A close reading
Part of what makes the fantastic creature so compelling is the composition itself. The print is bold, but in black and gray. There is defining detail, but due to the coloring the creature looks very much like a silhouette or shadow. This shadow feeling contributes to an atmosphere of non-realness. That is, a trick of the light, or a dream. Delanglade’s emphasis on dreams in his work is notable in this aspect, as it allows us to see the creature as dreamlike. The green and gold aura around the creature was added after the printing itself. It is flecked and cloudy. The green lends itself to a sylvan atmosphere. The work in cooler colors, green, also makes the creature seem nonthreatening despite its teeth and claws. That and its position, its head turned over its shoulder, the action in its legs, make it seem as though it is dancing rather than running or hunting. This evokes a dream state which can contain the uncanny, or surreal, but is distinct from a nightmare. The dream occupies a unique space of the real-imaginary, in that a dream is real due to its status as a dream, but the elements contained within it are unreal, manufactured by the mind. The creature is an easy representation of this state, both frozen in its imagined moment and dynamic in its body. Its body is humanoid in anatomy, but that is where its humanness stops. Its head, tail, and claws all evoke a much different creature. This creature is both wolf-like and dragon-like, but all traits together make that less important, as the creature is a whole of itself. It evokes the fantasy creatures of dreams. There is also a curious genred connotation to the creature, as we think of genre in the modern. The hybrid, the chimeric creature, the human-but-not is a creature not only of dreams but also of fantastic genre fiction. Fantasy, as a genre, has long contained the surreal-made-real, and the genre constantly plays with the bounds between human and not through other humanoids and fantastic traits. The green and gold, the colors of the forest but also often the colors of the fantasy world, contribute to that notion here as well. If the creature is one of dreams, and one of fantasy, we must consider it in its like between human and not, a being through which we see ourselves.