I Am Dodo
Kae Nishimura’s I Am Dodo is a humorous children’s picture book that assumes that one dodo did, in fact, survive extinction—because he is so very, very clever—and, after several years of worldly traveling, is now living in New York.
Everyone assumes that he isn’t a dodo because dodo birds are extinct; so he can pretty much do as he likes. However, one professor maintains that there is still a dodo somewhere on Earth and that one day he will find proof. Everyone laughs at him, of course, except for his dog, Spotty. When the professor finally does run into the dodo bird, he is overjoyed and knows he just has to capture it for his long-awaited proof; however, the bird proves to be too clever to catch.
Unlike the psychopath explorer after the bird Kevin in Up, the professor realizes that the dodo is too special to be caged and put on display. The two—or three, rather, with the professor’s dog included—develop a strange friendship in which they often hide from one another, find each other, and then go have a bite to eat.
The pictures are huge, round, and friendly, and autumn shades are mostly used on every page. It really is a pretty funny story with a decent message; however, I was still bothered by a couple of things as a I read it. My daughter and I stopped to talk about how the dodo really is extinct and how serious that is (When she asked, I answered, “Extinct means an animal is gone forever; he can’t come back.”).
The story really glosses over the birds’ extinction—but without glossing over the gory details. On the very first page of the story, there is an island of the birds just eating and hanging out, with a ship in the distance. When the ship arrives in the next cell, it shows a dog and some weird white creature—a seal? a beluga whale on land? heck if I know!—eating the birds who are “so slow and foolish they were easily caught.”
Say what?
The book makes light of the birds’ destruction, insinuating that it’s their fault they were wiped out—and that other animals, not humans, did the dirty work. I’m not saying that we need to tell four-year-olds about the trials and travesties involved with colonization, overhunting, and the like; but we don’t need to LIE to them, either.
And the last picture on the page shows the Dodo’s bones strewn across the island, which is now devoid of grass, trees, and anything else. Pretty gruesome for a kid’s book, I have to say.
