Swimmy

Written & illustrated by: Leo Lionni

This is a cute story about a little black fish named Swimmy who narrowly escapes being eaten by a big tuna fish. He is then left all alone in the world because many of his friends did not escape. He made himself feel better by experiencing all the magnificent creatures in the sea until he comes upon a school of fish just like his own, but they are too afraid to do anything because of being eaten by a bigger fish. Swimmy comes up with a plan to outsmart the biggest fish in the sea.

The illustrations in this story look like watercolors and some sort of printing with paint. This story is colorful, but not big, bright, over-the-top colors which makes the reader feel like she's really in the ocean underwater. It also looks like there are different colors just layered and layered on top of each other on some pages. It is almost dream-like.

What I did notice was that Swimmy is a little, tiny black fish and no matter what other creature was on the page, no matter the size, Swimmy was always noticeable and could be found. This makes sense because he is the main character in the story so I can see the reason why the author painted Swimmy in a color so that he could be easily recognized. Also, Swimmy is always swimming to the right. It doesn't matter what page he's on, the left or the right, he's always swimming to the right and it made me want to turn the page and observe what Swimmy was going to come across next. Most all of the animals do swim towards the right. What I do find interesting is that not one animal's body is cut off from one page to the other. At the end, when Swimmy and his gang are chasing away the big fish, these fish are cut off. Readers can only see the back half of their bodies and their tails. I thought this was very interesting and it made me feel like Swimmy had succeeded in what he set out to do with the school of fish like him.