I only noticed the brilliance of Faceytalk when I looked over the shoulder of my daughter watching a recreation of the episode someone had done with merch dolls and put up on YouTube Kids.
The recreation sadly broke the strict rule of 'singe take / no cuts, iPad view only', but that drove home to me how great the original was.
Agreed. My three-year-old's favorite episode, by far. Realizing how artistically ambitious and just plain good Bluey is has been an interesting lesson in how kids actually do have good taste/interesting preferences as long as you don't bombard them with the Cocomelons of the world.
My daughter likes to say "that makes me happy... and sad!" at the end of a particularly artistic episode, like Sleepytime, the wordless one where it rains, or the final episode ("The Sign" - the Citizen Kane of children's television).
When I watched The Sign for the first time, my wife said “you’re going to be crying at the end of it”
And sure enough, she was 100% right. It was like peak Pixar, entertaining for the little ones but very deep and full of incredible depth and emotion for the adults.
The PDR article doesn't mention any link between them, but Clarke's illustrations look very influenced by Aubrey Beardsley to me. I find both interesting as examples of the kind of thing that minimalist/modernist aesthetics both destroyed and grew out of (in the sense that Beardsley and Clarke both display the Victorian horror vacui and love of ornamentation, but also experiment with huge swathes of empty space):
If you are interested in Harry Clarke's work check out the collection of materials from his studio available on the Digital Repository of Ireland's site.
https://repository.dri.ie/catalog/9593zf44k
It includes a succinct bio.
I saw some of his drawings for the Poe stories before I read Poe and so they always influenced my visualisation of the stories when I read them. Rich food for a teenage imagination before there was a public internet.
"Through a chink too wide comes in no wonder" - Kavanagh
