Flotsam (review)

Wiesner returns with his traditional wordless-narrative format for another fantastical outing. A young boy finds an old underwater camera washed up by an ocean wave, and he excitedly takes its roll of used film in for developing. The result is worth the squirmy wait: a sequence of scenes reveal amazing underwater secrets, from gaudy clockwork fish to castellated tortoises, kindly reading-aloud octopuses to subsurface alien colonies. Perhaps the most fascinating image is the one of another kid, herself holding up a sheaf of what are clearly other amazing photos taken by the peripatetic camera, topped by a picture of still another kid, holding a picture of still another kid, and so on; our protagonist cleverly views the recursive image under a microscope, revealing the series of kids around the world and through the years who have found the camera and its magical images. The protagonist then takes his turn with the tradition, reloading the camera, snapping his own picture with the images he found, and returning the camera to the depths, where complicit sea creatures ferry it along to a faraway beach for discovery by another child. There are a multitude of appeals in the story—the fanciful undersea world, the kids-only secret, the web of connections across time and distance—and Wiesner's cinematic visual narrative fills the story out cunningly, beginning with a reminder (as the protagonist peers through a magnifying glass at a baroquely structured crustacean) that the actual denizens of the sea are already pretty darn fantastical. The boy himself is visually a bit bland and pallid (the kids in the photos actually look more interesting than the protagonist), but the subtle colors and smooth regularity of the watercolor scenes emphasize the normality of the world in which these extraordinary visions turn up, underscoring the "it could happen to you" point. Pair it with Pattison's The Journey of Oliver K. Woodman (BCCB 6/03) for a dual exploration of the way a project can link distant strangers, or just point it at Wiesner fans ready for a new visual adventure.