Laurent de Branhoff, the author of “Babar,” who revived his father’s popular picture book series about the elephant king and led its growth into a global multimedia series, has died. He was 98 years old.
Mr. de Brunhoff, who was originally from Paris and immigrated to the United States in the 1980s, died Friday at his home in Key West, Fla., after two weeks of hospice care, said his widow, Phyllis Rose.
Only 12 years old when his father Jean de Brunhof died of tuberculosis, Laurent used his talents as a painter and storyteller to publish dozens of books about the elephants that reigned in Celesteville, among them: “Babar at the Circus” and “Babar’s Yoga for Elephants”. Although he preferred fewer words than his father, his illustrations closely imitated Jean’s gentle, understated style.
“Together, father and son weaved a fictional world so seamless that it’s almost impossible to tell where one stopped and the other began,” said author Anne S. Haskell. I wrote this for the New York Times in 1981.
The series has sold millions of copies worldwide and has been adapted into television shows and animated features such as Babar: The Movie and Babar: The Elephant King. Fans range from Charles de Gaulle to Maurice Sendak, who once said, “If he had come to me, how I would have welcomed that little elephant and lovingly suffocated him.” ” I once wrote.
“Babar, c’est moi” (“That’s who I am”) about his work, de Branhoff told National Geographic in 2014, “For years and years, drawing elephants was something he thought was me. It was my whole life,” he said.
This book’s appeal was by no means universal. Some parents shied away from the passage in his debut novel, “The Story of Babar the Baby Elephant,” in which Babar’s mother was shot and killed by a hunter. Many critics called the series racist and colonialist, citing Babar’s Parisian education and influence on (supposedly) African-based regimes. . In 1983, Chilean author Ariel Dorfman called these books “tacit histories that justify and rationalize the motives behind the international situation, where some countries have everything and others almost nothing.” I called it.
“The history of Babar is nothing less than the realization of the colonial dreams of the dominated countries,” Dorfman wrote.
The New Yorker’s Paris-based correspondent Adam Gopnik defended “Babar” in 2008, saying, “It is not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination. It’s a self-conscious comedy about our close relationship with.”
De Branhoff himself admitted that he felt “a little embarrassed to see Babar fighting black people in Africa.” He particularly regretted his 1949 publication Babar’s Picnic, which contained crude caricatures of blacks and American Indians, and asked the publisher to withdraw its publication.
De Brunhof was the eldest of three sons born to the painters Jean and Cecil de Brunhof. Babar was born when Cecil de Brunhof, the namesake of the Elephant Kingdom and also Babar’s wife, improvised a story for her children.
“My mother started telling us stories to distract us,” de Brunhof told National Geographic in 2014. about it. He was so funny that he started drawing. Thus the story of Babar was born. His mother called him Bebe Elephant (Baby in French). It was his father who changed his name to Babar. But the first page of her first book, an elephant killed by a hunter and its escape to the city, was her story. ”
His debut novel was published in 1931 by the family-run publishing house Le Jardin Des Modes. Babar quickly received positive reviews, and Jean de Brunhoff wrote four more Babar books before dying six years later at the age of 37. Laurent’s uncle Michael also helped publish two additional books, but no one added to the series until after World War II. Laurent, who was a painter at the time, decided to take it back.
“I gradually came to feel strongly that a Babar tradition existed and that it should be perpetuated,” he wrote in the New York Times in 1952.
De Brunhoff has been married twice, most recently to critic and biographer Phyllis Rose, who has written many recent books, including Babar’s Guide to Paris, which concluded in 2017. He has written for many of Babar’s publications. Although he had two children, Anne and Antoine, the author did not consciously write for young people.
“When I write a book, I don’t think about children at all,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2017. “Babar is a friend of mine and I worked with him to come up with the story, but the children were never in the back of my mind. I was writing it for myself.”
