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Significantly, their friendship withstands such storms, mainly because they give each other the benefit of the doubt and take time to move through uncomfortable emotions towards what is actually being communicated between friends.īut now wielding her trumpet, Piggie turns the tables, inundating Gerald with wave upon wave of powerful sound. Gerald, who occasionally displays a rather choleric, irritable disposition, expresses himself through outbursts of emotion and, given his larger size and elephantine resonance, Piggie more often than not is bodily tossed about by Gerald’s powerful sighs, cries, exclamations, and sneezes. This sort of physical buffeting is a common occurrence in the Elephant & Piggie series, however usually the roles are reversed. Willems’ imaginative “voicing” of the trumpet has a wonderful playfulness to it (reading it out loud to children is a blast!) and puts me in mind of a sort of overlap between the scat vocables of Ella Fitzgerald and the trumpet improvisations of Wynton Marsalis. Using an enormous, thick, black font that looks as though the letters are being shocked by an electric eel, he presents the clamorous tones of the trumpet through onomatopoeic syllables. Music: The moment that Piggie begins to play her trumpet, Willems gives it voice in the form of brash, orange text bubbles, shaped with sharp edges like fiery explosions, and connected by jagged, lightning bolt shaped lines. As the noisiness of her performance crescendos, Gerald increasingly expresses himself through thought bubbles as his feelings of tension and discomfort increase. In “Listen to My Trumpet!” the dialogue of the two friends begins with generous amounts of exclamation points as Piggie enjoins Gerald to listen to her give a trumpet recital. Willems takes his time, devoting a large number of pages to the moment-by-moment unfolding of the story. Many pages contain no talking at all, allowing the illustrations to move the story forward, whether the characters dejectedly walk off the page, romp joyfully in the rain, blush with awkwardness, or simmer with jealousy. As each character talks, their words appear in a specifically colored speech bubble like a cartoon strip (gray for Gerald, pink for Piggie, etc.). Text: There is no narrator throughout the Elephant & Piggie books, which are driven by monologues or, more often, dialogues. Piggie’s love of her gleaming trumpet is made clear by her ebullient face, quivering excitement, and the loving hug she bestows upon the instrument.

“Listen to My Trumpet!” includes only Piggie and Gerald, as well as a golden trumpet and a wooden, three-legged stool. On every page, every character is part of the emotional narrative, expressing and reacting to real-time events.

Remarkably, the simplicity of these drawings provides the canvas upon which to depict astounding emotional details through facial expressions, body gestures, motion lines, written sound effects, and the size and style of font in the text boxes. Usually appearing on a blank, white page, these characters have a sketch-book immediacy and simplicity, a characteristic that Willems uses to intentionally invite children to participate as co-creators, especially in activity books such as “We Are in an ART-ivity Book!” (2017) and Kennedy Center “Lunch Doodles” on YouTube (2020). Willems depicts all the characters in these stories in a simple style, replete with circles and ovals, lines and angles, bold outlines and solid colors.

MELODY ASSISTANT VIRTUAL SINGER IPA SERIES

Picture: The Elephant & Piggie series (2006–16) chronicles the varied adventures of best friends Gerald the Elephant and Piggie the Pig in twenty-five books.

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