About the Little Ones

French Canadian artist Jusseret debuts with a beguiling wordless fantasia featuring two young girls wandering through a magical and dangerous land. The story opens with the sisters leaving the safety of their home to venture out past surrounding power lines and into the countryside. They encounter a flock of crows feasting on a dead woman and collect her bones to carry along with them. Later, they run into sentient, tool-shaped creatures toiling away on a construction project with the aid of gigantic worms. After the pair befriend a young anthropomorphic fork who escapes its duties and runs away with them, all three are taken in by two elderly women. As the menacing tools and worms chase after their MIA fork, the girls fight back using the bones of the dead and natural magic. The surreal landscape is drawn in evocative lines rife with feminist imagery, as in a sequence depicting the girls bathing in a river surrounded by blood red flowers, which concludes with one of them experiencing her first menstruation. Jusseret’s dreamy but accessible narrative, with its message of finding and reclaiming feminine power, is conjured with elegance and grace. (Sept.)