Module 14--Scranimals

Scranimals

Synopsis: Two children sail off to Scranimal Island, a world filled with scrambled animals like the Pandaffodil and the Porcupineapple. In rhyme, Prelutsky lifts the imagination in ways that can only be matched by Peter Sis's wonderful drawings.

Citation: Prelutsky, Jack. Scranimals. (2002). Illus by Peter Sis. New York: Greenwillow.

My thoughts: I've never really gone out for poetry, but Prelutsky is at least funny and Sis! He's amazing. I loved his mangorilla stomping through the jungle with the colorful kids in peeking on.

Library usage: It would be fun to read one or two of these then let kids design their own "scranimal." They could write a poem or draw or picture or both!

Reviews:

[(review date October 2002) In the following review, Stevenson offers a positive assessment of Scranimals, calling the book a "stunning achievement."]
Ah, landmark authors, those whose contributions are so reliably rewarding that each new book can be safely anticipated and opened with glee. And ah, the sweetness of surprise and delight when it's discovered that said author has actually managed to exceed expectation.
And so it is with Jack Prelutsky's Scranimals, in which Prelutsky takes the familiar concept of scrambled animals to dazzling new heights in this series of nineteen poems describing a visit to mythical Scranimal Island. Rejecting mundane mammalian combinations, poems here soar into the creative stratosphere with bizarre but linguistically plausible hybrids between vegetables and amphibians ("The Potatoad"), mammals and fungi ("The Hippopotamushrooms"), and birds and fish ("The Cardinalbacore"). The verse sparkles with wit and mad invention, the wordplay elegant enough to impress sophisticated readers yet precise enough to be funny to youngsters still grappling with the possibilities of poetic language; in fact, there's a Beatrix-Potteresque tendency to play elevated vocabulary for comic effect and then puncture it with the bathos of simple earthiness ("The Hippopotamushrooms / Suffer from deficient grace / And their tubby, blobby bodies / Tend to take up too much space"). There are plenty of inventive riffs on biology true and mythical (the Ostricheetahs hide their heads in the sand), and concepts are accessible enough to amuse younger audiences: they'll snicker not just at the lumbering awkwardness of the Stormy Petrelephant, an elephant with sadly insufficient wings, but at the narrators' understandable relief at its groundedness ("The Stormy Petrelephant's failures / Relieve us of absolute dread. / We love it in fields of azaleas-- / We'd hate if it soared overhead").
Yet there's more than just humor here: Prelutsky keeps the uneasy strangeness of these odd mongrels lurking in every verse, and he impeccably orchestrates sounds and cadences to suit a variety of moods. One of the finest poems, "The Detested Radishark" (see cover for a glimpse of his horrific visage), is as jubilantly sinister as Silverstein's classic "The Slithergadee." The enduring theme of rapaciousness ("For it eats what it wants, / And it always wants to eat") is made more dramatic by the vivid description ("Its appalling, bulbous body / Is astonishingly red") and the pounding and relentless pace: "And the only thought it harbors / In its small but frightful mind, / Is to catch you and to bite you / On your belly and behind." A lot of families will happily evolve a tradition of gently acting out the "catch you" and "bite you" portions, and a lot of delighted victims will happily squeal with shivery glee.
Sís' art picks up on the strange and otherworldly aspects of the poems, evincing a surreal and haunting edge to its intricately lined visions that recalls Odilon Redon (especially in the sepia-toned puffed-up Potatoad with its little potato-toad eyes). That's an additional lure for older readers, but there's enough restraint to keep things from becoming purely monstrous, especially in every picture's inclusion, in brighter, reassuring hues, of the intrepid boy and girl who are touring the island; happy tourists on their magical scooter (which has all the transportational versatility of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), they're intrigued but unintimidated by the wonders they view. The depictions of those wonders also suggest the poetic yet thorough detailing of an old bestiary, and the mock-scientific approach (also evident in the helpful inclusion of a pronunciation guide for each animal's coined name) is enhanced by the artist's creation of an actual geography for the island (there's a table-of-contents map keyed to the poems, and endpapers sport an overhead view of the whole island). Throughout the book, the individual scenes faithfully and amusingly adhere to this geography, so readers can further entertain themselves with glimpses of neighboring habitats and their residents: a distant Petrelephant flounders amid the trees beyond the savanna wherein the Broccolions stalk the Antelopetunia, a Camelberta Peach's hump protrudes from the hills behind the Spinachicken patch. Those in the mood for more playful science can turn to the back cover, where Sís helpfully visually enumerates the biology of each Scranimal in mathematical terms: a banana + an anaconda = a Bananaconda, a panda + a daffodil = a Pandaffodil, and so on.
There's something here for just about every poetic need--for readalouds, for performances, for readalones, for reading with a flashlight at sleepovers, for taunting and amusing younger siblings. Ultimately, this is a stunning achievement--Carrollian-level poetry with art to match--that's sure to provide delight for years.


[In Scranimals, o]n Prelutsky and Sís's Scranimal Island, intrepid explorers will find such scrambled creatures as Ostricheetahs (who run very fast but also stick their heads in the sand) and Spinachickens (rather dimwitted green creatures who wilt in the heat). The verses are humorous, in the usual Prelutsky way--peppy, singsongy, and clever--as in this on the "ponderous Stormy Petrelephant ... futilely trying to fly": "Its wings are too small to support it, / They're patently only for show, / And so it is constantly thwarted ... / Up isn't a place it can go." Kids will easily get and appreciate most of the combinations (the Potatoad, the Radishark); others require a greater level of sophistication (the Camelberta Peach, the Cardinalbacore), though a helpful chart appears on the back cover. Sís's simultaneously imaginative and concrete illustrations transform a nice-enough collection of related poems into a unified whole. A picture of Scranimal Island appears on the endpapers; a map on the table of contents. Two child tourists, armed with map, binoculars, and a jauntily striped inflatable life preserver, propel themselves to the island via skateboard, using an umbrella as a sail. Though muted colors characterize Scranimal Island and its denizens, on every double-page spread Sís portrays the children and their paraphernalia in bright colors, keeping the focus on them and on the power of imagination.

Parravano, Martha V. "Review of Scranimals." Illus. Peter Sís. Horn Book Magazine 79.1 (Jan.-Feb. 2003): 91. Rpt. in Children's Literature Review. Ed. Tom Burns. Vol. 115. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resource Center. Web.
Stevenson, Deborah. "Review of Scranimals." Illus. Peter Sís. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 56.2 (Oct. 2002): 45-46. Rpt. in Children's Literature Review. Ed. Tom Burns. Vol. 115. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resource Center. Web.