her conviction.
Over the next several years, my calls and texts with Alba chronicled the highs and lows of making this incredibly ambitious film with absolutely no money. And there were plenty of lows. During a heavy rainstorm, a basement flood damaged the set. A well-known singer-songwriter who we thought had agreed to write the theme song backed out. Some days it was so hot under the lights that Julio animated naked.
Animating on evenings and weekends, at the glacial pace of 24 shots for every second of action, Alba and Julio persevered. Alba recruited an astonishing array of remarkable people to work on the film, among them Steven Kynman, the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine, who not only voiced the narration but also did the green-screen acting that Alba based the animation on, wearing a colander on his head to stand in for Prince Florian’s helmet.
She also recruited a stunning array of accomplished people to work behind the scenes: Polly Fossey, head draper for Boardwalk Empire, made one of the tiny dresses for Princes Amanita. Steve Wheeler, a knifemaker who had worked on The Lord of the Rings movies, made Florian’s tiny sword. Nathan Flynn, who was a sculptor on Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie, made the armatures for the dolls. The stopmotion artist Oscar Rodriguez constructed amazing tiny props.
When I visited Fantasiation studio in 2015, I witnessed the typical weekend scene: Alba moving from the stove to the kitchen table, simultaneously cooking lunch for the assembled crew while supervising the building of the forest that Amanita rides her bicycle through on the kitchen table, using painted popcorn for foliage.
Costumes were being sewn in the dining room. Sets were being modified in the basement. In the living room, Julio sat on the couch with one of the film school students who were on the crew, creating facial animations on his laptop. Since he and Alba couldn’t afford the fancy motion capture software that big studios use, Julio eventually created a new way to incorporate 3D faces with motion capture data in post production using Blender. One 17-second stretch of animation took six months of post-production work to get ready.
Over the years I have watched her fearlessly ask for the impossible time and again.
Years went by. Alba and Julio kept working on Dangerously Ever After, as well as other short films, including Dak’ Toka Taino (I am Taino), which showed on HBO, all while raising their daughter, working their day jobs, traveling to animation festivals, and teaching throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Meanwhile, Dangerously Ever After nearly went out of print — only the promise of the upcoming film kept it on the shelves. (While we’re waiting for the movie to make it big, you can help my publisher keep the faith by ordering multiple copies for every child you know and a few that you don’t.)
To be honest, I might not have campaigned to keep my book in print if I hadn’t had Alba as my role model. Over the years I have watched her fearlessly ask for the impossible time and again. Her first choice to play Amanita was Emma Watson—I have copies of the emails she exchanged with Watson’s agent. What I learned from Alba is that it never hurts to ask. Does it matter that Watson said no when so many other luminaries said yes? After all, our whole collaboration began with a blind request from someone on Facebook I had never met.
On Tuesday, Alba sent me the finished film, which she’d just submitted to four different film festivals, all of which are Oscar qualifiers. She has her eyes on the big prize and I remain convinced by her conviction, as well as by the beautiful work she did on this finally-completed film. It’s truly a work of art. I couldn’t be prouder to be associated with it.
You can see the trailer here. Stay tuned for news about where you can see the whole thing.
In Other News…
I recently wrote about being a banned book author for the September/October issue of Mother Jones.
On the same day the Mother Jones piece was posted online, an Iowa school district removed over 400 books from the shelves, including The 57 Bus. Please sign the letter protesting this horrible decision.
I am finally getting ready to launch A Sigh of Relief, my Justice & Accountability newsletter. I’ll be sending it to all of the subscribers to this list so you can get a feel for it. If it’s not for you, just unsubscribe. I won’t hold it against you, I promise.
Upcoming Events
Amherst, Massachusetts
Sunday, September 17, 2 pm
Eric Carle Museum
125 West Bay Road, Amherst, MA
I am thrilled to be doing a Wild Blue Story Time at the Eric Carle Museum as part of the exhibit Horse Tales: Galloping into Children’s Books, which includes one of Laura Hughes’ gorgeous illustrations from Wild Blue.
Thanks for reading all the way to the end.
I bow to you,
Dashka