Babar author Laurent de Brunhoff, who revived his father’s popular picture book series about an elephant king and presided over its rise to a global franchise, has died at the age of 98.
He preferred using fewer words than his father did, but his illustrations faithfully mimicked Jean’s gentle, understated style. Fans ranged from Charles de Gaulle to Maurice Sendak, who once wrote: “If he had come my way, how I would have welcomed that little elephant and smothered him with affection.”De Brunhoff would say of his creation, “Babar, c’est moi” , telling National Geographic in 2014 that “he’s been my whole life, for years and years, drawing the elephant”.Some parents shied from the passage in the debut The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant, about Babar’s mother being shot and killed by hunters.
Adam Gopnik, a Paris-based correspondent for The New Yorker, defended Babar, writing in 2008 that it “is not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination; it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination”.