Everything is watching you. The snakes, of course, along with the birds, bears, turtles, fish, rabbits, and horses. Also: the tables, the chairs, the bridges, the tents, the rocks, the plants, the trees, the trucks, the boats, and even the fires. But it turns out that children love a surveillance state, or so it seems, based on their adoration for the works of Jon Klassen, a children’s author and illustrator whose books are distinguished by, among other things, a hyperabundance of eyes.
Klassen’s distinctive peepers appear everywhere, including, once or twice, in the pages of this magazine. His long white oval scleras and perfect-circle black pupils, sometimes open and sometimes closed, are always inexplicably expressive—managing to seem happy, sad, scared, sleepy, shifty, angry, eager, alarmed, mischievous, or murderous. His suns stare curiously from one side of a page spread to another and his stacks of hay worriedly study the horizon, while his one-eyed stools and one-eyed fenceposts pop up like eager cyclopses.
This is perhaps just a sly trick of the trade, a version of what filmmakers call the Kuleshov effect, which Klassen himself has acknowledged, whereby we infer the emotion in a face from whatever that face is looking at. But it’s also obvious from his œuvre that Klassen remembers a fundamental truth about the world as children see it: all things are animate. A pebble, a Popsicle stick, a tiny piece of thread—a child can turn any object into a best friend with an intergenerational backstory, and any pair of things into a mother and baby who must never be parted. Everything is alive to young children, and there is nothing they like more than imagining the inner lives of whatever they see. Knowing this, Klassen makes marvellous use of anthropomorphism, including in a new board book this summer that tries to bring everything, even the book itself, to life.
