Cinema Junkie Bonus Episode: Your Fluff is Enough
Please note this is an automated transcript and may contain inaccuracies.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Today we're going to visit Wiggly Wiggly Farm to meet Lenny the Little Sheep.
RASHMI GANDHI
Lenny had always been smaller than most, with knobbly knees and a less than full coat. He'd watch other sheep with their curls all in line and wonder, "Why does their fleece look nicer than mine?" Okay, if that doesn't sound like the usual Cinema Junkie fare, let me explain.
BETH ACCOMANDO
The reason why I'm doing a podcast about Lenny the Little Sheep does have its roots in movies. I first met its author, Rashmi Gandhi, through movies. We were both film critics. She was and still is part of a trio of podcasters who review films as Moviewallas and have celebrated more than 500 episodes. When I visited Rashmi's house for the first time, I was impressed by the giant hand-painted Bollywood posters on the wall and a trunk that her dad used to ship Bollywood films in.
RASHMI GANDHI
I think the dates on it, you can see all of the labels that used to come on the trunk. It tells you the studio the film was made in, which region of Mumbai, previously known as Bombay. And the film was Daag, D-A-A-G. This was the film, the original trunk that held the film prints.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Welcome back to listener-supported KPBS Cinema Junkie. I'm Beth Accomando. So yes, we're diverging from talking about strictly movies so we can discuss Lenny the Little Sheep, who appears in the new children's book, Your Fluff Is Enough, the first in a series of Wiggly Wiggly Farm Stories written by Rashmi Gandhi and illustrated by Darren Oei. But neither one of them ever thought they'd be creating a children's book. So today we explore how to self-publish your own book and get to meet Lenny the little sheep. I need to take one quick break and then I'll be back with author Rashmi Gandhi and illustrator Darren Oei. Welcome back to Cinema Junkie. I'm Beth Accomando. To begin, let's hear a little bit more of Rashmi at her home reading from her new book, Your Fluff Is Enough, about Lenny the little sheep.
RASHMI GANDHI
Lenny was known for his big wooly heart, but one spring morning his coat fell apart. He'd wandered through thickets in search of a snack. Snap, snag, rip went his fleece as he tried to get back. The farmer helped clean him, but oh, what a sight. Most of his wool had been pulled out that night, so until his new fleece could grow nice and thick, she stitched him a jacket with dots and a zip. I look like a blueberry bouncing along. This cannot be right. This coat feels all wrong. It's silly. It's itchy. It makes me feel bad. Why does my coat always leave me so sad? So off Lenny trotted with sniffles and doubt to see what his friends' fancy coats were about. He strolled by the pond where the lilies would sway and ducks in fine feathers paraded all day.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And that was some music from Rashmi's husband, Joe Djan, created for Wiggly Wiggly Farm. Rashmi and Joe don't have kids, so I asked her what inspired her to write a children's book.
RASHMI GANDHI
I think the first thing is I wanted to have a book I wish I had when I was growing up about really recognizing that you are enough. And secondly, I have nieces and great-nieces, and I really wanted to leave them something that said, you guys are perfect as you are, and may you always stay the same. You don't have to compare yourself to anything else or be anyone else. Your fluff is enough.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Originally though, this did not start as a children's book. So what was the original idea for this?
RASHMI GANDHI
I spent a lot of time in corporate America, and having managed teams who are difficult, I had a wonderful manager, and I said to him, we should write a book because it looks like we've handled a team of animals at times. And wouldn't it be great if we wrote a communication and teamwork book about how a farm works, but analogize people to, to animals? So that was the original idea. And in fact, I ran the characters that I wrote through a DISC assessment just to see how they would turn out. But maybe that's further down the line.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Now, because it became a children's book, a key element to children's books is illustration. So Darren, how did you get involved in this?
DARREN OEI
5 years ago, when the world shut down for COVID and stuff like that, and things are opening back up, I was selling these character Christmas cards. So I would just draw these cute little animals and I would sell them as these blank Christmas cards people could buy and send to other people. So Rashmi got a set and she really loved the illustration style. So I stopped doing that for a while just 'cause life got busy. And then Rashmi approached me and she said, "Hey, I remember those character cards that you did. I loved how cute those animals are. I'm working on this exciting book series that's about farm animals. Would you be interested in hearing more about what this is about and being a part of it?" And so she gave me this amazing presentation and pitch about this whole world that she had built with her writing. And she showed me kind of like, "Okay, this is what I have an idea for. These are the animals I'm thinking." the animals that you drew feel like such a great starting point style that could match. And so then it was a matter of, yeah, this sounds super fun.
DARREN OEI
I've never done anything like it. And let me come up with a design that's inspired by, but can still have its own brand identity so that we can turn this into something really, really new and exciting. Yeah, it took a few redesigns to kind of find the right one, but it felt like a very easy process of being excited to join and be a part of this. And then also that we just had a lot of easy chemistry, I felt like, while we were working. Started off with just drawing these little Christmas cards just to try to make a living when the world was kind of shutting down and reopening. And then now it's exciting to turn into something else.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And describe what the creative process is like. Did you have the book completely written and then presented to him? Like, just talk about how you put this together.
RASHMI GANDHI
Yeah, so I actually wrote 4 of the books straight off. I started with Lenny. It was while I was traveling. I retired last year and I always wanted to write, but I was never good at finishing things. So I would start things and write some essays and start like 4 chapters of a novel and have very lofty ideas. But it was when I was traveling, this whole thing came together. So I wrote all 4 characters and then basically presented to Darren this vision of the world. So I'd written one, and then I wrote the second one, which is Penny. And then I figured, well, where do they live? And then created the world and then went back to writing the next two books.
BETH ACCOMANDO
You mentioned Lenny. Explain who Lenny is.
RASHMI GANDHI
Lenny is a little sheep who perceives that he doesn't have as much fluff or as much fur or wool as all the other sheep, and he doesn't feel adequate. And his story is that he realizes that Actually, he is adequate. Again, each of the characters has a perceived flaw, a self-perceived flaw that becomes their superpower. And again, I wanted to relate that to children just to say that it doesn't matter who you are, that truly your fluff can be enough. You just have to kind of reprogram the way you see yourself.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Now, when you decided to tackle this, you didn't just write a children's book, you decided to also do it in rhyme and blank verse. So what inspired that?
RASHMI GANDHI
I've always loved words and rhyming. I love gangster rap, um, which people find unusual. Um, but I've always loved, I've just always loved rhyme and poem and the ability to tell something in a way that is like a song. And, and rhyme is so fun. Children love rhyme. I love rhyme. And it's that ability— I think Darren, you said it— it's that feeling of being able to predict the next word that's gonna come up that's super fun and how it just sticks with you. So I've always loved rhyme and I decided to do it in rhyme. And sometimes I'm regretful of that, but most of the time it's fun.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And Darren, talk about your creative process in the sense of you're creating these animals. What are you focusing on in terms of the design and the look of these animals?
DARREN OEI
So my drawing style, I would say, before working on this book was really inspired by a lot of anime and manga. There's a lot of like, with those styles, there's a lot of like sharp edges, exciting things going on, a lot of almost like kind of sleekness. And I wanted to do the opposite of that, knowing that with children's books, I didn't want anything that would come off as looking aggressive in any kind of way. So specifically with the shapes of the characters, I was thinking a lot of roundness, a lot of soft curves, a lot of colors that are a little bit more easier on the eyes rather than bold colors. I wanted the bold colors to be more reflected in the eyes rather than the actual body of the character. And so a lot of it was thinking, what would be something that is akin to a stuffed animal, something that would be— have like the fullness of being stuffed with polyfill, that would be cuddly, cute. I was thinking like big head, small body. That always feels kind of like a fun animated quirk that kind of sets cartoons apart from kind of drawing something more realistic.
DARREN OEI
And Roshpi can tell you, the very first design of Lenny looked a little too editorial, where like part of his fleece was almost shaped like a bow tie, and then his face was all long and he had slender limbs. And then Roshpi said, okay, this is nice for something else, like redesigned to make him a little bit more cuddly and sweet. So ultimately it came down to like, how do we create a character that has that stuffed animal look? And once we answered that question of can this character be turned into a stuffed animal that kids would want to bring home with them? Once we answered yes to that question, that's where it felt like, okay, this is the design we can land on and now develop further.
RASHMI GANDHI
Original Lenny looked like he was buff at the gym, like he worked out at least 4 days a week and ate a diet of protein and peptides. Yeah, but I think the other piece, Darren, you said, which was really important during the process, was the characters should be ones that all children can draw.
RASHMI GANDHI
And that, I think, was really key in the way that you came up with the design.
DARREN OEI
So yeah, because like, to me, um, when I was growing up, I watched a lot of Disney films, like, uh, the Disney Renaissance era in the '90s and 2000s. And so like, a lot of those characters felt like they were simple— in quotation— simple to draw for a kid that was just trying to replicate the simple shapes. Like, there's a head, there's some arms. A lot of the costuming even were like just color-blocked sections. And so as a kid learning how to draw, easily being able to copy these Disney characters that were like such a simple accessible reference to me at that point, I then thought, well, these characters should also have that kind of easy to replicate. The colors aren't super crazy. There's maybe— the color palette of each character is 5 colors at the most. I tried to limit that to make sure that there wasn't any over-complex things that people have to think about when trying to replicate drawing these characters.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And I've heard you talk about drawing eyes before. Yes. So talk about making the eyes of these characters.
DARREN OEI
So they always say the eyes are the window to the soul, right? And I wanted the souls of each of these characters to be very, very, very easy to see and understand and to emote with. And so with all these characters, their eyes take up at least, I would say, a third of their face, if not more. So I didn't want there to be any question about what they were thinking, what they were feeling. Because one of the things that people tend to feel safe about is knowing the intentions of another person or a character. Once it starts to go into like, "I don't know what they're thinking, I don't know," then it gets not as safe. And so then I wanted somebody reading these books, looking at these pictures, to automatically have that safety of, "Oh, I can trust this character. I can trust their intentions." and also I understand who they are and what they're thinking about. So all of the eyes are very, very expressive because of how large they are. Again, there's a lot of roundness to the shape, so that helps contribute to also the shape of their face as well and the way that it's laid out.
DARREN OEI
And then all the colors for the character's eyes are specifically chosen based off of their characterization and aspects of who they are that are pertinent to the stories.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And we are at a time right now where technology allows people to do so much more at home on their computers. So this has been self-published. And talk a little bit about the challenges of that or the things that were rewarding about being able to have that control.
RASHMI GANDHI
Absolutely, Beth. One of the decisions I had to make very early on was self-publishing versus boutique publishing versus trying to get an agent. And one of the things that was really important to me when I did the research was self-publishing really allows you to have entire control over the whole process. And so I knew I wanted to work with Darren. I knew what I wanted the look and feel of the books to be like at the end, even though I didn't know what the characters looked like. And so that was a very easy decision for me. And with the resources that are available on the internet, people are so generous with putting out courses and checklists and there's so much information that it made it approachable.
BETH ACCOMANDO
You've not only thought through doing 4 books, but you have a website where you wanna offer tools to people who might be using the book. So explain what that's like.
RASHMI GANDHI
Yeah, so our, our website, quick plug, is happywiggly.com. And what we've tried to do is make it very approachable. So there is an interactive map where people can go on, kids can go on with their parents or caregivers and click on the little animals and find out more about them. We plan to put coloring pages out of the various characters. We have activities like build your own confidence crown, make your own kindness cards. Again, the whole world is about sharing kindness, and I know that sounds trite, but I really felt like this world at this time really needs more kindness. And I was thinking about great friends that I have who are grandparents and spend a lot of time with their grandchildren, aunts and uncles who get to spend time with their nieces and nephews. And these are fun things that we can do together. So again, we're going to try and put more of that stuff out.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And you mentioned that this is a 4-book series. So who will Lenny be joined by?
RASHMI GANDHI
So Lenny's actually joined by all 3 of his friends, Penny, Daphne, and Felix in the first book. So we have Penny, who's a little piglet, and she's very conscious of her weight and being messy because she loves mud. So that's her story. We have Felix, who is a very cute little nerd, and he's, you know, people think of foxes being sly like a fox. He's shy like a fox, and his story is all about finding his laughter and being able to let other people in. He also wears glasses because my little great-niece got glasses last year, and she was very upset that she looked different to everyone else. And so we figured, let's give Felix glasses. Let's let's make that normal. And then we have Daphne, who doesn't quack like other ducks, and that was really an analogy for me around children who have speech impediments, or I was thinking about, you know, refugee children who come to different countries. They have different accents, they can't speak the language, but they all have something to offer. So that's our 3 characters so far. I wrote them time agnostic. I mean, I wrote them in a certain order, obviously, but each book is a standalone So we have to decide which one we do next.
RASHMI GANDHI
I think we have an idea of what we want to do next, but yeah, I'm not sure what we'll do. Maybe we'll surprise everyone.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Yeah. And you said this is your first attempt at drawing children's books. How has this experience been? Is this something that you enjoyed?
DARREN OEI
Yeah, I've enjoyed it a lot. I think what differentiates this kind of art style versus other styles I've drawn, like I mentioned before, I love the simplicity of it. I love the simplicity of the shapes, the color choices. Everything just looks clean, I guess, is the word that I can say. Everything looks clean and polished because I would say that in some of the other kind of drawing styles I have, there's just always kind of a lot going on. So then sometimes the eyes don't really know where to look. Whereas with creating this book, I wanted there to not only be the aspect of hearing the story and being able to process it that way, I wanted the eyes to have a journey that it could go. So So the way that the text is laid out, the way that the characters are positioned in the pages, I wanted there to also be a visual journey that is easy for the eyes to follow where it needs to go. So it was kind of a mixture of a drawing style that develops from simplicity mixed with I want to create a roadmap that's part of the experience for the visual aspects of the book.
DARREN OEI
So I love the simplicity of this because I feel oftentimes I'm drawing way too much.
RASHMI GANDHI
Well, Darren's also an amazing illustrator, right? So I think it's like a way for you to show off how good you can draw. And I think the thing that we both realized was this journey of minimalism in some ways, and certainly from earlier versions of the book to what actually came out, we really invested in negative space.
DARREN OEI
The first iterations of the book felt cluttered. That's how he described it. We were like, oh, okay. There's a lot of exciting things going on, but now the eye is kind of confused. Sometimes like if you go to like a buffet and you look at everything all at once, it's like, where do I start? Whereas if you have fewer options, it's a little bit less overwhelming for you to then navigate. So it kind of felt like that with some of the earlier versions where then we thought, okay, let's leave some more empty space in the page so that there's at least not this overwhelming sense of, ah, like, I don't know what to pay attention to. And so then it was this back and forth in the design of trying to figure out how minimalism would then help to bring out more of the story.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Even with this sense of minimalism, you created this on a computer, and there's layers to this that you've created. So what is the future for Lenny in a possible animated world?
DARREN OEI
That is certainly a possibility. I don't personally know yet how to do animation, uh, but I know that that's something that is is certainly within the wheelhouse of what we dream for Wiggly Wiggly. There's a lot of rich storytelling in this world, and these characters have such rich, dynamic personalities and complexities. I feel like we could come up with a Myers-Briggs for each one of these characters, like personality profiles. But there's so many fun scenarios that we imagine these characters to be in that are relatable to our day-to-day lives that both children and adults can find some kind of relatability and want to root for them. And so it's certainly not outside of the realm of possibility to have some kind of an animation or I don't know what else kind of broad expanses. But there's a lot, there's a lot that can become of Wiggly Wiggly.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Now we are sitting here in your house, Rashmi, and I knew you first as a film critic with Movie Wallace.
RASHMI GANDHI
Yes, yes.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And we are sitting very close to a case that contained films because your father was involved in film in England?
RASHMI GANDHI
Yes, yes. So, uh, my father was a film distributor for Bollywood movies when we were in England, and he would basically run cinemas on weekends. And yes, big reels of film would arrive in trunks. We would have painted film posters around the house, and we would have Bollywood movie stars coming in and having lunch or dinner with us, and we didn't know what was going on. Yeah, very strange childhood. You know, you don't know you're different until someone points that out and you kind of think everyone lives the same life as you. So yeah, it's— film's been part of my blood since day dot, I would say.
DARREN OEI
Yeah.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And Darren, your background too, you have something people may not know about, but you're also a drag queen here in San Diego and in Southern California.
DARREN OEI
I started drag out of COVID also. So I would be considered, I guess, what people would say is like a COVID queen in that I started learning how to do makeup and all that, like, during the lockdown when we had nothing else to do. Drag, I've been doing for about 4 years professionally, uh, performing, uh, at different venues and things like that. But performing in general, dancing, I've been doing for about 17 years. And I started with learning how to dance in university. I was in a ballet company for a while, and then before I transitioned to then doing drag. And I was raised in Vegas, And so that's just the land of everything extra, a lot of showmanship. And so, so with that kind of background, then going into drag and dance and then just being excited about things like design and all that, like I grew up seeing all these posters of showgirls and just everything was larger than life. And so I think that's what contributes to my artistic eye when it comes to design for characters and all that. Which then describes why I had to kind of pull back into a more minimalist approach that could still somehow capture the bigness of the background that I'm coming in with in a more concise package.
RASHMI GANDHI
We have to do Wiggly Wiggly Farm Does Vegas, Darren.
DARREN OEI
Lots of feathers on the floor. Lots of feathers, lots of sequins.
RASHMI GANDHI
My brain is ticking.
Song
More than brave, more than tough. When the cold wind blows and the road gets rough, you don't have to change to shine like the stars above. Just be who you are, 'cause your fluff is enough.
BETH ACCOMANDO
After the interview, Rashmi and Darren sat at the computer to show me how they created Lenny and his farmyard friends.
RASHMI GANDHI
So I think what was really important to both of us was representation without putting it in your face.
RASHMI GANDHI
And so it was important for us to have Lenny as darker skinned.
RASHMI GANDHI
And Darren, when you did the farmer, the farmer's arms, we only showed her arms.
RASHMI GANDHI
Yes.
RASHMI GANDHI
But it's a woman for sure. She's wearing nail polish.
DARREN OEI
Red nails.
RASHMI GANDHI
And she has darker skin.
RASHMI GANDHI
Yeah.
RASHMI GANDHI
You know, we wanted Felix to have glasses. We wanted the big expressive— yeah, representation is how I would describe it.
DARREN OEI
And all of them have different eye colors as well. And so we wanted to have eye colors that you would see more often, like blue, brown, green. But then Daphne felt like a character that because she's so sassy, it felt like she'd be a fun one to have purple eyes. So to give her that extra little—
RASHMI GANDHI
Yeah.
DARREN OEI
Sass, pizzazz. But all these characters, we wanted to all have different eye colors, different skin tones. Obviously with animals, because they already have different textures of fluff, fur, fleece, it's more easily understood and accessible. So with Lenny's design, it felt like the first character of the first book of this series should have some darker skin.
RASHMI GANDHI
Yeah.
DARREN OEI
To already set up that we want this to feel like a very diverse world.
RASHMI GANDHI
Yeah, what shocked me most was, remember you sent me characters with different colored eyes? Yeah, and we did Lenny in like brown skin and white skin, and we tried different things. And this, this one just seemed— this was Lenny. Yes, you breathed life into him. Yes.
DARREN OEI
And what's cool about these characters is that obviously they're not the only animal of their kind. There's other sheep, there's other pigs, there's other foxes and ducks, but each of these characters is specifically different than all the other ones. And so if you read through the book you notice that all the other sheep have much bigger fleece, but none of them stand on two feet. All of them are all on fours. The foxes— Felix is the only one with glasses. All the other ones don't have glasses, and they also tend to be more on fours. The other pigs don't have lashes. The other pigs don't have as big expressions. Their eye colors are going to be more grounded as well, rather than the bright blue I wanted Penny to feel like she was looking up at the sky, the sky as her ambitions, and the light reflecting back in her eyes is blue. And with Daphne, none of the other ducks have purple eyes, none of them have the same kind of pizzazz as she does. And so there is a distinction between each of the main characters and then the rest of that kind of animal that they share the same species with.
RASHMI GANDHI
Yeah, and I think maybe it's important to for us to talk about the fact that we have a map.
RASHMI GANDHI
We have a map at the back of the book, and our goal is that with every book we will expand that map dependent on each one of the characters, so you learn more about where they live and the environment they live in.
RASHMI GANDHI
And it was something that was important to both of us.
DARREN OEI
Yes.
RASHMI GANDHI
Um, Darren was like, hey, should we do a map? And I was like, absolutely, we have to do a map right from the outset.
DARREN OEI
So I, I love maps, and as somebody that grew up playing a lot of video games almost every video game has some kind of a map, 'cause you got to know where you're going, you got to know where the side quests are, the main quest. So it felt like a very easy way for us to also help build the entire world before we went into working on the other books. And then knowing where everything was in proximity actually helped give us a better idea of the roadmap of where exactly Lenny starts on the farm, he goes this way, he goes that way. So then it gave us a more, um, a deeper understanding of his actual journey, how far he has to go to hit each of these points in the plot. But then it also gives us an idea of the environments that each character is in. Daphne lives in a pond, uh, Felix is in the forest, forest and groves. Penny is in her mud spa. And so each of these different environments, the characters, their appearance is going to be affected by the things that are in that environment. But there's also roads that cut off at the edge of the map that gives us an easy chance to then expand the map later when we want to introduce other characters.
BETH ACCOMANDO
That was Rashmi Gandhi and Darren Oi. Their book, Your Fluff Is Enough, is available on Amazon. That wraps up another edition of KPBS Listener Supported Cinema Junkie. If you enjoy the podcast, then please share it with a friend because your recommendation is the best way to build an addicted audience. You can also help by leaving a review. Till our next Film Fix, I'm Beth Akomando, your resident cinema and sometimes book junkie.
