BY HEATHER CAMLOT PHOTOGRAPHY BY RICHMOND LAM
Geneviève Godbout still has the book she was obsessed with as a child: the French edition of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever. But she didn’t exactly read it. “I wasn’t a big reader because I was drawing all the time,” Godbout says. “I would look at the book and draw.” Raised in Saint-Raphaël, a small town near Quebec City, she had only four or five children’s books growing up. Although her mother was a reader, Godbout lived with her father, who wasn’t. “But he always recounted fairy tales before bed,” she says. “He would make funny voices and I loved it.”
What her home lacked in printed matter it more than made up for in movies: she had VHS copies of all the Disney films. So it’s perhaps no surprise that Godbout set on a career in the visual arts. At 16, she moved to Montreal to attend the animation program at Cégep du Vieux Montréal and at 19 moved to Paris to continue her studies at the prestigious Gobelins animation school. She joined Disney Consumer Products in London and was put in charge of creating new licensing images of Winnie the Pooh and The Aristocats for Europe.
After a few years, Godbout felt like she needed a change. She took on a few side projects, including some picture-book illustration gigs, and secured representation with Emily van Beek of Folio Jr. in New York. In 2013, Godbout returned to Montreal to illustrate full time. “With books you have to choose what you want to tell in the [artwork] because you have a limited number of pages,” she says, when asked how animation and print storytelling differ. “But you can also illustrate something different than the text. Plus, there’s something more intimate about books; the experience is different for each person.”
That intimacy was top of mind for Godbout when she was recently asked to illustrate not one but two of kidlit’s most iconic characters: Anne of Green Gables and Mary Poppins. The two books – Goodnight, Anne by Kallie George (Tundra Books) and a picture book adaptation of P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books for Young Readers) – are out this fall. “I just couldn’t believe my luck. They are two of my favourite characters,” she says, but admits she was really nervous to take them on. “I know people will discover my work through these characters because they are so well known. It was a lot of pressure.”