Jumpy Jack & Googily (review)

Jumpy Jack the snail gets by with a little help from his friend, Googily. As the two walk companionably home and enjoy a nice evening in their cozy shared house, Googily repeatedly reassures the nervous snail that there are no monsters, despite Jack's great fear of same. The joke here is that Googily is in fact a monster himself, so that Jumpy Jack's greatest fear is actually his constant succor. The problem is that the text is so poker-faced about that joke that young audiences may begin to wonder if Googily's fantastical physique is something other than monsterly, and the unstated truth never offers any kind of payoff; the finale, in which Googily is frightened by an under-bed sock, fails to deliver any compensatory punch. Line-and-watercolor illustrations have a zany vivacity even as they echo the matter-of-fact tone of the text. Jumpy Jack, with his eyes peering out timidly from their stalks, actually looks rather more monstrous than Humpty-Dumptyish Googily, a nattily dressed blue wonder with bristly eyebrows and pointy teeth that somehow enhance rather than detract from his toylike cuddliness. Monsters, Inc. (which, coincidentally enough, had a monster nicknamed "Googly Bear") is the ultimate exploration of this idea, but audiences who like their monsters in cuddly book form may still appreciate the duo's warm if unusual friendship.