walk rabbit walk

You probably wouldn't know it from the goofy, brightly colored cover of the hardback edition, but "Walk Rabbit Walk" is in the bucolic animal theme most notably conveyed by British writers A. A. Milne (`Winnie the Pooh'), Beatrix Potter ("Peter Rabbit," "Jemima Puddleduck," etc.), and Kenneth Grahame ("The Wind in the Willows)." These books share a gentle love of nature, specifically the English terrain of woods, farms, and the countryside. From the gently shaded opening illustrations and the text, I correctly placed Colin McNaughton and Elizabeth Attenborough within this tradition. (Attenborough co wrote the text with McNaughton, who drew all the pictures.) The book begins with rabbit leaving behind his neat, gated, foliage covered house, and making his way along a rolling landscape: "'It's a long way,' said Rabbit to himself, `but it's a lovely day and I shall enjoy the walk.'" In a reverse of Aesop's tale of the hare and the tortoise, it is the rabbit who takes the slow way to the eagle's party on top of a mountain. He's invited by his friends to join them in faster modes of transportation: Fox comes by in a hot air balloon, Bear (in the Mr. Toad role) drives by on his garish read and yellow racing machine, Cat offers a lift on his spiffy motorbike, and Pig somehow gets hold of a blue-propellered helicopter: Wonderful view from up here..." "Don't you wish you could fly, Rabbit?" To each of his animal friends, the Rabbit replies similarly: "No, don't...I like to feel the grass springing under my feet," or NO thank you Fox...I like to look at the flowers and the butterflies as I walk along." While there is no moral to the story per se, it turns out that Rabbit has made a wise choice-both for aesthetic and practical purposes. When Fox accidentally crashed into Pig in midair, a chain reaction of (unfortunate) events tangles every machine-driven animal into a crash on the road. Fortunately, the animals are all ok, although their machines will need quite a lot of repair. The animals all walk up to eagles lavish mountaintop estate, trailing Rabbit, who gets there first. This is a clever twist on the classical tale of the speedy rabbit, and the illustrations and text somewhat recall the writers mentioned above (although not with the same enduring quality). Occasionally, the authors depart form the shaded soft look of their predecessors, especially in the crash scene. Still, the updated look retains some of the feeling, and various modes of travel and their ultimate (safe) crash will delight its young audience.