Mr Wuffles
By: David Wiesner
Publisher: Andersen Press Ltd., London, 2013 (This version from 2014)
Format: Hardback (version shown is a pocket edition)
A playful silent book, filled with languages
David Wiesner will be a well-known author name for most of our readers. He is a three-times winner of the very prestigious Caldecott-award, and amongst his many books are a lot of famours silent books, one of them being Mr Wuffles. In this book Wiesner was inspired by his own cat, Cricket, and it´s complete lack of interest for any store-bought toys.
If you look to the spread above, you see Mr Wuffles on the cover...looking as bored and disdained as only a cat can do. When you open the book, you see him again at the end-paper. Notice all those toys, still with their price tags on? Mr Wuffles walks right by them, completely uninterested. Until he finds interest in the one thing that is not a toy - a tiny spaceship with aliens inside. To make this book, Wiesner filmed his cat (that looks a lot like Mr Wuffles) and used the footage as inspiration for the drawings. The cat´s movements are amazing, so lifelike that it seems like he will jump off the page at any moment.
This is not your usual "wordless book", it is a silent book with a few words, and lots of other languages no one can really read. I have had the privilege of attending a live webinar with David Wiesner. One of the many interesting topics he covered was the making of this book, and how he had been stuck for years after making the beginning - where to take the story next? At last he came up with the idea of all the different characters speaking different languages.
So there is a lot of "talking" going on in this book: The humans are speaking (a tiny bit of) human language, the ants are speaking ant language. The cat is mostly silent, apart from a frustrated "Mroww!" at the end of the book. I was immediately drawn to the ant language, and could not quite understand why (it is just small lines in a row), until I realized it remined me of the yellow bird "Woodstock" in the Peanuts-comics that I have loved since I could read. (In the webinar, Wiesner revealed that he is also a Peanuts-fan, although he was did not think about the similarities at the time he made the book). The aliens speak a wonderful language of pictograms. Wiesner worked with a linguist to make these pictograms, and they are very interesting to study. Notice for example, the difference when the alien engineers speak, their language is more complex than that of the common aliens.
This book can be read as so many things: It is a story of collaboration, of finding friendship through a common enemy, of the importance of art in human (well, or alien,) interaction. It is a book packed with action, and very typical for Wiesner he drives the story forward using different formats: full spreads, one-page pictures with panels on the opposite side, cartoon-like spreads with lots of panels. I find the grey background on some of the panels very interesting, they seem to symbolize being inside either the spaceship or the hole in the wall. This is an excellent book for multilingual groups, and of course for cat lovers of all ages.
The pictured version is a paperback, I would recommend getting the hardback if possible. There are so many details to study and so many stories to be made that this book is bound to be read and re-read lots of times - you will want a sturdy binding.
Wiesner has made so many original and fun silent books. We will review them all so please stay tuned for more!
