This Is Not My Hat

"The thing that makes this so clever is the way he uses counterpoint between the words and the images. We see that the fish has stolen a hat. The words simply tell us what the fish is thinking. So we can clearly see that this fish has totally misjudged the situation (and this is about being in on the joke again). We know from the pictures that this story is not going to end well for this fish. The fish knows he has done something bad so he subjects the reader to a lot of self-justification. The timing is almost perfect. It is perfect. I love the moment when the fish tells us that someone has seen him but that he knows this individual (a crab) won’t tell. And the very next page is the crab pointing to where he has gone. “Talking about humour is like dissecting a frog: the process is horrible, and at the end the frog has died” The page thing is so clever and bold—the first double spreads are just the big fish—I mean this is a lot of storytelling space to use up when you’ve only got 24 pages to play with. These first spreads are simply the big fish waking up and the only thing that changes is his eye. This slow pacing at the beginning and those slight changes show us just how much trouble the little fish is going to be in and what a threat the big fish is. If Klassen hadn’t set it up like this in the beginning that joke may not have worked. But it does."