Tiptop Pop-Ups

Tiptop Pop-Ups

‘Bugs,’ by George McGavin, and More

From "Bugs"

By SARAH HARRISON SMITH

Published: November 20, 2013

THE LITTLE MERMAID
A Pop-Up Adaptation of the Classic Fairy Tale
By Robert Sabuda
12 pp. Little Simon/Simon & Schuster. $29.99. (Pop-up book; ages 4 to 11)

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From "The Little Mermaid"

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From "Transformers"

Robert Sabuda’s superb pop-up pages in “The Little Mermaid” look like set designs for a drama in two kingdoms: one below the waves and the other above. Open the book and, with a rustle, the prow of a ship unfolds toward you. Sails flap, waves curl away from the hull, an oddly dead-looking figurehead looms under the bowsprit. There’s something wrong here: The masts aren’t aligned, and one looks broken. That sinking ship — surely a challenge to create from paper — illustrates the fateful moment when the little mermaid rescues a drowning prince, for the love of whom she later sacrifices her voice. Sabuda hews to the tragic, troubling story line of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, published in 1837 rather than the popular Disney film version. Andersen ends with the mermaid becoming one with the sea foam, then ascending skyward with the “daughters of the air.” (Disney, more cheerfully, concludes with her marriage to her beloved prince.) 

Sabuda’s enthusiasm and ingenuity in illustrating the story are daunting. The mermaid swims through castles made of piled-up bones, a park scene sports three rows of tall trees and two sets of garden walls. Thick black outlines, sinuous lines and tie-dye colors bring an updated look to the illustrations, which may help them appeal to older children. To create more space for the written narrative, each spread contains at least one booklet furthering the tale and enclosing additional delicate pop-ups. In places, this more-is-more design makes the book a challenge to read — either because it’s hard to know what sequence the booklets’ pages go in, or because the visual elements are so impressive they make the words seem irrelevant. Could Sabuda — whose long pop-up bibliography includes versions of “Peter Pan” and “The Chronicles of Narnia” — abandon words altogether and tell a story like this entirely with pop-up pictures? That would be something to see.

BUGS
A Stunning Pop-Up Look at Insects, Spiders, and Other Creepy-Crawlies
By George McGavin
Illustrated by Jim Kay
12 pp. Candlewick Press. $19.99. (Pop-up book; ages 7 and up)

Do bugs give you the creeps? Or do they make you think, “Yum! I’ll have one of those for lunch”? “Bugs” offers plenty of thrills for readers of both persuasions. McGavin, a celebrated entomologist (said to enjoy eating insects), and Kay, who last year won a Kate Greenaway Medal for his artwork for Patrick Ness’s “A Monster Calls,” have created a fascinating book about arthropods that poises pop-up engineering and text in admirable balance. Each spread has at least one magnificent pop-up: Show stoppers include a wasps’ nest, with its interior magnified and labeled, and a fat-tailed scorpion that rises a good six inches from the book’s center seam. For fascinating detail, a cockroach as long as your hand unfolds in layers to reveal 16 body parts, including “Malpighian tubules” and — cue middle-grade giggles — rectum.

With Kay’s surprisingly pretty watercolors and trompe l’oeil touches, a handwritten-looking typeface and masses of detail, “Bugs” takes a page from Candlewick’s popular “Ology” series books (“Dinosaurology,” “Egyptology”), which teasingly mix fact and fiction. Here the facts are real, but presented with all the tricks and guises of fantasy. Opening flaps reveals smaller pop-ups, some cleverly designed to surprise: Behind what looks like the lid of an explorer’s compass-box, a whip spider shifts as if about to pounce; a leaf hides a centipede that seems to dart out when exposed. Faux newspaper clippings advocate for creepy-crawlies: “Why the world needs bugs” lists the useful things bugs do, like “eat dead flesh.” But don’t be put off: There’s also a blue morpho butterfly taking flight, and pond and woodland scenes to put the bugs in beautiful context.

TRANSFORMERS
The Ultimate Pop-Up Universe
By Matthew Reinhart
Illustrated by Emiliano Santalucia
12 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $37. (Pop-up book; ages 4 and up)

Reinhart, who credits Robert Sabuda with encouraging him to embark on paper engineering, is a master of pop-up’s intricate forms. In his new book, licensed by Hasbro, he turns his skills to making Transformers — those martial robots which, as cartoon characters and toys, can change into vehicles and weapons; here, they do exactly that, in paper form.

These outsize pop-ups would impress even if they did not have dual profiles. With the pull of a tab, a 3-D yellow race car with black stripes unfolds and springs up into the figure of Bumblebee, a fighter with his fists up, ready to rumble. Elsewhere, the domed shape of Cybertron, a planet that’s home to the autobots, flips to reveal an embattled cityscape. If you hold “Transformers” too close as you open its penultimate spread, Omega Supreme (more than a foot tall, with weapons) will bop you in the face. Short paragraphs describing the autobots include quotations from them: “Our war: inevitable. Our home world: devastated: My words: difficult.” These guys are more about action than adverbs, and so is the book.

Reinhart has created many other pop-ups, including “DC Super Heroes: The Ultimate Pop-Up Book,” “Star Wars: A Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy” and, lest you underestimate his range, “Cinderella.” For children who like Transformers, or adults who admire the toys’ technology, “Transformers: The Ultimate Pop-Up Universe” offers a tour-de-force display of the paper engineer’s craft.