Age 5+

This book had a initial print run of 50,000 copies. It was put together by committee — Paul McCartney, children’s author Philip Ardagh, and animator Geoff Dunbar — and it shows: it is lumbering, awkward and not very beautiful. The pictures have the dull slickness of computerised animation, Ardagh’s wit is laboured, and there are tiresome digressions, such as “missed him by a squirrel’s whisker (if squirrels have whiskers)”. The book is, however, worthy. It tells the story of Wirral, a squirrel who loses his mother in a ghastly bulldozed-tree episode and goes in search of an ideal island, where animals are safe from nasty pollution and industrial development. With him is an air balloonist, “Froggo, a frog (the clue is in the name)” — all right, I laughed — who helps rescue Wirral’s miniskirted squirrel girlfriend from a power-hungry woman. The improbable plot is too discursive to create much tension for the climax, in which a lot of animals take on a battleship, and a flea rescues slave animals from a factory. McCartney apparently spent years thinking about these characters; my advice is stick to the song-writing.

(Faber £12.99)

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