Being eaten by animals in picture books

• Siobhan O'Brien Holmes
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I was reading Klassen and Barnett’s ‘Looking at Picture Books’ newsletter again and really loved their thoughts on why Klassen’s book, I Want My Hat Back, isn’t too dark for a young audience, despite publishers’ reactions when he was shopping it around.

In this book, a bear loses his red hat and asks several other characters if they’ve seen it. He’s really polite and thanks them all, even though they haven’t been remotely helpful, until eventually he finds the rabbit that stole it.

This time, rather than be polite, he eats the rabbit and takes back his hat.

Publishers thought this was too dark and recommended changing the ending so that the bear sits on the rabbit instead, or maybe beats him up.

But Klassen and Barnett agree that it’s perfect the way it is, and that those alternative endings would actually have been even darker – for two reasons.

One is that children have a certain familiarity with animals eating characters in books and are more likely to accept it as a mild punishment.

Often if you’re eaten in those, it’s more like being sent to your room or something. You’re just in there, and you don’t get to do anything for a while.

Barnett adds:

If the bear beat up the rabbit, we would be thinking about bruises and broken bones. But when I read I Want My Hat Back, I don’t think about the bear, like, chewing.

This is such an important distinction! In reality, of course, being eaten by a bear is horrific and violent, but within the logic of a children’s book it’s funny and not necessarily final. Babies and toddlers see their parents pretending to eat their nose or toes, or saying ‘you’re so cute I could eat you’ (see ‘We’ll eat you up we love you so’ from Where the Wild Things Are). It doesn’t sound violent when you put it like that! There’s a sense that you’ll be swallowed up in one quick, cartoonish gulp and just, you know, sit in their stomach for a bit. You’re not really thinking about bones crunching and blood dripping.

The other important factor is that we don’t see the bear eat the rabbit. The rabbit’s there one minute and then gone the next, with the actual act occurring off page and merely implied by the bear’s insistence that he’d never eat a rabbit when questioned later. Klassen says:

I think you get permission to go dark, at least partially, from the way you execute the thing. The bear has no visible mouth in the illustrations. No teeth. His eyes never frown. He is largely blank.

Klassen gives the young reader permission to not be freaked out by the rabbit being eaten by a bear by making sure the bear doesn’t feel too real or threatening. Sure he’s eaten the rabbit, but it’s just one of those cartoon eatings. He didn’t really get hurt. The same goes for Not Now, Bernard, where Bernard is there one minute and gone the next, although here the text does tell us explicitly that the monster ate him. We don’t see the bone crunching, though.

This reminded me of Good Little Wolf by Nadia Shireen, one of our favourite picture books at home. After the good little wolf saves his grandma from the clutches of the big bad wolf and convinces him to start a new life on the straight and narrow, the three sit down to tea and cake. On the penultimate double page spread the big bad wolf promises to stop eating people up… and in the last, we see him sitting alone with a full tummy. ‘I’ll stop first thing tomorrow’, he says.

He ate them! The cute little wolf and his grandma, after all that! But we don’t see him eat them, of course, and it’s not made explicit – Shireen doesn’t tell us ‘the wolf ate them’ so the child can interpret it however they prefer. My son did used to find this a little upsetting when he was younger, actually, but right at the end we’re reminded that this is a frame story: it’s all just a picture book the big bad wolf is reading to the good little wolf and his friends. All’s well that ends well!