Ethel & Ernest

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For Robin Shaw, who has directed a number of animations based on Briggs' books, there was a clear impact on his work. Short story about the author's parents. We see a little bit of how they court, buy a home and build their dreams in it, how they form a family. Apparently, the author's parents were already up in age when they met and married and his mom was only able to have one child or run the risk of dying if she were to attempt to have more children. This is a great, whimsical character study of a common married couple as well as an excellent social study of British working-class morals and beliefs in the twentieth century.

In Ethel & Ernest vertelt Raymond Briggs het verhaal van het huwelijk van zijn ouders. Vanaf hun eerste toevallige ontmoeting in 1928, toen Ethel nog een dienstmeisje en Ernest melkboer was. Ze trouwden, kregen hun zoon Raymond in 1934, tot hun dood, binnen enkele maanden na elkaar, in 1971. Nos encontramos ante una especie de biografía en forma de homenaje del autor hacia sus padres. En ella nos relata su vida familiar desde que se conocen hasta que fallecen, donde iremos viendo el paso del tiempo, los progresos, las diferencias entre ambos, etc. He argues: "I wonder what would have happened if he hadn't had that loss, the way he had it. If you look at what he was doing before that, it's very different from what came after.Whilst the story was heart-warming and quite tender in places, I couldn't help but notice the political discrepancies between them. Ethel was a Tory and Ernest was Labour. My problem with this was how Ethel came across: she came from a working class family (she had about 8 other siblings) and yet she looked down on what she referred to as 'commoners'. I understand that she wanted what was best for her son but too many people in this world try and forget their roots, and they're ashamed of them, when they really shouldn't be. I am working-class and I always will be. I just feel that Ethel sometimes came across as someone who thought she was better than others which diminished the affinity I had with her.

His final book was consciously intended to be just that. Compiled across several of his last years, Time for Lights Out (2019) is a poignant, funny and deeply honest exploration of the experience of ageing and reaching the end of life, in the form of a collage of verse, drawings and random thoughts. I adore this fictionalized true story. Briggs shows us scenes from his imagination of his parents’ lives: how they met, raised a family during a destructive world war, and lived through the cultural roller-coaster ride of the 20th century. Briggs’s illustrations are full of humor, marvelous detail, and obvious love for the people who inspired the title characters. The illustrations were beautiful and reminiscent of Briggs' other masterpiece, The Snowman, and the ending was very, very poignant. The book, first published in 1978, feels as if it was drawn by a child as Briggs drew with coloured pencils. It went on to form the basis for an animated film of the same name that was released in 1982, although there is no reference to Christmas in the book. (Briggs initially saw this addition as "corny and twee" but he admitted " it worked extremely well".) He contends: "There's never been a book like it. It's a perfect book because it's so expressive, it's the sort of book that moves you to tears because it's so intense but so simple, in the same Raymond way. It has deadpan, offbeat humour, but he is depicting those two people he loved so dearly. It's one of the most moving books I've ever read."Liz died in 2015. He is survived by her children, Clare and Tom, and grandchildren, Connie, Tilly and Miles. The characteristic that the journalist John Walsh described in a 2012 interview as a very English “strenuous curmudgeonliness” had become in later years a stereotype that Briggs embraced, exemplified by his column in the Oldie, Notes from the Sofa, collected in book form in 2015, where he would rail against sundry incomprehensible aspects of modern life.

Life gets pretty basic. Based during the Nazi times of ww2, this graphic novel is pretty impressive! Reminds me of the movie Up at times. Ya está Raymond Briggs haciéndome llorar. Este hombre es, para mi corazoncito, el equivalente del niño cabroncete que siempre venía a tirarme de las coletas en el colegio. Solo que con Briggs luego me quedo con la sensación de que me han hecho un favor enorme, un regalo de una delicadeza inmensa. Ethel y Ernest es sutilmente vertiginoso, como la vida, que pasa con tanta rapidez y sin que te des cuenta. Es como esos álbumes de fotos antiguas en que ves a tu padre y a tu madre tan jóvenes y guapos, y se te pone un nudo en la garganta.

Ingrams says: "Ethel & Ernest is supposed to be a book about his parents. But it's really more of an autobiography of himself. He is the central character in it. You get the importance that he attaches to the world he was brought up in, the world of his parents, is a completely different world to the one people live in now."