Bibbit Jumps, written and illustrated by Bei Lynn 林小杯, will be published in English by Gecko Press later this year. It’s a delightful book about Bibbit, a frog who loves to jump, and his little sister, who’s quite a lot braver than him. Of course, both of them were once tadpoles, and then grew into frogs.
9781776572786 (Image source: Gecko Press)
We keep coming across Chinese picture books about tadpoles – see Minjie’s earlier post, including a link to “Little Tadpoles Look for their Mummy” 小蝌蚪找妈妈 books.
The original story, by Fang Huizhen 方惠珍 and Sheng Lude 盛璐德, was published in 1959. It’s about a group of tadpoles who go looking for their mother, but they don’t know what she looks like, so they ask several creatures along the way until they eventually find her. The story was made into a famous animation Where is Mama? 《小蝌蚪找妈妈》 (1960), under the artistic direction of Te Wei 特伟 (1915-2010). This was one of the earliest ink-wash animations (perhaps the first?), and was based on the paintings of Qi Baishi 齐白石 (1864-1957). You can watch it on Youtube here (it’s about 15 minutes long).
I decided to do a very quick survey of tadpole books in China and the UK. On Minjie’s link to the Chinese online bookseller douban there are almost 30 different titles.
For comparison, I took a quick look at tadpoles in English picture books – a search for “little tadpole” on amazon.co.uk and abebooks brought up these titles:
I guess from this very brief survey that the story of the little tadpoles (which even featured on postage stamps in 2013!) is one that’s known by almost all children in China, but by almost no children in the UK.
