Natalie Portman's Fables

October 12, 2020
Rhyming couplets, gross-out humor, and heavy-handed moralizing mark Portman’s retellings of three classic tales. Hare leaves Tortoise behind in a “bunny-cloud stink” that “smells like when carrots come out in a poo” in the duo’s classic fable. In “The Three Little Pigs,” Melinda the pig “loved sodas and all types of sugars./ She’d sip as she’d pick and then flick all her boogers.” And anti-materialism vibes prevail in “Country Mouse and City Mouse”: “A true friend should care about how you are feeling/ Not for your gowns or that thing on your ceiling.” Though Portman’s values are zeitgeisty—the tortoise lauds life lived “attentively;” the pigs’ houses fail because they are made of takeout containers and plastic straws—strained rhymes and thin humor wear (“ ‘Where’s your hu-mi-li-ty?’ asked Wolf that day. ‘The one tea I care for is creamy Earl Grey’ ”). Mattia’s sweet-faced
animals, rendered in watercolor, gouache, and colored pencil, combine visuals such as chopstick-using animals and a gilded rhino horn with a bucolic, animated style reminiscent of mid-20th-century cartoons. Ages 4–6.