If you love fresh stories that explore fairy worlds, then you’re going to love today’s picture book!

Mikey Please is a BAFTA Award–winning and Oscar-nominated animation director and writer based in London. He is an alumnus of Wimbledon School of Art and the Royal College of Art and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Café at the Edge of the Woods is his picture book debut.  You can learn more about him at his website or follow him on Instagram or on Twitter.

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THE CAFE AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS reminds me of fairy tale worlds I have visited many times over the years.  It’s HILDA-esque (another favorite book series of mine) as it introduces these fresh characters that somehow feel like they fit right into the mythos you’ve always known and loved.  In this story we meet Rene who has always dreamed of owning her own cafe.  She saves until she is able to do just that and builds a cafe at the edge of the woods.  Yet she finds the inhabitants are nothing like she expected.  She hires the only wire to apply for the job (i.e., Glumfoot) and is more than ready to feed her first customer until an ogre arrives and demands food she’d rather not make.  What transpires after that is sheer brilliance.  This is a story you will want to devour (pun intended) over and over again.

Welcome Mikey!

Me: Can you share about your journey? When did you start creating art and/or writing?  How did that bring you to where you are now as an author-illustrator of this book? 

Mikey: Big opener! I suppose it’s a question of how far back we go… it all began in the womb, when I heard my father reading. Then – ok-ok- I’ll briefly skim over the next couple of decades by saying that as a kid I loved making comics and as an adult I’ve mostly worked as an animation director. I’ve been making animation professionally now for a couple of decades, a chunk of that as an independent artist (making films on my own), and then at studios like Cartoon Network (making a series with lots of people) and more recently at Aardman Animation where I co-wrote and directed a stopmotion film called Robin Robin for Netflix. 

Underpinning all of this was a deep love of storytelling, pictures, words and books in particular. My approach to animation has always been to try and build a kind of 3D picture book, and indeed Robin Robin began as a mocked up picture book which we pitched to get the film off the ground. My breakthrough short film, The Eagleman Stag, similarly was developed as a little book I made for fun, before I developed it into a film. So the two practices have run alongside each other and to make a picture book which can actually hold up on its own feels was long overdue. I’ve attempted a bunch of them, and for some reason, this is the one that’s broken through. 

Me: I love that.  As a lover of fairy tales, I love this story of a chef who wants to cook gourmet foods but sets up shop next to the deep dark woods full of mythical creatures.  The premise of the problem is brilliant!  What gave you the idea?

Mikey: During lockdown my wife, son (then 3) and I had a lot of time to fill. One of the games we played was ‘cafes’, where my wife would pretend to be a pompous chef who only wants to make fancy foods, I’d be a rotating carousel of several mythical creatures (witches, fairies and Ogres) all demanding unreasonable, off menu non-foods. Thimbles of moonlight! Morning dew soup! Etc. and my son would be the downtrodden waiter stuck between the two of us, trying to please everyone. Something about the setting and situation seemed so rich and one day the opening line of the poem popped into my head, and I knew I had to flesh it out. Early drafts featured all the customers (fairies, witches etc) but I realized focusing in on just one customer meant I could delve more into Rene, her frustrations, her reactions, and that was where the fun was. 

Me: What did your illustration process for this book look like?  Are you a traditional or a digital artist?  Or do you use a blend of both for this book?

Mikey: A blend. I’d not done a lot of final illustration that’s had to work on its own, so there was a steep learning curve. I certainly didn’t have a set illustration style. There was no rule book to follow. Though all of my working day is spent drawing and writing (storyboards and scripts) no one ever sees or reads those actual bits, so it was a little nerve wracking knowing that particular aspect of my work would be laid bare. I knew I wanted to have an analogue aspect (as with my animation work) and explored a bunch of mediums: painting, watercolour, but settled on the very direct process  of pencil on paper and then colouring digitally. I arrogantly thought it’d be a straightforward process, but it floored me how hard it was to produce images that didn’t move. As a reader you get to pour over every detail, so it has to hold up! 

Me: I love the variety of creatures you have coming to the shop.  Even if one or two might be recognizable, most of them feel new (even Glumfoot).  Did you plan to have all of these creatures from the first draft?  Or were they added later during revisions?  Did this story undergo a lot of revisions?

Mikey: I always knew I wanted the story to wrap with a bustling cafe full of feasting mythical creatures and did a lot of visual development to find the customers in that busy cafe spread, auditioning them for fit. Most of the design work however went into finding the main trio. There were countless iterations. I feel like I only really got to know Rene, Glumfoot and Ogre by the time I finished the final art. Story wise, there were several drafts and at each stage refinements happened. But the big edits were all done in the poem, which I worked on over the course of about a year. Picking it up, beating it about, letting it sit so I could look at it afresh. 

Me: This is your very first author-illustrator picture book.  What is one thing that surprised you in the creation of it?

Mikey: As mentioned earlier, I was floored by the difficulty of making a still image. I think having worked at producing 12 images a second in animation, I foolishly presumed doing 1 image would be easier. How wrong I was! 

Me: Any advice for other new picture book writers and/or illustrators?

Mikey: Oh, well, I think I’m the one still hunting for advice. The one thing I’d pass on from the experience is that I think it’s been really positive that The Cafe at The Edge Of The Woods doesn’t fit into a template. As in, it’s a kids picture book, but it’s not the regular 16 spread story. It’s a bit longer, slightly complex, it uses unfamiliar words, an unfamiliar rhyming structure. It does a load things that I think you’re typically not meant to do and I think that’s helped it feel fun and surprising and resonate with people. 

Me: Any other projects we can look forward to seeing from you in the future?

Mikey: The Cave Downwind of The Cafe! The second book in the series, told more from Glumfoot’s point of view and coming out this time next year. It’s a companion book to this one. You’ll just have to wait until next year to see what I mean by that. But I’m really excited about sharing more, partly because I think I finally got their faces right!

Yay!  I can’t wait to read it.  Thank you so much for stopping by my blog today Mikey.

Dear readers, this book released in the UK first and released just yesterday in the US.  This book is as unexpected as a LAIKA film.  The writing and world building are fresh and the illustrations are captivating.  This is a picture book you won’t want to miss!