캐나다 판타지 그림책의 상상력

Imagination in Canadian Fantasy Picturebooks: Beyond the Boundaries between Fantasy and Reality

This article explores how to read picturebooks with some of the representative Canadian fantasy picturebooks: Munch’s The Paper Bag Princess, Morgan’s Matthew and the Midnight Ball Game, Bourgeois’s Franklin in the Dark, and Wynne-Jones’s Zoom at Sea. Reading picturebooks need to focus on words and images at the same time. Sometimes images tell more stories than words written in the pages. Children know how to read and what to read through pictures by intuition, while adults lost the ability to read pictures, only focusing on words with traditional way of reading. The function of pictures in picturebooks is to describe and represent. The function of words is to narrative. So the relationship between pictures and words are important and also complex. Picturebooks are an effective and interesting way of telling stories. They give pleasure to viewers and readers, both children and adults. In the Canadian fantasy picturebooks above, readers enjoy the story with the written words and more stories (that the words don’t tell) through focusing and reading pictures.