Review by Ian Keogh
Little Red Riding Hood is often thought to be one of the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, but in France the author is known to be 17th century writer Charles Perrault. Amélie Fléchais bases her slightly askew version on his original, at least to begin with.
Little Red Wolf is asked by his mother to take some rabbits to his grandmother’s house in the forest, as she’s no longer able to hunt since losing her teeth. He’s warned to avoid the area where the deadly hunter and his daughter live, but becomes lost, and is grateful when a young girl offers to help him. This is the point where young readers will gasp with horror, as they’ll realise who the girl is, while the innocent Little Red Wolf just follows her.
Straddling the borders between illustrated children’s story and graphic novel, Little Red Wolf definitely tells a story by means of sequential illustrations, even if they’re broken down into pages rather than panels, and accompanied by blocks of text. The illustrations are beautiful with a bold use of colour ensuring Little Red Wolf is instantly visible on every page. To set a spooky atmosphere, Fléchais creates abstracted shapes and has objects emerging from darkness and shadow, and the reversal of the wolf as figure of sympathy and humans as the threat is represented by the vast difference in sizes.
While the quality of the art never diminishes, the story takes a wayward turn, drifting into oblique fable and near enough forgetting the title character altogether. It’s a fatal flaw, as if two books have been stitched together. Marvel at the art, but The Little Red Wolf disappoints overall.
