Aaron Becker’s decision to leave a career in the film industry and make picture books instead seems, in retrospect, like a good one. His wordless epic Journey (Candlewick, 2013) won a Caldecott Honor, and subsequent picture books have earned multiple starred reviews and places on year-end “best-of” lists. His latest, The Last Zookeeper, follows NOA, a gangly, thoughtful robot who tends a collection of exotic creatures after rising seawater has inundated their zoos; they’re toy-sized next to his hulking form. As the floodwaters keep rising, NOA builds a boat to carry his menagerie to safety. Then a storm swamps them, and help arrives in the most surprising way. Becker, currently in British Columbia with his family for an extended stay, spoke with PW about developing backstories, staying hopeful despite the state of the planet, and never giving up on a good idea.

There’s a sketch on your Twitter feed from early in 2020 that shows NOA almost as he appears in the book. Did the robot appear first, and did the story grow around him?

No, I had worked on the story even before that drawing was made. It was about an orphaned kid in a flooded stilt-city in a post-apocalyptic world, taking care of the zoo animals just because he cares about them. One day the kid falls through a portal in the pool of the polar bear exhibit, and a young bear falls through with him. They land in this parallel world where the planet has been taken care of—the way things could have gone on Earth. The boy discovers his doppelgänger there, and they head off in a sailboat to the north where they give the baby polar bear to a mother bear.

So, pretty different from the way it is now! What happened to that story?

My editor, Mary Lee Donovan at Candlewick, and the designer, Maryellen Hanley, and I sat down with that draft, and they said, “This doesn’t leave any hope at the end of the book. Why wouldn’t he stay in the other world? Why would he come back?” I felt defeated. I had fully finished polished dummies and everything. It was done in my mind.

I still look at that draft. I still like that book. This one is more child-friendly, it’s more accessible. There’s a play between staying true to the heart of the work and finding ways of making a story engaging. I think early drafts feel more pure to the creator, but maybe lack something in their ability to communicate effectively to the reader.

What happened after that? How did you get from that version of The Last Zookeeper to this one?

When I drew that robot, I thought, he belongs in that world. That one little sketch was done without thought or pretense, just moving my pen around late at night, and he came out fully formed, kind of hunched over, defeated and exhausted.

He started out more integrated into the boy’s story. There’s a seawall, and the well-to-do people who have survived sea-level rise live in a nicer city inside it, behind the wall, and the robot lives outside it. At that point, I showed it to a screenwriter friend, and he said, “There are so many problems with this story!”

[Laughs] That’s harsh. How were you with that?

Oh, it was great! You don’t want someone to lie to you. He told me the truth.

So I thought, I’m going to do this wordlessly. I need to pare the story down. I was more attached to the robot than to the boy.

And you imagined a whole backstory for the robot?

Yeah. The endpapers [of the finished book] are the little house that he lives in, and the picture frames up in his house are images of NOA in his former life, with all of his friends, fellow construction robots, and they’re all based on socialist WPA posters of them building a better tomorrow today. He and all of his robot friends putting up structures that look like raising the flag at Iwo Jima and marching off to work with their lunch pails. That was an important beat in the book. I wanted his loneliness to be based on something. He had companionship, and he lost it.

I have to build these rich worlds full of backstory. If I don’t take five years to develop the backstory, it doesn’t work. You have to have all those little things that get lost on the way, but that still inform the richness of the world you enter.

So I started all over again, and that became The Last Zookeeper that is now coming out.

The backstories are complex, and you have this complex method of making images, too, right? Did you build digital models for The Last Zookeeper?

The robot is a 3D model, his boat, the zoo—I built it all out in 3D first. I do a pencil sketch, then I build it as a model in the computer, then render it with shadows, and then do a drawing on top of that.

It was nice to have that model to use for the robot in case I wanted to do a really crazy camera angle. In one spread, the camera’s really low down and you’re seeing him tower over the animals. It’s a really hard perspective to draw well because he’s so huge and the animals are so small—it could have been confusing for readers: “How big is he exactly?” “Did the artist just screw up?” It allowed me to create a totally believable image.

It’s so deep and elaborate. Do you ever wish the creating would come more quickly?

I once heard Jon Klassen say, “If it takes you too long to get a story to work, don’t do it. You’ve got to do the ones that come out all at once.” I was so discouraged. I look at illustrators like Ralph Steadman or Quentin Blake—they’re so guttural and intuitive in their mark-making. I’m always so envious of that approach. I’m much more methodical.

In the book, the climate message is one of hope, not despair. Can you say more about that?

I don’t see us getting out of the mess that we’re in as a species unless some of us have that naïve hope in the face of so much despair. What are we going to do without hope? That’s why I open with that Jane Goodall quote [“Only if we understand/ Can we care. Only if we care/ Will we help. Only if we help, shall all be saved.”]. If NOA doesn’t receive some bit of grace, it’s all over. If we’re working hard and we have the right reasons for doing things and we’re clear of heart and mind, we have to believe that’s enough.

The story is ultimately about the fact that when you’re a child, or an adult, for that matter, and you care about what you’re doing, you are constantly going to be faced with moments where what you’re doing is failing and things keep not working out. NOA cared about these animals and yet still he was beaten down. He still capsized and was washed up. I wanted him to be rewarded for caring, like the story of Job, except that it worked out for him. What a lousy story that is!

Once you figured out the ending, did that come more easily?

There were so many iterations before I arrived at [the final ending]. It was a process to get the beats right. God, the beats! You would think that after all this time, I’d have figured out how to do it. To make it feel right, there’s no way to do it other than multiple, multiple drafts.

Did you ever think about becoming an architect? I’m thinking about the energy you put into designing and drafting all the buildings in your books.

Architecture was an idea for me. I had the idea that being an architect was like Mike Brady’s job, that you get to sit in an office and dream up cool buildings. I didn’t realize that it was going to be having to design buildings where the plumbing has to work and you have to work with engineers and you have to be a junior for 10 years. I thought, no way, I want to make something cool right out of the gate. And that’s what’s cool about these books! I get to be Mike Brady, and research the coolest zoo buildings on the planet and make my own zoo. And I don’t need to work with an engineer or worry about the plumbing.

PW interviewed you in 2013, when Journey was first published. What lessons have you learned along the way? What do you care more about, and what doesn’t seem so important now?

After that first interview, my life took a shift that I could never have dreamed of. I was really ambitious when I made Journey. Our daughter had just been born and I knew the book had to be successful if I was going to have a new career. That fire is still there, but it’s not like a driven fire to get acclaim and recognition and success. I’m one of a handful of author and illustrators who get to do the projects they want to do. It’s my fulltime job. As someone who spent years working for other people and their ideas, that’s a gift. Talk about receiving some grace!

What are you working on now?

I’m illustrating a manuscript for Atheneum—it’s called We Go Slow, and it’s by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie. It’s a gorgeous poem that she wrote about a grandfather and a granddaughter going on a walk in Queens, and I was immediately taken with it.

I have these board books that I’ve done—I have one called Winter Light that’s finished and comes out this fall. And I’ve just signed a contract with Candlewick to do another wordless picture book.

Last year you wrote on Twitter, “There are only a handful of moments one gets as a writer that are truly transcendent, but I had one today, as I shuffled around the beat board of a story I’ve been trying to crack since 2015. An audible gasp sounded as I discovered where this story had been headed all along.” What was that story?

(Thinks for a moment.) Oh! I know what that was! I’m also working on a story that I started when we were living in Spain in 2015. It’s not a picture book, it’s a novel, or a screenplay, a huge, big, epic story. In my office I have all these strips of cork board, and on them are the beats for this huge story. I was moving them around and something kind of came together about what the story needed to be.

I have a couple of those projects that, every time I’m done with a book, I work on, and then they go back into the files until the next time. Buried in these files are books that actually do eventually get made. I don’t let go of things. I keep working at them until they work. That’s how NOA and I are alike.

The Last Zookeeper by Aaron Becker. Candlewick, $18.99 Mar. 12 ISBN 978-1-5362-2768-0