STRANGE CREATURES

Natural habitats and the constructed world clash in an imaginative conflict.

A cluster of critters, content in their sylvan surroundings, notice a poster alerting them to a party and happily decide to attend. Bears, bunnies, foxes, and birds in party hats dance and eat cake, but when the celebration’s over, it’s really over. Upon returning to the forest, the animals find that their trees have been razed for timber! In their place are mountains of human-made detritus. The animals try to repurpose this tangle of old chairs, televisions, and other castoffs, ominously etched in red lines, into shelters, with little luck. They resort to retaliation, enlisting assistance from the humans’ small guardians (their pets) to get their people to attend a party. The wild animals reclaim their homes while the humans are making merry, finally sparking understanding and working out their issues with a tree-planting truce. Visually, this Portuguese import is lovely—playfully paced and gleefully odd. Animals ascend a surreal trash heap, humanoid rabbits gnaw fruitlessly on shoes, and a bear dons a terrifically terrifying human mask. The intentionally off-kilter look of the watercolors and shaky pencil lines recalls Maira Kalman’s whimsically absurd style without mimicking her. The narrative struggles by comparison, resolving the challenges of conservation with a clean-cut conclusion that simplifies a very real problem, falling short of the book’s visual expansiveness.

A stylish, strange story with a somewhat overly simple conclusion.