Author and Illustrator: Leo Lionni

Publisher and Year: Scholastic Inc. 1970

Number of Pages: 28

Genre: Fiction

Analysis

This is the story of two best friends: a tadpole and a fish. But when the tadpole starts to develop features that resemble a frog, and the fish gets larger, they realize that they are both different. Frog goes away and comes back with stories to tell Fish, but fish imagines a whole different world than what Frog is describing to him.

In the middle of the the book, Frog comes back to the pond to tell Fish all about the world out of the pond. As Frog is describing this new world to Fish, Fish imagines all the animals and people just like him. For example, Frog tells fish about birds that have “wings and two legs and different colors”. But Fish imagines them as fish with different colors and wings and two feet. Fish doesn’t know that not every animal or person looks like him. When he tries to jump out of the pond to see the other creatures, he realizes he cannot breathe and Frog pushes him back into the Pond. Fish then feels content with his underwater world and ends the book saying “Fish is Fish” I do wish that the author would have written the ending a bit differently though, because I wanted Fish to see that not everyone looks somewhat like him, and that just because they live in a different world than he does, doesn’t mean that it is bad or worse than his. Just like with children, one day they will notice that everyone doesn’t look exactly like them. Some might have different hair color or skin color, but children need to be taught that just because someone looks different from them doesn’t mean that they are better or worse.

The text is always written above the pictures. Because most the story takes place underwater, it seems likely that the text would appear above it, allowing more room for the illustrations underneath. As the tadpole begins to develop the features of a frog, the drawings of the Fish show that he keeps getting madder because the tadpole is changing. The pictures are also important because as the frog tells the fish about the different creatures he sees, fish is imagining them differently than how they actually are.

The fish keeps imaging the different animals and humans with fish bodies since he has never seen any other animal, besides the frog so he needs to be exposed to other kinds of species to understand that not everyone looks like him. The thought of superior species (race) could be present because the fish states that underwater was much better than on land and that fish is fish.