< 40 years after she took the stage, 'Angelina Ballerina' is still dancing

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

When Angelina Ballerina first came onto the scene, the little mouse danced, twirled and leapt across the page and into the hearts of millions.

HELEN CRAIG: My name is Helen Craig. I illustrate the Angelina books. It's now exactly 40 years since I drew the first one, and you wrote the first one. Katharine wrote the first one.

KATHARINE HOLABIRD: So I'm Katharine Holabird. I'm the writer of the "Angelina Ballerina" books, and I've been working with Helen since 1983. And we've had a wonderful, wonderful collaboration all these years.

RASCOE: The "Angelina Ballerina" series now includes more than 25 books. It's been adapted into a television series, for the stage and for the ballet. Today, Katharine Holabird and Helen Craig's creation is considered a classic in children's publishing.

HOLABIRD: Angelina Ballerina is a very determined little dancer. She's a little white mouse in a ballet tutu and pink ballet slippers, and she is passionate about dancing. And as the first book begins, Angelina loved to dance. She danced all the time, and she danced everywhere. Her dancing is such a passion that it does get her into trouble. But what I love about her - she's really resilient, and she always gets up and dances on. She trips and stumbles a lot, but then she gets up and dances.

RASCOE: As part of Picture This, our series of conversations with authors and illustrators, Katharine Holabird and Helen Craig talk about their 40-year-old collaboration.

HOLABIRD: I was a young mother in London with two little girls at the time. My husband started a small publishing company. I'd studied writing and literature in college, and I wanted to be a writer. So I was writing backflaps and doing interviews and this, that and the other, and he met Helen. And then later on, they decided it would be great to do a picture book with Helen, and there I was. It was a very lucky break for me.

CRAIG: It's a lucky break for us both, I think.

HOLABIRD: (Laughter) Yes.

CRAIG: Well, Katharine, you wrote it as a little girl, didn't you, to begin with?

HOLABIRD: I was really writing about a child, of course, and it is the story of a child. But Helen had already done a "Little Mouse ABC" and a "Little Mouse 1 2 3" and "The Mouse House" books. So she was illustrating books with mice when we met, so we just decided that Angelina should be a mouse. And Helen drew a little white mouse in a tutu, and I just thought, this is it. This is the perfect character.

CRAIG: It's very fortunate in a way because you often hear little, tiny girls say, well, I'm Angelina, and I'm Alice, or I'm so-and-so. And because they're mice, it's not fixed in any country or anything. It's sort of universal.

HOLABIRD: Yes. And I also have always loved that the mice are many different colors.

CRAIG: Oh, yes.

HOLABIRD: The best friend is a little brown mouse, and then the parents and the grandparents - it's all mixed up, which is great.

CRAIG: I could add a nice little thing that my father called my mother Mouse. I thought that was a normal name for mothers, but he called her Mouse because she always had to have a little bit of cheese at the end of her meal. And as a result, she was always given mice. And she had a collection, which I used to love looking at as a child, the little china ones, wooden ones, all sorts. And then if you think about mice, they can go up on their leg, hind legs. They've got little hands. They've got a tail which expresses emotion. They've got whiskers which express emotion. So you've got everything in one package. You can really go to town. It is a bit difficult making them do ballet positions, but you can get 'round it if you try hard enough.

HOLABIRD: I think Helen's illustrations have created such a magical world for Angelina. They're very detailed. They're extremely fun to look at and watch. And as Angelina, you know, dances across the page, in the background, there's always something fascinating. And really, the illustrations are exquisite works of art.

CRAIG: Thank you.

HOLABIRD: And the look of it is very old England. I had a little girl write me once and say, please, I want to go to Mouseland. Where is it? Because Mouseland is - the way Helen has created it, it's such a charming, beautiful place. It's all based on Helen's world growing up.

CRAIG: I lived in a very small village in Essex when I was small, in a cottage without any running water, proper water. You had to pump it from the pond - and no electricity. So it was very simple, and the village was very simple. And it was very important for me to create this village, safe village where Angelina lived. And I based lots of the shops and things around my own village. And I made a plan of Angelina's cottage, the ground floor plan and the upstairs, so that I could move around and always get it right because children are very sharp. They very quickly see if you've put something in the wrong place. And it's terribly important that the world - although they're not actually conscious of it, it's there in the background and it's a kind of safety place. That was what I was trying to create for Katharine's character, a safe place.

HOLABIRD: I - well, I used to love the process because we worked creatively together very well. For example, I would write the story, which usually takes six weeks to two months, something like that, and we talk about it quite early on. I'll call Helen and say, so this is what I'm thinking of doing. I'd love to write a story where Angelina dances in a dance festival, but she's going to get there on a barge with her grandparents, and Helen loved it. So then we went - remember, Helen? We went together to the...

CRAIG: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

HOLABIRD: There was actually a barge museum in London, and we went and looked at barges and did some research, and the story was created like that. So we've always worked very closely together.

CRAIG: Then Katharine will give me the story, and I will divide it up into - I know how many pages about to fill, and I do very little thumbnail sketches, and then I do it a bit bigger. And then I go back to Katharine, and then it's backwards and forwards between us until I get to the point where we all agree that what I've roughly got in mind is right. Then I will do a rough drawing on very thin paper and put another sheet over, and I work these up more and more until I get it to exactly what I want. I'll put it on the light box, work with a very fine pen. Then I start working in with watercolor, a bit of this, a bit of that, until it gets to where I want it to be. That's why it takes so long. It takes me a year to draw an Angelina book if I'm going to do it to my satisfaction.

HOLABIRD: Helen's a perfectionist. Everything looks fantastic, but it's because she's so exacting that it's difficult.

CRAIG: Yeah, and I have great respect for the children who are looking at these books. I don't like putting out something that's feeding the wrong information. You're either got to be completely wacky, and it's going to be absolute sort of comic strip image and it doesn't matter that it's all wrong, but if you're going to draw like we've done for Angelina, they've got to be - work. They look as though they work, you know?

HOLABIRD: And one of the things I remember - Angelina's birthday. I decided she would get a bicycle for her birthday, and the last full-page spread is the whole village coming out and riding bicycles through the hills. Helen said to me, please don't ever write a story about bicycles again. They're really (laughter) hard to illustrate.

CRAIG: They're horrid things to draw. They're very difficult. They drive me mad.

HOLABIRD: (Laughter). I don't know how you've done it.

CRAIG: I'm constantly amazed that I was drawing her in 1982 because it was published in '83, so the whole of '82 was used up drawing her. And now it's 40 years to this year, and I just can't believe it.

HOLABIRD: Angelina has had a really extraordinary run, and we were just very lucky to know each other and to be able to create this magic together. It's been a really thrilling ride.

CRAIG: It's a funny feeling.

HOLABIRD: It's a wonderful feeling.

CRAIG: It's difficult, sometimes, visually, when it gets altered terribly.

HOLABIRD: It is very hard letting go when you can't control everything.

CRAIG: I've let go now. I'm like a mother who's let a child go out into the world.

(LAUGHTER)

HOLABIRD: Yes, we've had to let her dance out into the world, haven't we?

CRAIG: Yeah.

HOLABIRD: And she's still dancing, which is absolutely wonderful. I'm very, very proud of her.

RASCOE: That was Katharine Holabird and Helen Craig talking about "Angelina Ballerina," their classic children's book series. And our series, Picture This, is produced by Samantha Balaban.

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