Even though the book has no included soundtrack, the sly, high-spirited, eye patch–sporting donkey that grins, winks, farts, and clumps its way through the song on a prosthetic metal hoof in Cowley’s informal watercolors supplies comical visual flourishes for the silly wordplay. It is three-legged, and so a “wonky donkey” that, on further examination, has but one eye and so is a “winky wonky donkey” with a taste for country music and therefore a “honky-tonky winky wonky donkey,” and so on to a final characterization as a “spunky hanky-panky cranky stinky-dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey.” A free musical recording (of this version, anyway-the author’s website hints at an adults-only version of the song) is available from the publisher and elsewhere online. In the song, Smith meets a donkey on the road. The print version of a knee-slapping cumulative ditty. And the littlest ones will demand to know where the heck that rabbit went.

Others might react to a certain moral vapidity. Indubitably hip, this will find plenty of admirers. Font colors correlate with the animals’ dialogue as well as the illustrations’ muted color palette, and the four-sentence denials (first rabbit’s, then bear’s) structurally echo each other. The text type, New Century Schoolbook, intentionally evokes the visually comfy, eminently readable design of 1960s children’s primers. Foliage is suggested with a few ink strokes (though it’s quite bashed-up after rabbit goes missing). Klassen’s ink-and-digital creatures, similarly almond-eyed and mouth-less, appear stiff and minimalist against creamy white space. There’s the subsequent dash and confrontation, followed by bear in hat and rabbit-well, nowhere to be seen. Ten pages on, as the bear describes his hat for a solicitous deer, realization hits: “I HAVE SEEN MY HAT.” The accompanying illustration shows the indignant bear suffused in the page’s angry red. While everyone denies seeing it, a rabbit (sporting, readers will note, a pointy red chapeau) protests a bit too indignantly. Klassen’s coy effort combines spare illustration, simple, repetitive text and a “payback’s a bear” plot.Ī somber, sepia-toned bear longs for his missing hat and questions a series of forest animals about its whereabouts.

Jon klassen i want my hat