Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale

In Knuffle Bunny, Willems expertly manipulates the readers’ response by maximizing his use of the book’s composition to relate the story of a trip to the laundromat that turns unexpectedly dramatic. On the dust jacket flap, the reader is greeted by a brief plot summary that alludes to Knuffle Bunny’s fate. The end pages establish the book’s signature illustrative style--“a melding of hand-drawn ink sketches and digital photography”--by repeating one image over and over again: Knuffle Bunny as seen through the window of the washer door at the laundromat watching his family walk away. The plot begins prior to the title page with a series of family photos that depict the wedding of Mommy and Daddy, Trixie’s birth, and an early family outting which have been hung so each successive picture progresses not only time but also space and encourages the reader to follow the pictures to their logical conclusion--a large framed photo of Trixie hugging Knuffle Bunny on the title page. On each opening, Willems’ photographs serve as backdrops for his drawings and work with the book’s colored pages to create frames. These drawings frequently break frame, adding visual interest; moreover, as Trixie and Daddy make their way to the laundromat, the frames traverse the book’s landscape orientation, moving from left to right and even spanning page gutters. The frames not only reflect the motion of the characters, but they also reflect their emotions. Their orderly arrangement on the way to the laundromat quickly becomes disorderly on the way back, after Trixie discovers that Knuffle Bunny has been lost. In fact, when Daddy finally understands the source of Trixie’s distress the border breaks the frame and resembles lightening bolts while pieces of the photograph shatter like shards of glass. Willem further extends the text by juxtaposing frenzied chaos depicted in montages with a muted color palette that renders the sense of nostalgia with which a parent might view the early years of his child’s life. As the reader might expect, the story concludes on the back of the dust jacket with the family returning from the laundromat, having retrieved Knuffle Bunny who, for the first time, has his eyes closed in contentment.

Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale by Mo Willems; illus. by the author
Preschool Hyperion
40 pp.
Published 2004
ISBN 978-0786818709
$15.99

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