The Magic Bottle

The Magic Bottle by Camille Rose Garcia is a wonderful children’s book (for weird kids, maybe) that demonstrates her writing skills as well as her visual artistry. This book is dark, whimsical, and delightfully imaginative. It expresses in a very complete way her concept of “The Tragic Kingdom,” of strange animals and inanimate things (even the ocean is alive and conscious) on a human level living and struggling under the black cloud of industrialism; creating a whole roiling breathing world that has never been seen before. Her cutesy, yet melancholy and acid trip-like style features constantly weeping, lugubrious-looking cartoony characters, in a world entirely of her own creation, populated by bizarre, menacing, and threatened creatures. Growing up in the sinister shadow of Disneyland, Camille was intensely disillusioned with the artificial, sterilized promise of heaven that it offered.

The story is about a little girl, Lulu Blackenshoe, who comes upon a magic bottle on a beach. Accompanying her on her subsequent journey are Mr. Blue, a small blue octopus, and a Sad Little Turtle. Pirates are the heroes, while the Peppermint Man is an evil, creepy capitalist villain, reminiscent of the earliest jittery animations (I imagine him with a deep, darkly jolly voice), striving to make of the world “a forest of machines,” and the Peppermint Islands are the last refuge from industrialization, and his target of attack.

The book is like a ride that goes at breakneck speed from place to place within the utterly fantastic and imaginary world of Garcia, where everything is alive and moving together. At some point the flow just takes you along. It seems to exist in a “vacuum,” by which I only mean that it exists in the space which her art has uniquely created. It is quirky, funny, and meaningful. I love the amusing comments that come up at intervals, like: He has peered inside the ears of screaming bolivian monkeys, and browsed under the graves of dead virgins.

He was, after all, a very sensitive underwater sea creature unused to the gaggy smells humans find so pleasant.

He could hear a faint whistling coming from the front, a lullabyish tune that sounded jolly in a way if you like the sound of butterflies dying slowly in a meatlocker.

Yellowy sulfite poisons were excellent for ridding the world of birds, while the only thing to kill a Black-Footed Elephant was a mixture of clown’s blood and arsenic.

The smell could be considered pleasant, if you like the smell of burning hair in an ice cream shop.

(An unfortunate trait of pirates, due to their love of ornament, is beautiful yet unclear mapmaking.)

As well as the beautiful, lush descriptions of this world:

The sea pulled back and sighed, a patient giant beast waiting for death to carry it to the next world.

“The sand is giving up, the sun will soon throw in the towel.”

They fell through a long earthy tunnel, twisting here and there, catching a glimpse of earthworms and moles, treeroots and molten lava, then straightened and splashed into a jewely aquamarine underworld, slowly moving with the quiet symphony of life.
A giant octopus, red in color with luminous eyes, put his face against the bottle and smiled subconsciously, for he had no lips with which to smile. Whales slept and starfish daydreamed.

Take a drink from The Magic Bottle. It will change you for an hour, much like a visit from the Green Fairy.

Tags: animated inanimate things, camille rose garcia, cartoony, cute n creepy little creatures, dark side of disneyland, environmentalism, pop surrealism