Dream Eater Tapir is a picture book about two kids. But, it seems to me that the book is about just one child, two sides of the same child.
Happy Nose (Fu Bi Zi), the little dream eater tapir acting as “the night masked hero”, is much more like a “little varlet” with a bizarre appearance. The painter makes him plump, staging various naïve and lovely expressions and movements. The tools he uses to deal with nightmares are interesting and funny too, such as “precious fork to throttle nightmares”, “net to capture nightmares” and “iron shovel to flat nightmares”, which are much like the playthings used by kids to play house. What’s most remarkable and valuable is that he is totally unaware of what worry is and the only thing he knows is to capture the quarries (nightmares) and enjoy the delicacies. Kids like him are only likely to live in the legendary era before the history.
On the contrary, the little boy is a typical contemporary kid, comely, adorable, but a little fragile too. Along such a short growing journey of his, innumerable minor worries fall down upon his heart, which turn into nightmares and hit him at night, leaving him a frightened kid, until one day when Happy Nose comes.
You may say there clearly are two kids, but to me, there is only one kid as I know even in the little hearts of contemporary children, there is blood of ancient days which forms the other side of unawareness and nature, and every contemporary kid has a Happy Nose in its body. As soon as Happy Nose is wakened, nightmares will be eaten up and sweet dreams will restart.
This picture book is a practice painting of a very promising young painter. It is a story book created based upon a great originality, full of interesting texts and pictures. As a whole, there are a lot of funny details in the book attractive to readers, apart from the ending which seems a little bit rushed. I dare not say that there is some very profound significance in the story, but I am sure the author does have some thoughts.
Tapir is a kind of spirit beast with ancient origins. It is said that the earliest record of it is in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, where there is a sentence going as “there are a lot of cruel leopards in Nanshan Mountain” in the Classic of the Mountains: West Mountain bears an annotation made by later generations as “The cruel leopard is called tapir too”. There also are references in the Book of Songs and Er Ya.
However, it is likely that the legend of the tapir as a dream eater originates from Japan. It is said that the dream eater tapir is very shy that it is out secretly only at night to eat nightmares and reserve sweet dreams to people. This legend brings immensurable space for people to dream away in a beautiful frame of mind. A Japanese song called “Yumekui” is about the determination of young people to not give up easily and keep pursuing dreams.
I believe it is this very great reverie that makes this picture book beautiful.(By A Jia)
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