Jasper & Ollie

PreS-Gr 1—Jasper the fox and Ollie the sloth are having breakfast when Jasper asks his friend if he wants to go to the pool. Not waiting for the sloth's answer, he challenges Ollie to race him there and flies out the door, pulling on his trunks outside. Not surprisingly, Jasper arrives first and becomes exasperated waiting for Ollie to arrive, convinced that he must have snuck in unnoticed. While Ollie takes his time, a frenetic Jasper turns the place upside down looking for his friend and gets tossed out by the hippo lifeguard for pulling an alarm. When Ollie finally arrives, Jasper suggests that they go to the beach together instead. Willan's colorful cartoonish illustrations borrow some comic book elements, mixing full page spreads with split frames that depict the friends' contrasting journey towards the pool, multiple perspective shifts, using a dotted red line to trace the fox's path, and speech balloons as the story's only narration mechanism. The blocky stylized animals are highly expressive, from the fox's frenzied impatience, the annoyance of the animals at the pool and the delighted dillydallying of the lackadaisical sloth.