Caldecott Monday: Noah's Ark

[osprey_archer]

We've reached another Caldecott book that I'm familiar with from childhood! (And in fact we'll run into quite a few of them for the next twenty years of Caldecott books or so.) My parents actually owned Peter Spier's Noah's Ark, so I was quite familiar with it, although I must say it never was a favorite: the ark gets awfully dirty from having so many animals in it, which is only reasonable, but I thought all the piles of dung were gross.

I also found the Noah's ark story itself a bit upsetting - particularly the bit at the beginning where alllll the animals are gathering around the ark, but Noah's only letting them on two by two so you've got, say, a bunch of elephants standing around, dolefully waiting to drown. Why do the elephants deserve to drown because humans were horrible? It seems so unfair.

It occurs to me, rather gloomily, that at this point we might see the Noah's ark story as something like a prophecy: the elephants etc. still don't deserve to suffer, but human activity is slowly killing them off anyway - not with a literal flood, but from poachers servicing the rising tide of human greed. It is often the innocents who suffer most.

This is rather gloomy, especially considering the book itself is about as cheery as a retelling of Noah's ark can be. There are all sorts of fun animal vignettes (the elephant who doesn't fit out of the ark; the flood of rabbits coming out, because the two beginning rabbits have bred a four score and seven baby bunnies), all of which is very cute.

Comments

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Goodness, that does sound upsetting. That element of the Noah's ark story bothered me greatly as a child.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Noah's ark toy sets never have all the extra animals crowding around looking sad. They just have the animals lined up neatly two by two to enter the ark.

[thisbluespirit]

Looking at just the ills on Google Images, though, does show why it won - those are lovely! Detailed, busy, not too cluttered, proper colour (at last, hurrah!), child appeal. I really love his style, I have to say.

I suppose the thing with the animals and one ark is that you can't take them all, so you take enough to ensure there will be more elephants later and hope to goodness none of the two have any breeding problems, I suppose. (Ideally, you'd need more than that). But Noah's Ark is... Noah's Ark. But if the Caldecott is the same as the Greenaway, you have to specifically not judge the story but the quality of the illustrations and what they add to the story, so the story is kind of irrelevant.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

It's not like it's Spier's fault about the poor animals left on land anyway: he's just following along from the Bible story, and he does it with humor and dash. I suspect a child who isn't thinking about the poor drowned animals left behind on land probably gets a lot of fun out of the pictures of the animals interacting on board: they don't always get along, as you can imagine!