The Parallel Worlds of Animals and Humans in Raschka's A Ball For Daisy
On an emerald and pea green striped couch, two figures—one a human and one a dog—sit in a solemn embrace. The girl gazes tenderly at her dog, Daisy, whose downcast eyes reveal the grief the narrative rests on. Both figures emerge from negative space, defined by loose lines and watercolor washes. While Daisy’s contours undulate organically, her human companion is anchored by a triangular dress and straight cylindrical legs. Despite these differences, the two are more alike formally than they are different, particularly in their semicircular eyes and vibrant blushes of color, underscoring a shared emotional connection. In the panel just below, blooms of deep indigo around the couch reveal that night has fallen, and Daisy sits alone, her white fur replaced by a wash of violet that belies her deepening mood. Her human companion, presumably gone to bed, must leave Daisy to attend to her canine concerns alone. Despite the kindred connection between the pair, and between children and animals all over the world, the two remain distinct, a departure from the traditional animal tale in which animals annotate human experiences. The juxtaposition of sameness and separateness continues throughout this wordless tale, Chris Raschka’s 2018 Caldecott-winning picture book, A Ball For Daisy. Both the pictures and narrative illustrate the powerful parallel relationship shared between child and pet—two creatures fundamentally different yet deeply connected—and in doing so create an animal tale more deeply emotional and relatable than the traditional animal tale.
One of the most notable features of A Ball For Daisy, and arguably its strongest formal quality is its wordlessness. The story, told through watercolor illustrations follows Daisy and her beloved red ball. The fluid, expressive lines of Raschka’s drawings, particularly the vast array of shapes he uses to depict Daisy’s eyes, create an exuberant emotional experience for the reader as Daisy cycles between joy and abject despair when the ball pops. The book’s wordlessness amplifies the emotional content, prompting the reader to examine Daisy’s face and body language for narrative cues. This emphasis on looking rather than reading or speaking mirrors real human-animal interactions and highlights the unique and powerful relationships possible despite, or even because of, an inability to communicate. No matter how close the bond between animal and human, the two can never converse, resulting in what Berger calls an “abyss of non-comprehension” in his essay Why Look At Animals. As a result of this lack of a common language, most of our direct experience with animals relies on eye contact, captured perfectly with Raschka’s wordless book dominated by images of Daisy’s face. While an animal’s silence separates and excludes an animal from the human sphere, Berger argues that this distance creates the opportunity for a truly unique bond. “An animal’s life, never to be confused with a man’s, can be seen to run parallel to his,” says Berger, and this parallel relationship offers “a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange.” Granting Daisy the ability to speak or even including an omniscient narrator would have undermined the parallel relationship between Daisy and her human and, more importantly, between Daisy and the reader, resulting in a tale that would only alienate humans further from the animal world.
A Ball For Daisy exists as part of a long tradition of animal tales going back hundreds of years, but adroitly avoids the typical tropes not only with the book’s wordlessness but with the narrative and pictorial treatment of animals. Many traditional animal tales assign human traits to their furry and feathered characters, transforming these animals into “human puppets” according to Berger. Fables, with their thinly veiled moralistic lessons, are the biggest offenders. These tales do little to promote interspecies companionship, using animals simply to make didactic content more palatable. In A Ball For Daisy, Raschka gestures toward a more naturalistic treatment of animals as early as the title page. Daisy’s human appears in the background clutching the red ball, cropped at the midsection such that only her dress and feet are visible while Daisy fills the majority of the page. This skillful move communicates that not only that Daisy will play the leading role in this tale, but that Daisy will remain distinct from humans. In fables and heavily anthropomorphized tales, human characters are usually omitted, deemed superfluous. The presence of Daisy’s human serves as a foil to Daisy’s animal, albeit domesticated, nature. While Daisy does not stand in for a human character, Raschka does position the two species in shared emotional territory. Daisy’s story of grief in losing a beloved possession will at once be relatable to human children with their strong attachments to favorite toys. However, this relatability does not come at the expense of Daisy’s animality. In a joyful spread near the end of the narrative, Daisy and her new canine friend frolic in a park green with watercolor blooms while the dogs’ owners, who charmingly resemble their respective dogs in hair color and line quality, stand together in playful poses in the background. Both pairs know the joy of play, companionship, and love, albeit in different ways—they are alike yet different, reinforcing the narrative of parallelism between animals and humans.
A Ball For Daisy also reinforces the concept of parallelism with its panels. Raschka cleverly employs page divisions similar to a moment-to-moment comic defined with delicate watercolor washes. The panels skillfully depict slow and subtle undulations of emotion. On one particularly effective spread, Raschka uses eight panels to document Daisy’s gradual descent into despair. Each panel reveals a shift in Daisy’s facial expressions, body language, ear position, and even the color of the watercolor wash resulting in a heartwarming nod to the five stages of grief. Daisy’s isolation within these panels highlights that the emotional experience is uniquely hers. When her human comes to the rescue, entering the panel on the next spread, we do not see her face. In fact, for the first three quarters of the book, Raschka always crops Daisy’s owner out of the panel revealing only her orange spotted yellow dress and limbs made from scrawling gray brush strokes. Particularly on pages composed of long horizontal panels, cropping in this manner feels akin to a cinematographer’s pan on a main character, highlighting the primacy of Daisy’s story and the underlying reality that while Daisy and her human share experiences, they exist on parallel tracks—adjacent but distinct. These two lives finally converge toward the narrative’s end. The couch scene when Daisy’s human first appears fully, face and body, marks a turning point. She gazes down at Daisy intently, mirroring the close looking the reader has been engaged in throughout the book, in a gesture of emotional connection. It is at this very moment of deep looking that humans and animals meet. The next day, as Daisy meets a new friend in the park, Raschka leaves the humans in frame, highlighting their connections with their pets through formal resemblances. The new fluffy brown dog is accompanied by an owner with brown curly hair while Daisy and her owner share fluid gray manes. With the very title of his essay, Why Look At Animals, Berger encourages readers to consider the value of eye contact. In A Ball For Daisy, Raschka provides an answer—looking provides an entry point into a space where two lives meet, where parallel roads converge, if only momentarily.
Since the beginning of pictographic practices, humans have used images of animals to tell stories. According to Berger, “animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises”, serving as reminders of our smallness and our interconnectedness with other creatures in the world. Before modern civilization, humans interacted with animals regularly as fellow species. But as human culture cleaved itself from nature, everything changed. As animals disappeared from our natural environments, they began to multiply in our visual and material culture, in toys, book, and zoos. Picture books with animals represent to Berger “an epitaph to a relationship which was an old as man”. They document connections to the natural world that are slipping away. Treating the animals in picture books as “human puppets” that hollowly mimic the traits, speech, and values of human beings further isolates us. We need books that remind us of our unique companionship with animals. While Berger points out that a domesticated pet does not offer the same connection to wildness as free animals, A Ball For Daisy provides a thoughtful approach to the animal tale that highlights our parallel lives and demonstrates that by looking closely, we can ensure our paths, albeit more modern and paved than they used to be, will remain near to each other.
