Funnybones by Janet and Allan Ahlberg

Funnybones by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. An analysis of a picture book.



The front cover shows a big skeleton standing with one hand jauntily on his hip holding the leash of a skeleton dog. A smaller skeleton next to them appears to be dancing. They both look happy and humourously the dog has a bone in his mouth. The title Funnybones is written to look like bones too. I liked the contradiction between the usual sinister associations that skeletons have with the cheerfulness of these ones. I choose it because it is Halloween and therefore seasonal.

The illustrations are bright and cheery but the colours are not garish. The story is set at night and the sky is black or dark blue with bright yellow stars and moon in all of the pictures. The characters are skeletons and the white of their bones contrasts well with the sky. The pictures look like drawings – with slightly shaky black thin lines around everything. The shapes are coloured in with watercolours.
Some of the pictures fill the pages and the text is written on a black part of the picture. Other pictures are in boxes with coloured borders, some with the text in separate boxes, others with the text in the same box. The layout is varied, with some of the pages made up of several smaller boxes and speech bubbles.

There are a couple of pictures before the story starts – inside of the cover is a small picture of the skeletons cheekily peering around a door – showing that it is the start of something or maybe mirroring the opening of the book. On the next page there is another small boxed drawing of the two skeletons peering into a bedroom where you can see the silhouette of a small child sleeping in a cot. This is a small extra detail which may well be overlooked, but perhaps is placing the young reader in the story – giving him or her a place. On the facing page the title and the authors names are repeated in boxes with a coloured border with lines of the three characters repeated in different positions across the page. There is lots of detail there to entertain before the story starts. At the end of the story there is an extra small boxed drawing on the last page with the small printed details of the book.

The story starts as follows:

“This is how the story begins.
On a dark dark hill
There was a dark dark town.
In the dark dark town
There was a dark dark street.”

And so on.

The story ends with almost the same text, and the beginning and the end have very similar drawings. This gives the story a pleasing symmetry and takes the reader from a domestic interior, out on an adventure, and back to the domestic scene. The repetition of ‘dark’ makes the story fun-sounding and whilst making the picture it paints very dark, it also makes dark seem familiar and not scary. The very last page gives the story an unexpected slightly scary twist – the skeletons still live there!

The characters have no names and are referred to simply as the big skeleton, the small skeleton and the dog skeleton. The gender of the characters is not directly stated, but from the pronouns used they are all male. The relationship between the characters is not explained, but they all live in the same cellar. This lack of names and relationships makes it easier to emphasize with the characters and gives the story a certain sparseness – there is no surplus information.

The story is simple – two skeletons decide to take their dog for a walk and scare some people. The go to the park and the dog falls into a pile of bones. They put him back together and set off to find someone to frighten. There is no one about so they visit the skeleton animals in the zoo and then go home, frightening each other on the way.

The text is separate from the pictures but there are also speech bubbles within the pictures with more text. Some of the speech bubble text echoes the main text and some of it is not included in the main text. The main text is simple and the speech bubbles add more to it. At the point at which the dog is being put back together there is a funny joke with the dog’s ‘woof’ getting mixed up and being ‘wofo’, ‘oofw’ etc. This joke is told in the pictures with speech bubbles. It would be a difficult joke to explain just with text but with pictures and text it is easy to understand.

The text includes some jokes which might appeal to older readers. An example is “he’s all come to pieces.” This is a common phrase to mean someone has metaphorically fallen into bits, but here the dog actually is in pieces.

The pictures provides more information on the setting and the details of what the characters do and include jokes which perhaps children would appreciate more. The pictures also provide the emotions for the story. The characters are jolly and fun. This is shown by the smiling faces and details like the little top hat that the big skeleton wears.

The concept of the story – that skeletons exist in a parallel world at night could be scary, but the pictures make it fun instead. That reversal is interesting and comic. The magic of the story therefore only happens between the pictures and the text.

Smashing stuff Immee - you need to tell everyone else how to put pictures in!