The Magic Bottle

03.20.10

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.

See more after the cut

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

No Comments »