Tuesday (Somewhere, USA)

If I were to pick out my all-time favourite illustration from a children's picture book, then a top contender would absolutely be from David Wiesner's 1991 publication Tuesday. The story, told with minimal words, depicts the events of a seemingly nondescript night, on the titular day, when something truly inexplicable occurs - an army of frogs invades a suburban neighbourhood, somewhere in America, after mysteriously gaining the power of levitation (or, more accurately, the lily pads on which they're perched rise off the ground and into the night sky, and the frogs are only too eager to go along for the ride). The illustration in question shows a man in a bathrobe, seated at a kitchen table and dining on a pre-midnight sandwich, as the frogs float by his window and one of them directs a casual wave his way. The man's expression is in line with what you'd expect from someone who'd been enjoying a peaceful late night snack only to observe a bunch of frogs flying past their abode. Not only does it encapsulate, in one delightful image, so much of the heart and the character of Wiesner's story, but it also constitutes the most revealing intersection between the two ostensibly incompatible worlds integral to the narrative action. The book is concerned with the juxtaposition of the ordinary with the extraordinary, yet the familiar world of after dark suburbia is brimming with its own hidden depths and intrigue. There is something appealingly Edward Hopper-esque about the implicit narrative of the man in the kitchen; his vulnerability is presented comically, but there is a real vividness to his nocturnal solitude, as it rubs shoulders with the quirky fantasy world of the frogs happening right outside his window. Notably, this is the only point in the story in which the collision is mutually knowing, with the frog and human worlds directly contemplating one another. It also represents a rare point in the story in which we witness the frogs' invasion from the perspective of an insider gazing out at the bizarre occurrence; for the most part, Tuesday follows the frogs and their voyage of discovery, as they transform the suburban mundaneness into their vast personal playground. The only text accompanying the illustration, as with the rest of the story, is temporal, indicating that the scene in question takes place at 11:21pm. In one sense, this text is superfluous, as eagle-eyed viewers might pick up on the clock at the back of the kitchen, and take note of where its hands are pointing. But it does clue us in to the significance of the clock, as minor and distant a background detail as it might seem, and to its paramount role in dictating the outcome of the story. For Tuesday is a story as much about clocks as it is flying frogs and nocturnal suburbia. This much is hinted in the cover illustration, which centres upon the large clock within a church tower, with the frogs' participation teased only on the sidelines of the image. Throughout the book itself, clocks are featured regularly but always from a distance - the church tower clock is never more than a glowing speck on the horizon, clocks are just a part of the scenery inside the different houses the frogs drop in on, and we'll possibly notice that the police detective glimpsed toward the end is wearing a wristwatch. The passage of time is a subtle but omnipresent detail. The moral of the story might well be that time waits for no man or frog. Or pig, for that matter, but that particular chunk of the narrative is left predominantly to our imagination.

By the end of the story, the events that unfolded on the Tuesday in question, and on into the early hours of the following Wednesday, might appear to have been a great cosmic gag at the expense of man and frog alike. Come the break of dawn, and the frogs lose their powers as abruptly as they acquired them - their lily pads fall from the sky, giving the frogs no choice but to abandon them and return to their natural habitat. The respective punchlines, so far as both the frog and human narrative arcs go, make them both into the butt of the joke. In their final appearance, the frogs are drawn in a state of visible dissatisfaction - having tasted such exhilaration, the life of an ordinary pond-dweller can't help but seem incredibly dull. Meanwhile, in the light of day, the human world is seen grappling with the impossible task of attempting to make sense of this strange phenomenon. The man in the kitchen is being interviewed by a local news team, as a police detective studies one of the abandoned lily pads with a comical scrutiny. Their efforts are of course futile. The frogs and the suburbanites are both left rattled by the disturbance to their respective realities, yet at the end of the book Wiesner reveals that it wasn't really a disturbance at all, but merely time doing its typical thing.

Wiesner deliberately leaves much of the narrative detail unaccounted for - indeed, part of the charm of the story is in the lack of explicit explanation for why the frogs gained (and lost) their ability to fly. It would be tempting to see the frogs' invasion of the suburbs as amounting to a kind of divine retribution, recalling as it does the Biblical plague of Egypt, but for the fact that these frogs are obviously so benign. The author's answer is offered more implicitly, in the book's final pages, which take place, so the text specifies, on the following Tuesday at 7:58pm, and depict a drove of pigs hovering in the night sky. It would appear that, at dusk on Tuesday, a group of animals somewhere in the world (or maybe just the USA?) gaining the ability to fly is something that simply happens, as much a part of the flow of the time and the rhythms of nature as anything else around them. Mirroring the recurring motif of the clock is the full moon that features in the backdrop throughout the frogs' adventure, another perfect circle emphasising the cyclical nature of the narrative. In my opinion, Wiesner cheats somewhat in the final image - obviously, a week on and we wouldn't be looking at a full moon any more, but he gets around this by having the moon partially obscured behind the treetops, enabling him to maintain the appearance of a full circle and retain the motif. The choice of flying pigs for our closing image carries its own very obvious symbolism, by demonstrating that the impossible has been rendered possible. Wiesner continues his theme of flying animals, but he also clues us in that absolutely anything might happen on a Tuesday. The deluge of infinite possibilities are hinted in the prominent appearance of a weather vane at the end, with the different directions indicating the various ways in which this narrative could potentially go. And yet we already know, having observed how things played out on the previous Tuesday for the frogs, how the pigs' own story will ultimately end. Their own adventure, marvellous as it might be, is set against a ticking clock. At the crack of dawn, they will, presumably, be brought back down to earth. This is the final paradox with which Wiesner leaves us - so much possibility, and yet so much inevitability.

There are two different levels in which I'm most inclined to interpret the events Tuesday. One is that it involves a kind of dream narrative intersecting with reality (in that regard, it is not unlike Peter Collington's The Angel and The Soldier Boy), with the flying animals representing a kind of collective dream on the part of the suburban world as it lulls itself to sleep, one that must end when daylight creeps back in. The other is that the frogs' wild bender through the suburbs is to be read as a metaphor for one's uninhibited youth, or some other golden period of one's lifetime, when the world seems alive with surprises and possibilities. When it is over, the frogs are left mired in their nostalgia, with the pigs representing the incoming generation about to get their turn in the Tuesday spotlight. In both scenarios, our celebration of the fantasy on offer is tempered by our understanding that it is impermanent. Tuesday, and of the fleeting magic that it yields, must pass. Of course Tuesday will come again, but no Tuesday is ever exactly the same. Wiesner's book acknowledges the impassivity of time, but ultimately embraces the sequence of change that it brings.

Tuesday was a smashing success on release, achieving massive acclaim and winning the 1992 Caledcott Medal (an honor Wiesner would replicate with two subsequent publications, The Three Pigs in 2002 and Flotsam in 2007). The book's immense popularity and enduring images made it inevitable that somebody would eventually use it as the basis of an animated project; this happened in 2000, when it was adapted into a 13-minute short, directed by Geoff Dunbar and produced by Paul McCartney, who also composed the short's music. It was dedicated to the memory of Linda McCartney, who died during its production. The short was later compiled into the home media release Paul McCartney: The Music and Animation Collection, alongside Tropical Island Hum and Rupert & The Frog Song, two other animated projects created by the director/producer team of Dunbar and McCartney (the latter production of course provided the origin of the infamous "We All Stand Together"). Do you know what else these three shorts have in common? They ALL feature frog characters prominently. Two frog-related films might be a coincidence, but three...well, it definitely feels like the mark of a fetish on Dunbar/Macca's part.

For fans of Wiesner's book, Dunbar's film is as lovingly faithful to the source material as you could hope. The narrative trajectory has been followed accurately, while most of the key images from the book have been recreated wholesale, if expanded on to take advantage of the animated format. The film mines more sight gags out of the frogs' collision with a washing line, for example, and the scene with the frogs watching television in a sleeping woman's living room (as one of them operates the remote control with its tongue) also includes the frogs surfing through the channels and laughing at David Letterman. While Dunbar's film contains little dialogue, in keeping with the wordless nature of Wiesner's book, it deviates from its source slightly in incorporating some discernable speech, firstly in the form of background noise emitting from the suburbanites' TV and radios, and from the human figures themselves in their final scene (we hear a sample of what the man in the kitchen says to his interviewers). Dustin Hoffman also shows up to offer some closing narration in which he ruminates a little more overtly upon the themes that Wiesner only hinted at, so that we get this final takeaway in the voice of Mr Bergstrom:

"The events recorded here are verified by an undisclosed source to have happened somewhere, USA on Tuesday. All those in doubt are reminded that there is always another Tuesday."

An obvious question the story begs is why Tuesday in particular? I would presume that Wiesner chose it, out of all the available options, because it registers as an entirely arbitrary day of the week (unlike Friday, Saturday or Monday, which each convey their own immediately identifiable cultural niches), which pertains the pivotal mergence of the humdrum and the fantastical. There was, apparently, nothing overly special about the events of Tuesday that Wiesner focusses on - the book is, after all, named "Tuesday", not "This One Tuesday", indicating that it relates to something intrinsic to the character of Tuesday. But of course, those events mattered to those who experienced them. What the ending ultimately points to, implicitly in Wiesner's book and more explicitly in Dunbar's film, is the multitude of different stories out there waiting to be uncovered. By its nature, it prompts the reader (or viewer) to construct their own narratives about the goings-on of other Tuesdays in other locations, the smaller stories in the bigger picture. I see the man in the kitchen as as significant a figure in this process as any other, a lone individual stirring in a world as indifferent to his existence as the passage of time is to any of its subjects. Tuesday itself might come and go impassively, but by witnessing its effects on those who experience it, we become invested in their individual plights, and in their lack of control in the broader scheme. What Wiesner captures, as effectively as the quirky cuteness of his flying frogs, is the kind of lonely alienation that accompanies your late night sandwich cravings, while you anticipate nothing in particular manifesting in the dark void outside your window.