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Sirius had the newspaper cutting with a picture of the Weasley family in Azkaban. He then swam back to mainland as a dog.

So, one night when they opened my door to bring food, I slipped past them as a dog... It's so much harder for them to sense animal emotions that they were confused... I was thin, very thin...thin enough to slip through the bars...I swam as a dog back to the mainland ... I journeyed north and slipped into the Hogwarts grounds as a dog.

But in the Shrieking Shack, he pulled out the Weasley family picture from within his robes. How did Sirius still have the picture if he had to transform into a dog to escape?

Black put one of his claw-like hands inside his robes and took out a crumpled piece of paper, which he smoothed flat and held out to show the others.

It was the photograph of Ron and his family that had appeared in the Daily Prophet the previous summer, and there, on Ron's shoulder, was Scabbers.

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  • 16
    It's also not necessary to assume that the photo he showed in the Shrieking Shack is the same as the one he saw in Azkaban. It's a well-circulated newspaper. Acquiring another copy would be trivial.
    – shim
    Commented Jul 11 at 18:43
  • There's a related question here: scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/11372/…
    – shim
    Commented Jul 11 at 18:46
  • 4
    Like this?
    – Alex
    Commented Jul 12 at 2:10

2 Answers 2

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An animagus is able to transform with clothes on, as can be seen when McGonagall transforms inside the class room:

Also found the clip where Sirius transforms from dog form back to his clothed self:

Regarding the books as requested, this answer from a similar question also confirms that McGonagall does not transform into a naked witch in front of her students - she showed them the animagus transformation in both book and movie.

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  • I'm unsure if either of these scenes occurred in the books. Can you give a quote showing that they did?
    – J. Mini
    Commented Jul 11 at 19:01
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    Also McGonagall in TPS in the scene at the beginning in Privet Drive
    – SpacePhoenix
    Commented Jul 11 at 19:03
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    @J.Mini: SpacePhoenix's suggestion is pretty easy to find; it's page six of the first book (at least the edition I have). McGonagall is in cat form, Dumbledore sits down next to her (so presumably looked at her as he went to sit down), looks away, speaks a single sentence to her, then looks back and she's there, fully dressed, glasses and all. Unless she changed back and magicked up clothes directly onto her body in the time it takes to for him to sit "a moment", then say "Fancy seeing you here, Professor McGonagall", then look at her, the transformation included, and restored, her clothes.
    – ShadowRanger
    Commented Jul 11 at 23:55
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    I don't see why JKR's movies should be less canon than her books, but I included an answer from a previous similar question to show that McGonagall is also capable of transforming with her clothes on in the book.
    – memory_alpha
    Commented Jul 12 at 6:29
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You're assuming there are no other copies of the Daily Prophet around. It wouldn't have been impossible for Sirius to find a discarded copy after he gets back to Britain.

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    That's also assuming the specific edition Fudge gave Sirius was still in print and readily available :P if you could find any quote from the books supporting this, it would be a great addition!
    – fez
    Commented Jul 11 at 21:11

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