Reading to Your Bunny

Based on perennial American Library Association annual conference attendee/speaker Rosemary Wells' 1997 picture book Read to Your Bunny, the iconographic-animated Reading to Your Bunny offers a library-friendly (if also rather perfunctory) tale of a young bunny named Fred who is far more interested in watching TV and playing video games than reading books. Encouraged by his elementary school teacher and a Book Fairy (somewhat incongruous in this otherwise straightforward narrative), Freddy's parents start reading to him for 20 minutes daily, and take their son to the library, where he is captivated by a story hour rendition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (and delighted to learn that he can check out books for free with a library card). Featuring surprisingly lackluster animation from the legendary Michael Sporn, Reading to Your Bunny does benefit from excellent voice work from the wonderful Diana Canova (as well as David de Vries and Wells herself) and a fun music video on the joys of reading performed by Mary Chapin Carpenter. Essentially a PSA for literacy and libraries (with the usual negative swipes at TV and video games—blindly knocking the formats with no qualifiers about good or bad content), this is recommended, overall, for the pro-reading aspect of its mixed message. Aud: K, E, P. (R. Pitman)