Why I gave up my Hollywood job to draw the Scott Polar expedition
A Disney animator has revealed how she gave up her Hollywood job after falling in love with the story of the Scott Polar expedition and came to Cambridge to turn it into a graphic novel.
Sarah Airriess had just finished working on Disney’s The Princess and the Frog movie when she read The Worst Journey in the World, a 100-year-old memoir from a survivor of Scott’s trip to the South Pole.
And from that moment on she knew her life’s mission would be to retell the story for a wider audience. But first that meant moving to Cambridge so she could be close to The Polar Museum where important artefacts from the trip were kept.
“Back in 2008, I heard a radio play based on the Worst Journey in the World, and it absolutely took over my brain.” says Sarah.
After reading the book that the play was based on, Sarah reveals: “I quickly thought this would make a great graphic novel. And then within a few years, I’d kind of read everything about the trip and I had the animation background already and I realised I'm now the most qualified person to create this graphic novel, so I think I have to do it. And so then I just reorganised my life around making it happen, which, considering I was working at Disney in California, and I needed to be in Cambridge was a bit of an ordeal. But it turned out to be a happy one. I've greatly enjoyed living in the Cambridge area for the last eight years, but it's been a journey.”
The book that gripped Sarah was the account of Robert Falcon Scott’s last fateful expedition to the Antarctic, as told by surviving expedition member Apsley Cherry-Garrard. It tells of the journey from England to South Africa and southward to the ice floes. From there began the unforgettable polar journey across a forbidding and inhospitable region. On November 12, 1912, in freezing temperatures, the author, in a search party, found the bodies of Scott and his companions along with poignant last notebook entries.
The events of the fateful Antarctic expedition are well known, but Sarah explains that is only half the story.
“The Worst Journey has been a classic of travel literature for 100 years. But what makes it brilliant is because it takes the human angle on the story,” she says.
“There’s no end of people dissecting what went wrong with the expedition but this is just a man writing about his friends and that comes through to people. I had no idea that the personalities on this expedition were so interesting and so engaging and so friendly and that they really cared about each other. It seems obvious, but that’s never part of the discourse about the expedition. It’ s all about the planning and the weather and all the logistical stuff. But these guys were all living together for two years. Of course they cared about each other.
“I went into animation because I loved reading. And I wanted to make films of the books that I loved. But that’s just not how the animation industry works. I wanted to work on something that really employed my emotional depth and that would mean something to people in a deep way and say something important about what humans can be. The film and television industry is not interested in emotional intensity and tragedy, in people being lovely to each other when times are really awful. And yet here was a memoir with everything I wanted in a story and that I had the skills and the passion to tell.”
As well as the tragedy of the failed mission to be first at the South Pole, The Worst Journey also describes high adventure across the Antarctic.
Sarah says: “That’s what’s so memorable and eternal about the story is that it is just a massive adventure. It’s an adventure that leads to tragedy, but there’s so much just swashbuckling that happens before that and it gets left out because all anyone wants to focus on is the tragedy.
“So you don’t get the story of the second returning party who were tobogganing over giant crevasses down the Beardmore glacier and all sorts of crazy boy’s own adventure stuff and then their leader nearly dying of scurvy and telling his lieutenant ‘go on without me’, but one man strikes out ahead of a blizzard to travel 35 miles for help. And how this is what inadvertently leads to Scott’s death.”
The first volume in Sarah’s graphic novel series is close to being published and The Polar Museum is running an exhibition about the making of the book, which is open now. It reveals artwork from the graphic novel and how she worked with museum curators to research the story.
Sarah said: “I’d been to other museums with artefacts from the trips but when I reached The Polar Museum, at the in Cambridge it was perfect. I’d seen other people’s skis and other people’s sleeping bag, then I get to Cambridge and those are Scott’s skis and the black flag they saw at the South Pole that told them that Amundsen had already beaten them to it, and then Titus Oates’ sleeping bag which is cut down this fight so he could sleep with his frozen foot outside the bag so it wouldn’t thaw and become painful. Just incredible stuff like that.”
Bringing the Worst Journey to Life, a free exhibition by Sarah Airriess, is on view at the The Polar Museum on Lensfield Road, which is open from Wednesday to Saturday each week, from 10am to 4pm. There is no need to book.
