Mike Twohy’s 2017 picture book Mouse and Hippo is about art, perspective, size, cooperation, and friendship. It is also good and fun.
Mouse had set up an easel on what looks like an island but turns out to be Hippo. When Hippo responds to Mouse’s itchy presence on his back with a twitch, he dumps Mouse into the water. This leads to Hippo admiring Mouse’s painting, and then painting Hippo’s portrait as a thank you for fishing them out of the water. Many scenes of painting ensue, and the result is one gray square: Mouse is painting life size.
Hippo loves it, and paints a picture of Mouse in return. In this picture, Mouse ends up as a tiny dot. Mouses loves it, but when he gets it home, finds it is too big to fit through the door to his house, so they work together and cut it down. Mouse hangs the cookie-shaped result on his wall–and Hippo has to stand on his head to see it.
Besides the play with sizes and perspectives, what’s nice about this book is easy way Twohy moves from image to image, and concept to concept. There are lessons here, but they emerge naturally.
