![]() Throughout, Sakai emphasizes the rabbit’s stiff, toylike unreality, showing him lying forgotten in the garden beside a shovel or propped up against a tree. Sakai’s illustrations, richly textured paintings done in acrylic and oil pencil, retain the original’s Edwardian setting, while cushioning the story’s sharp edges with blankets of smudgy, luminous color. “ ‘Fancy a rabbit without any hind legs!’ And he began to laugh.” In Sakai’s (In the Meadow) retelling, those cruel truths are considerably softened and pared down-where Williams sometimes seemed to prolong the afflictions of her hero, Sakai touches on them only long enough to give her story some emotional heft before moving on. “He hasn’t got any hind legs!” sneers a real rabbit in the original version’s woodland scene. ![]() ![]() But at its core, Margery Williams’s classic story is about stark realities: humans are brusque and unreliable, toys wear out, and-above all-one is either real or one is not. Everyone remembers that the Velveteen Rabbit receives a fairy’s gift of life. ![]()
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