There is something strange about watching a character you've known for years begin to move.
Edward first appeared in The Silent Dance of Stars as Madame Bea's familiar — a black cat with a history that extends much further back than the story ever really explains.
I've known parts of that history for a long time.
Recently, I've started animating one of them.
The last life of Edward
The hand-drawn animation takes place on an old Japanese street.
I've been building the backgrounds in watercolour: wooden buildings, narrow streets and the main road running past them. Against those painted backgrounds, Edward is beginning to appear in much rougher form — pencil shapes moving along walls and slipping through the street.
At the moment, it is still very much a work in progress.
Some of the background pans are in place and Edward's movements are beginning to take shape, but much of him is still little more than moving pencil forms.
And I quite like showing it at this stage.
The finished sequence will follow Edward as he slinks along the street and eventually settles near a corner. From there, he notices a child playing in the road.
The child doesn't see what is coming.
An old motor car — one of the earliest kinds beginning to appear on Japanese roads — comes hurtling along the main street. The driver is oblivious to the child, and the child is oblivious to the car.
Edward sees both.
He leaps into the road and pushes the child out of danger.
It saves the child's life.
And costs Edward his last one.
Before he was a familiar
This is the part of Edward's story I've wanted to explore.
Edward wasn't always Madame Bea's familiar.
He had lives before that.
Some of those stories reach much further back, including ancient Egypt and the circumstances in which he first encountered Bea. They may become stories of their own one day.
But this animation is about his final life.
It is Edward's selfless act — choosing to save the child — that changes what comes afterwards. His death doesn't quite end his story. Instead, it begins another part of it.
Edward becomes a familiar.
And eventually, across all that distance and time, he finds his way back to Bea.
Stories that move
Animation has interested me for as long as I can remember, and I've always wanted it to become part of what I make through Ciro Correia Studio.
That doesn't necessarily mean everything becoming a fully animated film.
I'm interested in the space between still illustration and animation too: parallax, moving drawings, rough pencil sequences, painted environments, fragments of motion — whatever form allows a particular story to come alive.
That's part of what excites me about building the Studio around worlds rather than individual books.
The Silent Dance of Stars may be where we first enter this world, but it doesn't have to be the only way we experience it.
A character mentioned in one story can wander into another. A piece of history can become an animation. An illustration can move. Something that was only hinted at in the novel can become a story in its own right.
Over time, those fragments begin accumulating.
The book.
The illustrations.
The Archive.
Edward's origins.
Madame Bea's past.
Animations.
Small stories we haven't discovered yet.
Layer upon layer, the world becomes larger than the thing that first contained it.
For now, though, Edward is still mostly pencil lines.
He's creeping along a wall towards a corner.
The child is waiting somewhere further down the timeline.
And there's still a great deal of drawing to do.
But he's moving.
And that's rather exciting.