their imaginary friend

Imagination in kids is important. Dick Bruna, the creator of Nintje, understood it and made it a worldwide success.
"I hope that the child's imagination is stimulated to see things in their simplest form", he said.

I visited Nintje museum in Bruna's hometown of Utrecht last Saturday and saw a place geared towards children's imagination.
It all started in 1955 with the name Nintje which was called after a toddler pronunciation of the word rabbit in Dutch, konijn.
Since then, Dick Bruna has always been in pursuit of simpler forms & colours (black outlines, no perspective, bold colours - "sometimes brown for the bear") and modest adventures, all contributing to develop the imagination.

The kids had a good time obviously, playing hide-and-seek in the colourful labyrinth, pretending sleeping and eating in Nintje's house, looking inside a giant cylinder or watching the cartoons on TV in Japanese "because I like it" said my 4 yo son when I wanted to set up the English language for him.
Even the shop, with its four coloured chairs, was yet another pretext for playing.


For older visitors, the exhibition also includes a video about a late 40s' trip to Paris, as well as Bruna's other works, like the covers of popular detective books and his designs for the French Inspector Maigret detective series by Georges Simenon.