Brian Froud On ‘The Dark Crystal’, ‘Labyrinth’ And His Love Of Nature

For anyone that grew up in the 80s, like me, films like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth have had a huge impact. However, much of what made those movies so visually unique and arresting was the work of British artist, Brian Froud. What with the new Netflix series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance finally out, I wanted to find out more about how Froud approaches his work.

As always, I wanted to know what things interested Froud as he was growing up and playing around in the woods seems to be a big part of that.

“I grew up in the country, in the South of England. I went to a village school that always seemed to me that was set in the woods and so during the breaks I wasn't playing with the other children in the playground, I was always out in the woods and climbing up trees or finding little secret ways under bushes. That was how I spent my early life, somehow connected to nature. Following that, I lived by the seaside, which was fun.

“I wasn't particularly interested in drawing really. My father was a flight engineer on airplanes, so I suppose that when I did draw, I was drawing airplanes. So I have always been connected I suppose to flying things. Planes or fairies.

“I also used to love building plastic model kits. In those days, it was mainly airplanes that you could get as kits, but the thing that I loved the most was knights in armor. You could get things like the Black Knight of Nuremberg and the Red Knight of somewhere else. I used to love those. They were great fun.

“You would rebuild the knights and I would keep on re-buying them and perhaps paint them another color. There would always be something I would do, like glue something extra on and try and make them different. This also turned out to be a passion in later life of trying to make things and make them stranger.

“I later went to a traditional grammar school and did sort of alright. I was doing art there and I was thinking of leaving school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. When the art teacher said, "don't you want to go to art school?". I hadn't really thought about that and he took me and showed me what an art school was like. I loved it, as you walked through the doors, the smell of oil and turpentine. I also saw these big paintings, huge paintings that the students were making of rock stars like the Rolling Stones. I thought that this was the place for me. Then I went back to school and had to study a bit more, get my A levels. However, without that teacher telling me that I had some talent, which I had no idea I had, without him I really wouldn't have gone to art school.

“While my art teacher at grammar school encouraged me to go out and paint nature but he showed me some of his drawings and he used to do these really funny drawings of people he knew and how he imagined what they would look like in the bath. I thought that was hysterically funny and that really intrigued me about the whole fantasy aspect. I suppose about using your imagination to take you into another place. In this case, it was people's bathrooms.

“Really, I think the reason I got into doing what I did at art school is that it was a reaction against painting. I started as a painter but I really didn't like the fact you could paint rubbish pictures but if you could give them some erudite meaning and you made that up, that people would think that was good art. I thought this was patently not true and I was intrigued by the fact that art and a picture should tell a story, or convey some deep emotion. I gave up the painting and went into graphic design, thinking that was a more direct and more honest way of using images. I quickly found that was really boring and by then I discovered Arthur Rackham, a turn of the century artist that painted fairy tales. Seeing his pictures and seeing, in particular, his drawings of trees that had faces. It was the shock of recognizing that's how I felt as a child, in amongst the woods that I felt that nature had personality and soul. Due to Rackham, I started to get involved with the idea of illustrating fairy tales whilst I was at art school. I spent all my spare time developing that. I sort of taught myself illustration at art school, which they indeed acknowledged when I left as they set up an illustration course after me because of my enthusiasm for it.”

‘Faeries’ And Working With Alan Lee

One of Froud’s most influential works is the artbook Faeries that was published back in 1978. Working closely with Alan Lee, Froud brought the classical world of fairies to life in a new and fresh way. Something that would go on to influence other artists many years later.

“I worked with Alan Lee after this. I finished art school around 1970 and then I had an agent, drawing and painting all sorts of illustrations. Book covers, magazines, advertising. I did anything that came along. Eventually, I moved into a studio space at the agent's, which other artists did as well. So we were all working in Soho in London. Alan was there and he tended to work late at night and I worked during the day, so it was usually when I was going home I would drop by and say hello as he was gearing up to do his work. That's how we met really.

“After discovering Rackham, it was all the artists surrounding him that interested me as well. The ones that did all these deluxe books around 1910 and that sort of period. I really loved the richness of the illustration. In particular, I loved the detail that was going into this work. There was something I guess for me that was attractive that was it had this nostalgic quality, a look back to a bygone age. So when I started to do my own work it tended towards that type of look. Indeed, when I did a book called The Land of Froud, which was a series of my paintings, people just assumed I was dead. That I was some kind of rediscovered artist from the turn of the century and were really shocked to discover that I was a young man.

“Oddly enough, while I didn't pursue it, Alan Lee did. I mean, for us it was The Lord of the Rings. When we were at art school, that was the big book we were all reading. In many ways, it's influential. After a recent showing of the original Dark Crystal movie, somebody asked a question "why does Dark Crystal look like The Lord of the Rings movies?". I was a bit taken aback and had to think about it and wondered "oh dear, did I steal anything from it?" and then realized, wait a minute, no we were ahead of those movies. So I answered with the fact that Alan Lee and myself live in the same place and we both respond to the landscape that we live in and that shows up in our art.

“I worked in London for about 5 years and I got tired of the "tricks" I suppose of doing all these different art styles and I was longing to discover exactly what I wanted to do. I thought that might actually coincide with me moving into the countryside, which it did. So my response to nature and looking at the hills and the trees, was to imagine while I knew what it looked like on the outside but what does it look like on the inside? When I thought about that, suddenly I found myself painting and drawing trolls and fairies. All my art really is a response to nature.

“It's worth clarifying that I am talking about British nature here, as when I am in America that type of nature does affect my artwork. Years ago, I was a guest of honor at the World Fantasy Convention in San Francisco. When I went, I was convinced that there wasn't a single tree in America, as they didn't really show up in the fantasy art. When I got to America, there were these stunning and beautiful trees and I got a bit angry thinking what's going on with all these fantasy artists here?

“What seemed to be going on was that it was a bit incestuous, they were looking at each other's work and it was just going round and round. I just thought they should have stepped onto their doorstep and looked outside. I mean, it's right there under their noses. Somebody asked me the other day, what was my favorite fantasy book and major influences, and I realized what I really wanted to say was that it was actually a tree. Everything you need to know is in a tree. It's the shape, forms, rhythms of it. All of that absolutely informs the way I draw and see things in that art. I think it's all there. I also worked for a little while at Skywalker Ranch and definitely, I felt the way I saw things and drew things was different because the landscape was different. 

“Going back to Rackham, after finding out about him I went onto see what his influences were. Things like the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris, as well as further back from that as well. The thing I find very seductive is Northern European art, around the 1500s and 1600s. There is something about that, rather than Italian, as Italian art of the period is all about nudes and it's a hot country. The people in those paintings fly and drift across the sky, it's all rather exuberant. Whereas in Northern European art the nudes, look cold and are almost shivering. They are rather pinched. However, they have this feeling that they are rather like root vegetables. They are like something that has just been plucked out of the cold earth into the light. There is something very organic about them and the art, that's what I find feeds into my own art.

“With making Faeries, it was interesting because Ian Ballantine, the guy who brought paperback books to America, and he had developed these series of books on old artists and that's indeed how I did The Land of Froud. Alan and I actually shared a house together and shortly after I moved out, just up the road, in fact, he came to see us and showed us a book called Gnomes. This had been a bestseller and we assumed Ian had chosen us because we were young and arrogant, that we were somehow the best people in the world to do a book about fairies. This was only because we were passionate about this kind of art that looked backwards and was connected to English folklore. It was what we wanted to do and we thought we could do it.

“What we missed as we were about halfway through the work is that what the publisher wanted was not really a book about fairies, but instead a bestseller follow-up book to Gnomes. There is a difference because what they expected as fairies to be like gnomes, so rather jolly and fluffy. Yet here we were producing this work that was everything was green and had little sharp teeth. It was really shocking.

“At that point, they were rather confused and weren't sure whether we should continue. However, they allowed us to continue, which was great, because what we were doing was actually true to the subject matter. What we were reminding people was that fairies didn't just exist children's nursery books, but they had always existed in people's minds and in folklore. That fairies were dangerous, tricky and had been part of people's lives. I think because of our expertise of developing our style and how we painted as well as how we wanted to express it, I think turned out that we were the perfect people to do a book about fairies.

“The book was a runaway success, I think because people just intuitively understood that it was real. That there was some authenticity to it and it was a thing that people had seen in such a long time.

“Oddly enough, even though Alan and I shared the same house for a while but when we were doing the fairies book, we were in different buildings. Our plan had been originally to confuse people about who was doing what, but because there was two of us we realized it needed to have a flow to it, a visual flow. So the original plan was to do the drawings and actually draw on top of each other's art. It was meant to be a synthesis, but there was just no time to do it that way. We had to do everything in such a rush. So we started by figuring out what we wanted to include in the book, write it on a bit of paper and we put all the bits of paper with the names on in the middle of the floor and one by one we just we would choose what to do. Put the bits of paper in our own little pile, so that's how we divided the work up. Making sure we knew what each of our strength and weaknesses, so Alan got what he was really good at and what I was good at. That's the way we just divided it up, we painted away just a few hundred yards from one another. We also made sure there were a few images that were absolutely a crossover, so I was partly in his style and he was partly in my style. Again, so the book ended up seamless really.”

Working With Jim Henson And Puppets

The popularity of Froud’s work inevitably lead to people like Jim Henson getting in touch, which would in turn lead to projects such as the original The Dark Crystal.

“By then, Jim Henson had actually seen a cover of a book I did earlier on. On the cover, it had the first painting I created when I moved to the country. It was of a troll with a waterfall coming off its nose. That was the one Jim had seen and then meanwhile I was doing other books, I couldn't really do much until I had finished Faeries but then I ended up in New York working on the project that was to become the Dark Crystal.

“I was a bit shy, I didn't know quite how to react. All I know was when Jim said: "do you want to come to New York?" I couldn't turn it down because I loved The Muppets. I also had been considering how could I turn my art into something that would be like a film. I sort of realized that animation wasn't going to work for it. I mean, when you look at my art it can often seem like it's complicated. So all the forms or that there is lots of detail, but underneath that, the thing that underpins that is actually abstract. So I knew that if we could crack the idea of this being real. With puppets, I could just put lots of detail on the top and it would look like one of my paintings. However, this had just been one of the things in the back of my mind, but when Jim said that he wanted to do this film with puppets and it's going to be like puppets nobody has ever seen before and he wanted all that detail, it was just such an amazing opportunity. I had no idea if I could do it or not, I mean I say that I started work for Jim and five years later he hadn't fired me, so I must have done something right. Jim liked the way my art looked, but he had no idea, nor did I, of how we could facilitate that. Luckily, I did have some skills at making things. I could do a little bit of sculpture, so in the early days, I could show people the way things should look in three dimensions.

“As we were developing the film and making it better, making it more real. We were pioneering puppetry, pushing into directions it had never gone before. I was learning and found that I was able to express it and help people realize Jim Henson's vision.

“This kind of thing is like surfing I suppose. You have to surf this because it is no good trying to make the water go in the precise direction you want. I tried at the beginning to make my designs looser and do more prototype work. So you guide that but in the prototype work you find out what's possible, what's good movement, how we are going to manipulate it. Meanwhile, it's all still really abstract but I am guiding how it should feel. It's all about feeling really. It's only near the end when you bring the people together, who are making costumes or textures, and then guide that and bring it all together onto the creature. Then it sort of becomes itself.

“Jim was a great advocate of people's creativity, he loved that and encouraged that. His encouragement was not about making it different or not good enough but instead, how can we make this better. Everything was about making things better. Making it somehow more itself. That was what our challenge was and that's what we all had so much fun doing.

“That said I still have to bring to a cohesive look, my battle on working on a movie is to let that happen but without stultifying the creativity of people and also without interfering with its visual potential. You can't have things in it that stick out, as what we were doing in the Dark Crystal was creating a whole world. Every single thing you see in the film is meant to exist somewhere else and be something you have never quite seen before.

“It took us five years to do the Dark Crystal and we had Christmases off but it was every day of my life was working on that to try and make it happen. It took that long because meanwhile, Jim was doing Muppet movies and things like that, which was frustrating for us at the time. We just wanted to get the film done I suppose but it actually really helped us as it gave us more time to really explore the possibilities of puppetry. So it worked out the better for it to have spent that long on it.

“On the mythos for The Dark Crystal, Jim's inspiration had been a children's book about crocodiles in elaborate costumes living in a castle. He just liked the idea of some reptilian creatures living in opulence. That was like the germ of the idea. After that, he quite rapidly started to put in the deeper meanings to it. As in the idea of the split and the setup of good and evil. All that was pretty loose and so when I arrived in New York and there were nine of us in the workshop there, starting to do some prototype work, I was drawing as Jim was talking about it. Frank Oz would be there. What we did was to mainly develop the world, I was drawing Skeksis, the name for them came quite early, and I would be doing these things. Jim and Frank loved monsters, so whatever I was drawing they always told me to make it worse. We just thought that the characterizations of these creatures were just hilarious. There was a lot of laughter. So we just constantly just fleshed out the world as we did it. We knew that Jim wanted the world itself to be alive and full of creatures, so you never quite knew if it was a rock or a creature, that sort of thing. I just kept scribbling away and it was really much later that the whole structure of the film came in. I suppose we just intuitively did it and I sort of fed in the geometry because I thought how do we try to imply that this world has been here for thousands and thousands of years. So I tried to come up with something not necessarily like a mythology but just a sense of it having a really ancient history. Jim really liked being in England as well, he liked its sense of history. He was also intrigued by the more esoteric side of things. Post The Lord of the Rings there was a big interest in Earth magic, lay lines, standing stones and ancient sites. Jim was really interested in that. That meant he was absolutely open to me feeding this stuff in. It gives the film this extraordinary depth.

“Anyway, after The Dark Crystal was released we went to a special showing in San Francisco, by that point we were exhausted and we said never ever again. However, after the showing of the film, I was in the back of a limousine with Wendy my wife, Jim and I and Jim said: "Oooh, should we do another one?". For some bizarre reason, we heard ourselves saying "yes" and at that point we hatched the plan, came up with the title, what was in it and that was the beginning of Labyrinth. I came back to England and started painting pictures. The first picture I painted was of a baby surrounded by goblins and that was the whole look and feel of Labyrinth. It all came from me painting pictures.

“It was Jim's idea to mix puppets with people in Labyrinth. When we came up with the idea for the film in the back of that limousine, the first thing he said is that he wanted to put some people in it. What I saw immediately was a vision of a baby surrounded by goblins, because in folklore goblins steal babies and that's what fairies do as well. Visually it's just a great image. Of course, the mixture of people with puppets was very traditional for the Muppets. I mean The Muppet Show is all about big stars, singers and actors, connecting with basically an inanimate object, which is a puppet, and making you believe that everything is alive. It wasn't a big step to do that for Labyrinth. However, it did mean we started to approach it in a slightly different way I suppose. That we knew what a human being in a landscape surrounded by puppets, what that energy is like and how that enhances the story. What I had learned on The Dark Crystal was how puppets were made and how you manipulate things. How you have to hide things. My drawings were based on creating creatures with how they would be manipulated in the film. Due to that, we ended up with a series of images. It did become a sort of episodic because of that. Then Jim felt we needed some tweaking to the script and he asked Terry Jones from Monty Python to do that.

“Terry came around the workshop and just loved it. On my desk was my sketchbooks and he started to flick through them and see all sorts of little drawings and things in the corners. He really responded to those. I think what he realized from seeing my art what my references were. Jim, being American, had missed some of them but Terry being English understood. In that, some of the references were from things like Alice in Wonderland, so the episodic approach we used was a lot like Alice in Wonderland. We suddenly were building new characters because Terry brought them in and it gave Labyrinth more of a whimsical quality. Meanwhile, underpinning it is quite a profound story about a teenage girl coming into maturity.

“The Allo' Worm at the beginning of Labyrinth isn't voiced by Terry, someone actually thought it was me. However, it does have that sort of literary voice Terry uses and has a similar kind of crazy dialogue.”

Updating ‘The Dark Crystal’ And Bringing That World To Life Again

It was here we moved onto the new Netflix series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and how Froud took on the task of returning to that incredibly complex setting.

“I can't talk much about the new Dark Crystal series on Netflix but it is wonderful to be asked to do it again. Over the years, there had been possibilities of re-approaching The Dark Crystal and it has usually been maybe some sort of animation but always not what we originally did. The genius of Netflix is that they said: "Oh, but we want it to be with puppets" and that's what they've got. So building puppets again, to be re-engaged with that world-building because we are not only recreating the world of The Dark Crystal but repopulating it with old and new characters. People have been just so delighted to be able to have the opportunity to work on the project and also to be engaged with the physicality of making this stuff. Just experiencing the magic of when you see these things come to life in front of your eyes on a beautiful set. Everything happens in front of you, it's not hidden away in someone's computer. It's been exhilarating but it's obviously been hard work, considering we have done ten episodes. The original film took five years and in this one, we have the length of several films but have done it in a very short period of time.

“There were a lot of things you have to remember, only because puppets are puppets. They don't actually fundamentally change. A lot of that we know what to do but I think what's happened is we've lost the people that did the original film. So to get people on board again and everybody assumed it would be quite easy, then they discovered how difficult it is to create the illusion that these things are alive. It's extremely hard work, however with Louis Leterrier the director he's brought this fresh dynamic eye to it with his camerawork, it's exhilarating. Sometimes when you watch it just takes your breath away.

“I think what really had happened was that when we did the original Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, we assumed we were going to do some more but it never happened because Jim died. We were planning to do a third film together, just before he died. Then CGI sort of took over after that. I think that people are beginning to realize we have lost something in the physicality of puppets and what we have done with this new Netflix series is to show people what was lost. I mean there are huge limitations with puppets of course but there is something astonishing and rather uncanny when something you know is inanimate just seems to have more life then you thought possible.

“As for the third movie we planned with Jim, it was going to be about trolls. The only thing he said was that "this time let's make it for children". What's interesting about doing The Dark Crystal again is that over the years everybody has said that they loved the original film but it really scared them. When we made The Dark Crystal we weren't thinking we were going to scare children because oddly enough we didn't think it was for children. We were making the film for us really. We were making a film that we wanted to see. So I think people were rather shocked when they experienced something that was darker and stranger than anything that had really been done before. These days though it is actually mainstream, now people understand a vision like this. To do The Dark Crystal again means its time has come.

“As for my concerns about doing an animated version of The Dark Crystal, it goes back to what I said about making a three-dimensional object, so something that is real. One of the things about puppetry is that it is a collection of things that can go wrong but because it has a direct link to a human being, a puppeteer, and somehow when you see a strange creature that is puppeteered you sense the humanity in it. That it's alive. I don't want to be completely unfair with CGI, as a lot of it is absolutely brilliant and when it works you don't notice it. However, some CGI is just dreadful, because it's squashing and stretching and doing things that are totally unbelievable. That rather upsets me. I don't dislike animation, but like Jim, I just think how can we do this better?

“A lot of things that I see and go "Oooh, that's terrible!" is because it has to be done cheaply. With some more money spent on certain things you literally get a better product. I mean we had something like 365 people work on the original The Dark Crystal, that's a team obviously but it has still got to feel like something unified by Jim and I. However, with animation with so many more people working on it, it is sometimes difficult for it feel like one person has made it. I think the strength of scribbly animation, let's put it that way, over CGI is that you feel like you are having a direct insight into the heart of mind of the person that did the scribble. It's a direct artistic expression. The danger is that when you have more and more people and more technology you pile onto something, it gets in the way of that.

“I have always felt that phenomena showed up in fantasy art. That a huge amount of fantasy art I found disturbing, mainly because it was all shiny. It seemed to me that it had been over rendered. So when you looked at it your eye skidded off the surfaces. When I paint it's much looser, in the looseness it allows you in. This is because you as a human being feed some of the information into what the artist is doing and the whole thing then lives and lives time after time. Sometimes with CGI, it doesn't do that anymore and you just sit there and go "wow" but you don’t go "oh". It is about trying to touch someone's heart.”

Influencing Anime And The Future

One of the reasons I wanted to speak with Froud, was that when I interviewed Yutaka Izubuchi he cited Froud’s work as a major influence. So anime series such as The Record of Lodoss War took inspiration in part from books like Faeries. Naturally, Froud was very happy to hear about this.

“I think it's great that people find influences from my work. I am always humbled when you learn that you have inspired other people, I guess now that I am getting to be an old man is that when I was young, people often asked me is it alright to copy and I said yeah. Except, don't just copy, steal. First of all, steal from the best. Only the best. But then turn it into your own voice. Find your own voice as quickly as possible. That's really important. We as artists need to take from the past and propel it to the future. So if anything I have done that I can pass on I think that's wonderful.

“Talking of anime, did you know I worked on a film years ago called Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland and that had a Japanese production. I think it was made by TMS? I found the whole experience very frustrating though. My bit I did in California and they had hired two or three old Disney guys because they wanted some of that feel. Whereas we were all frustrated by the Japanese approach. Simply because they would say we start week one and by week twelve we would be here on the schedule. However, we all said, no. We need to play. They said we wouldn't finish and we said we would but we need to play now because we need to find out stuff and come up with things you won't imagine. It was really crazy. I was designing Nightmare Land and I kept drawing and drawing and I think Fujioka just seemed to dislike everything I did. I got to the end and said I have come full circle now and that he had to make his mind up about something. So creatively it was very frustrating.

“It was also when we got the main characters designed, I asked when do we go to Japan, because that's where they were going to make it, and they said: "you're not going". I couldn't understand that. I asked how they were going to animate it and they told me they did that. I explained that they may have had the design but they wouldn't necessarily know how it moved, as that was very much part of the character.

“There was another Japanese gentleman that was part of the production, whose name I have forgotten, who made documentaries and he really wanted to take me to Japan and see how I would react about what I draw. I thought that would have been fascinating.”

Finishing up we went back to how Froud keeps his work loose and how he wants that his creatures and characters to come to life in the mind of the viewer.

“My drawings and designs for these creatures I tend to think they are somewhat scribbly and sketchy, then I look back at my old stuff and think hang on, this is more scribbly and sketchy. There is always this looseness to it because I want it to be open, I want the energy of it to fly really. The trick is in any way that is expressed, be it puppet or in animation, is to try and keep that energetic thing as open and that's what is quite hard.

“Funnily enough, I have just done a series of drawings now which is a series of characters that are a kind of non-drawing. There is a tendency when you do something loose and turn into a character, is to tidy it up. Give the legs the same proportion and everything and then where's the character, it's sort of gone now. What I want is that first impulse. So I have been trying to draw them lopsided and with strange shapes. Now when I am looking at them, I think the way to do this, to bring it to life, would be animation. That these shapes and images would be expressed very well in a non-physical way.

“I would love to work on something like anime, then we could have battles on the size of the eyes.

“I honestly think what we are making for the new Dark Crystal series on Netflix, people will love in Japan. I think weirdly enough it is coming full circle, that I think the anime crowd will really love it.”

The artbook The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance: Inside the Epic Return to Thra is released on November 12 but in the meantime feel free to check out my review of the fascinating Brian Froud's World of Faerie.

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