Link Plays Music for a Dancing Deku Sprout — Print & Oil Painting

Comedy is hard to draw and this one gets it from timing. The sprout on the left has been caught at the top of a hop with both stubby arms flung out, mouth open in a wide toothless O, its two leaves streaming backward, its whole body tilted past the point where anything with feet that small could recover.

The audience is not watching. He sits on a low stump at the right with his knees up and his boots crossed, one hand over his eyes and his shoulders dropped, in the pose of somebody laughing too hard to look. It is the reaction shot that makes the joke land.

The forest around them is generously lit: a sandy path curving away between slim trunks, sunlight coming through in soft bands, moss picked out in yellow-green where it catches. A small pink fairy hovers over the path between the two figures, and the huge weathered face of an older tree fills the left edge with its eyes shut.

The Deku Sprout is the Great Deku Tree's successor in Ocarina of Time, which makes the scene funnier: this is the next guardian of the forest, and it is showing off. From our Zelda collection. The ocarina played in a forest sunbeam treats music seriously, and the forest duet with the Skull Kid turns it into a performance for two.