Oh, Little China Girl

One of the new characters in Oz the Great and Powerful is the China Girl, an inhabitant of a village of china people who appear to have been genocidally destroyed by the Wicked Witch’s Flying Baboons. (She’s also the fairyland avatar of a disabled girl whom the carnival wizard can’t help back in Kansas.)

The china village is obviously inspired by a chapter L. Frank Baum interpolated into The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy and her companions visit a China Country on their way south to Glinda’s palace. In that chapter, Dorothy wants to take a China Princess home to her aunt but is dissuaded. In the movie, China Girl demands that Oz take her along on his adventure.

There are various ways to read the character’s behavior in that scene. On the one hand, China Girl is insistent on her right to go on an adventure. On the other hand, she casts herself as a fragile little creature who shouldn’t be left on the Yellow Brick Road alone. Of course, she is a fragile little creature; we just saw her legs broken, and she’s less than a foot tall. China Girl clings weepily to Oz’s leg, but as soon as he agrees to take her she trots off happily. I think it’s clear that China Girl’s behavior is a ploy to manipulate Oz, the master manipulator. But in that effort she invokes gender stereotypes.

During the movie’s climax, China Girl plays an important role, bravely bringing Glinda her wand. (The fact that China Girl doesn’t use the wand herself implies the magic of this Oz differs from that in Baum’s Oz, where most magical tools can be wielded by anyone who holds them.) She’s also one of the two characters who asks anything specific of Oz beyond regime change, and ends the movie as his informally adopted daughter.

Illustrator Ben Wood noted a resemblance between the design of China Girl and how John R. Neill drew Dorothy in later Oz books, as he showed in the image above. He wrote, “It was a smart way to add her in without really adding her.” I’m not sure that’s what the moviemakers had in mind, but China Girl does provide more interest and, ironically, someone to identify with.

What Wattle?

Years back, Daniel Pinkwater had an essay about listening to a slow-speaking public radio announcer (obviously Robert J. Lurtsema) announce an upcoming musical commission by “Dan…iel……Pink…”

And Pinkwater had a second of worry about some commitment he’d forgotten before hearing the announcer conclude, “…ham.”

I had somewhat the same feeling when I read that antipodean artist Ben Wood has a new picture book coming out with John Bell.

A while back I drafted Ben to illustrate a story for Oziana magazine, and enthusiastically shared news of his Oztober events last year. But I didn’t remember the Wattle Tree picture book. In fact, I wasn’t even sure what a wattle tree is.

I’ve since learned that a wattle tree is one of a number of types of acacia growing in Australia.

And Ben created The Wattle Tree with another John Bell, who also goes by John Gascoigne. Hachette’s page for the book says, “A former nanny, he has decided to return to higher education and is currently studying to complete BA at Sydney University.”

Ben is using his blog to document how the two of them created The Wattle Tree, starting with the sketchbook drawing that inspired it all.

Oztober Returns Early Down Under

Exciting news from Bendigo!

Ben Wood is following up his “Oztober” marathon of Oz art last year with an exhibit at the Hudson’s Hub gallery starting this week. Prints are available for purchase.

Bendigo, Wikipedia tells me, was a gold-mining settlement in Victoria, Australia, that started to grow in the same decade that L. Frank Baum was born.

Art from Oz

The Australian picture-book artist Ben Wood is aiming to post an Oz illustration every day of this month. Above is his take on Ojo the Lucky, the Munchkin boy at the heart of L. Frank Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz, as well as the Glass Cat. I also particularly like his Cowardly Lion and Wogglebug.

My reading of Ojo is that he’s a bit bipolar. For most of Patchwork Girl, he’s prone to crying jags and complaining about bad luck. In Ojo of Oz (1933), Ruth Plumly Thompson even refers to him at times as “depressed.”

Yet in books where he’s not the star, just one of the crowd, as in Glinda of Oz, Ojo tends to be as chirpy as he appears above. The first mood is a lot easier to make interesting, especially since he also has a habit of overstepping rules that people have specifically warned him about.

In other Oz-art news, Bill Campbell at The Oz Enthusiast has opened a Zazzle store.