The Bear

Product Information

Wroe, Nicholas (18 December 2004). "Bloomin' Christmas". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 22 May 2010. In 2014, Briggs received the Phoenix Picture Book Award from the Children's Literature Association for The Bear (1994). The award committee stated:

Archived copy". Archived from the original on 11 March 2016 . Retrieved 11 March 2016. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title ( link) Briggs was uneasy at being described as a pioneering graphic novelist—he preferred to describe his creations as “picture books”. But the barely concealed emotional charge of his children’s tales, and their bucolic charm, acquired a stinging, subversive power when deployed, in an unaltered visual style, in his adult, satirical and autobiographical books, including Gentleman Jim (1980) and When the Wind Blows (1982). This film doesn't quite have the structure that the films of the Snowman/Father Christmas/Snowdog trilogy do. It's more of an interpretive dance than a story and that probably makes it quite artistic and beautiful for some. Children may enjoy it for it's simplicity and pretty style and without thinking too hard about it, but as an adult I find that it poses a lot of questions. The hilarious and heartwarming tale of a magical friendship between a girl and a polar bear, from beloved author of The Snowman, Raymond Briggs.

While at the zoo a young girl loses her favourite teddy bear into the polar bear enclosure. Later that night she is still upset and goes to sleep with no toys. However in the night the polar bear comes to her house to return the teddy and she lets him stay as a result. The morning comes and sees the girl keeping the bear a secret from her parents – not an easy feat in a three bedroom house. Later that night the pair go out into the snow to see the sights and play games. When the Wind Blows (1986)". BFI. Archived from the original on 15 September 2016 . Retrieved 11 August 2022. a b c d e (Greenaway Winner 1966). Living Archive: Celebrating the Carnegie and Greenaway Winners. CILIP. Retrieved 14 July 2012. As I say though, if you're just watching it to show your child a special little picture of fun and adventure and can get past the music issue (Maybe you haven't seen The Snowman at least 300 times), then it's a nice piece, but I tend to want a little bit more, even for a children's film, as they are an important way to teach them new things. I'm not sure this shares much of anything.

A brilliantly clever and funny tale about an unlikely friendship, from beloved children's author Raymond Briggs. Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. Briggs was drawn to illustration by his love of the newspaper comic strips of his childhood, when Mary Tourtel and Alfred Bestall’s Rupert Bear was a publishing phenomenon in the mass-circulation Daily Express newspaper and, from 1936, as an annual. He also grew up in the golden age of comics: the first Superman comic strip appeared in 1938 and the first comic book devoted to the character in 1939, the year that also saw the launch of Marvel Comics. It was also a time when art's boundaries had been expanded by flight and aerial photography, whether it was the the airborne cinematic perspectives of the Italian Futurists such as Guglielmo Sansoni and Tullio Crali or the paintings of the British war artist Eric Ravilious, with an aerial vantage point level with RAF aircraft in flight over the patchwork landscape of southern England. Briggs received a thorough professional schooling, first at Wimbledon School of Art (now Wimbledon College of Art), then at Central School of Art in London, the Royal Corps of Signals—for his national service, where he was put to work drawing diagrams for electric circuitry—and the Slade School of Art, University College London. At the Slade he overlapped with fellow students including the late Paula Rego and Victor Willing, and graduated in 1957, aged 23. Briggs put his meticulous research skills to use, mining historical dictionaries for redundant words that might give authenticity to his characters, including the more unsavoury bodily emissions of Fungus the Bogeyman. Ramachandran, Naman (10 August 2022). "Raymond Briggs, 'The Snowman' Creator, Dies at 88". Variety . Retrieved 11 August 2022.

Briggs's mature style, favouring crayon as a medium over earlier experiments in watercolour, has a fine-textured patina and muted palette that is as distinctive and unmistakable as the strongly outlined, vividly coloured images of two internationally popular Francophone comic-book series—Hergé’s Tintin adventures (starting in 1929) and René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s Asterix books (1959-2015)—both of which are reminiscent of the style and primary tones of the 19th-century posters and short books of the French publisher Imageries d’Epinal.