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Author Translates All of Peter Pan into Emojis

Take an exclusive look at Joe Hale's pictographic take on J. M. Barrie's classic tale of the boy who won't grow up.
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"Second star to the right and straight on till morning!" is the indelible refrain from J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, but designer-cum-emoji translator Joe Hale makes it even more iconic in his new pictographic retelling of the story, Neverland Emoji.
In the same style he used to translate Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland into the Wonderland Emoji Poster, Hale transforms the famous quote into:

The 47,000-word tale of Wendy, John, and Michael's journey to Neverland with the boy who never grows up clocks in at over 44,000 emojis, carefully chosen using a methodology based on Arthur Machen's aesthetic treatise "Hieroglyphics," the archetypal theories of Carl Jung, and the opening quatrain of William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence."

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"I did not have the same love for Peter Pan as I had for Alice when I started the project, but I grew to love it equally, if not more," Hale tells The Creators Project. "I think Pan is maybe more relevant than Alice today, as Neverland seems to describe our contemporary scenario of living in the virtual rather than the real and wanting to stay young and never grow up." Neverland Emoji debuts on the tail of the long-awaited diverse emoji update, but aside from its overall yellow "Simpsons tone," Hale doesn't find it to be much different: "I don't think you can cobble together many more new words with this update."

With the The Bible, Moby Dick, and Beyoncé's "Drunk in Love," all translated into emojis over the past year, the smiley-based language may really become this generation's lingua franca.

Hale has translated a few key quotes exclusively for The Creators Project. Check them and the full Neverland Emoji poster, which you can order here, below.

Visit Joe Hale's website for more of his posters and emoji translations.

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