Van Allsburg hasn't given his ants personalities, and that's okay we don't need ants with hearts. Van Allsburg's fable asks for something odder - perhaps the hint of menace that Beatrix Potter gets in some of her tales. It is a sort of colorless, moistureless, echoing, antiseptically clean dungeon.Ī 10-year-old I know thought ''Two Bad Ants'' was ''neat.'' She liked that it was a fable, ''like Aesop,'' and thought that it would be good as a ''read to'' for 5- to 8-year-olds and as a ''read by'' for 9's to 11's - ''maybe 12.'' For this adult, though, Mr. Van Allsburg gives us the world as an ant might see it. The colors, watercolor washes, are sourish and muted. Each illustration is made up of many parallel, steely-sharp, often curvy black lines. He's working with pen and ink now, and his pictures have a stripped-down, see-through look. When he has used pencil or pastel, his pictures have often been fastidiously detailed, with subtle, powdery shading from light to dark. Each Van Allsburg production has its own style. The visual scheme of ''Two Bad Ants'' is stylish, too. She's distant, scary and sexy, and you don't want to take her sugar from her. The ant queen, in one of the strongest plates - she's seen from the rear, clutching a sugar crystal to her face - is like a vamp sheathed in a skintight garment. In a plate where they wind through the forest at night, they resemble sports cars glimpsed at a rally. Van Allsburg's creatures are beautifully designed with delicately suspended bulbous parts in front and back, and tiny eyes that might be headlights, they're like Bugatti roadsters. The best thing about ''Two Bad Ants'' is that it makes you appreciate, perhaps even like, ants. By nightfall, they're simply glad to be alive, and when they see a brigade of ants marching in for more sugar they happily slip to the back of the line and, at the story's end, gratefully return to their hole. Wet and stupefied, they stagger into an electrical outlet and are belted across the room from the shock. They are scooped up and thrown into coffee, and after a last-minute escape they're nearly broiled in a toaster and then nearly whirled to bits in a sink. When they wake the next morning they find they've made a big mistake. They wend their way up, and through a kitchen to a sugar bowl, where each ant carefully carts off a crystal but two plotters decide to stay behind with this treasure. They make their way single file through grass - for them it's a ''forest'' - to an endlessly high mountain (the brick wall of a house). It's about two ants who march off one night with a bunch of fellow colonists to bring back some sugar crystals - a recent discovery which their queen has liked a lot. It's also stumpingly unlike anything he has done. Van Allsburg's new book, ''Two Bad Ants,'' has many witty illustrations, but it's a little flat. Spielberg, he does it in an ingenious and unsoppy way. Van Allsburg presents that moment when the world seems to open up, to reveal a softer world within. They're reminiscent of some Steven Spielberg movies, particularly ''Close Encounters'' and ''E. Some of the tales are merely nightmarish and jokey but ''The Stranger'' and a few others, which are bittersweet in mood, are genuine accomplishments. At the end, almost in the spirit of an afterthought, an object is found, or a remark is made, and suddenly everything that has happened can be seen in a different way. Each story builds to the final image or two with quiet suspense - you turn the pages uncertain where the story is leading. They're about dreamy and mysterious, sometimes magical, experiences. Van Allsburg, who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, has brought out roughly a book a year since 1979. Looking at the large pictures and reading the short accompanying text for each one, you are given a movielike sense of something organic unfolding before you. (Ages 6 to 9)Ĭhris Van Allsburg's picture books have a distinctive slow and spooky rhythm. TWO BAD ANTS Written and illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg.
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