As a striped cat with a red collar and golden bell walks through the world, all sorts of other creatures see that cat through the lens of their own perception and, page by page, the cat transforms accordingly. It's an ingenious idea, gorgeously realized in Brendan Wenzel's (Some Bugs; Beastly Babies) author-illustrator debut, They All Saw a Cat.
From the child's perspective, the bell-collared cat is big and furry, with a friendly, cartoonish feline face and a long, ankle-circling tail, the purring all but audible. The child is petting the cat, the two are connected. The text is spare, but lilting: "The cat walked through the world, with its whiskers, ears, and paws.../ and the child saw A CAT." On the next spread, "...the dog saw A CAT," and the scenario is not nearly as cozy this time. Here the cat is elongated, mostly limbs and tail, stealthy and suspicious. The cat's bell is huge compared to its body, as a keen-eared dog might perceive it. After a quick chase from a fox, whose fierce stare reduces it to a softly rounded, adorably edible scaredy cat, the feline resumes its more dignified cat shape and keeps on walking.
A bug-eyed goldfish sees the cat as a hugely magnified, blurry, yellow-eyed blob through the water of its fish bowl. A mouse sees a diabolical, sharp-toothed beast in a jagged sea of red and black, limbs and tail painted furiously with kinetic brushstrokes. A flea sits atop one cat hair in a field of pencil-scratched fur. A skunk goes eye to eye with the cat in a curvy, soft-focus composition of black and white.
Not only is each delightfully composed spread a dramatic commentary on the power of point of view--be it prey-to-predator or casual observer--but the artwork is a splendid showcase of eclectic styles and techniques. In the small print, the book says, "The illustrations in this book were rendered in almost everything imaginable, including colored pencil, oil pastels, acrylic paint, watercolor, charcoal, Magic Marker, good old number 2 pencils, and even an iBook." A cut-paper-collage cat near the end is a patchwork of all the animals' perspectives: "YES, THEY ALL SAW THE CAT!" says the text. Finally, the cat looks into a pond and sees its own distorted reflection in the swirly water.
Wenzel had some insights into the idea of perception while teaching art classes in Nepal, when children, to his dismay, would tell him they were bad at drawing. His view is that there are no bad drawings; every child's drawing of the same object is happily different, depending on their relationships and experiences with that object: "I quickly learned if you want to discover something unexpected about a subject, ask twenty eight-year-olds to sketch it!" he says.
And so we have They All Saw a Cat, a picture book that seems so light on its little cat feet but that goes right to the core of human experience. A keeper. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness
Shelf Talker: A child, a flea, a dog, a bird (and more!) see the same cat through different eyes, and their eclectic perspectives make up this inventive picture book.