I was lucky enough to get my claws on an early copy of The Peculiar Tale of the Tentacle Boy in July and gobbled it up, instantly falling in love with Mariana and William, getting lost in the seaside village and the story of this unusual boy. The book has captured a plaice in my heart and I urge you all to go out and snapper a copy up (too many fishy puns? You'll understand when you read the book!)
You can read my full review here :
https://kandobonkersaboutbooks.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-peculiar-tale-of-tentacle-boy.html
Today, it is my pleasure to be able to host Richard on my stop on the blog tour to explain how the films he watched as a child have influenced his writing.
HOW FILM HAS INFLUENCED ME
When I won the Chairman’s Prize at the Times/Chicken House children’s fiction competition, Nikki Gamble kindly described my novel as “cinematic” – a comment which has stayed with me ever since. Until that conversation I’m not sure that I’d quite realised how much the workings of my imagination, and in turn my writing style, had been influenced by my love of film.
As a child of the nineties, I was a huge fan of Tim Burton’s earliest and weirdest movies. For many of my generation, he was the first and easiest entry point into understanding the role of a director – that one collection of films could all have been made by the same person, in this case, someone with an incredibly distinctive style. In that manner, a film director is much like an author. One person telling multiple stories in their own unique and inimitable way.
I was drawn to Burton’s narratives of oddball outsiders and underdogs, plus the looming architectural shapes and bold colours of his movies. It was his ability to blend the gloomy and frightful with the whimsical that has been such an inspiration to me – the director’s enticing aesthetic of ghostly, gothic characters knowingly clashing with the neon lights of Christmas, or the pastels of suburban America.
All of this works to create a distinctly heightened sense of reality – something which another of my biggest inspirations in film does to great effect… Because if the films of Tim Burton have helped inform the kind of stories I want to write, then Disney animation is responsible for the way I actually write them.
The Disney Renaissance of my childhood is widely considered as a golden age of animation. The era saw enormous leaps in animation technology, coupled with a successful return to traditional fairy tales as source material and a run of incredible soundtracks. But the most essential change which elevated these movies were the subtle, but significant improvements in writing – a move toward character driven narratives with rich settings and impeccably realised villains. What I didn’t know while I watched my VHS tape of The Lion King every day after school for six months, was that I was subconsciously absorbing the principles of Disney’s three-act structure – a model used in most of the studio’s greatest hits.
It will come as no surprise to learn that my two favourite Disney films each follow an outsider searching for something more: Ariel, the land-loving mermaid with a thirst for knowledge, unsatisfied by her life below the waves; and Quasimodo, the bellringer of Notre Dame who lives in secret on the fringes of a society he is desperate to be a part of.
I owe a lot to my family for exposing me to so many different forms of fiction throughout my childhood. If it hadn’t been for all those evenings spent reading my favourite books in one long sitting, or so many brilliant movies watched on a never-ending loop, who knows what kind of stories I might be writing today.
THE PECULIAR TALE OF THE TENTACLE BOY is out now, priced £6.99. Read chapter 1 on the Chicken House website!
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