“Different isn’t weird, sad, bad, or strange. Different is different. And different is OK!’
This lesson in empathy, inclusiveness, and just plain humanity might well be the motto of the book. The quote comes early; readers are barely into the book and not yet even into the plot itself, when it arrives courtesy of a drawing of a mother and son sitting on a couch. It is not yet a lesson to be applied externally toward others for Charley. This beautiful moment of love from a mother to a son is based entirely on maternal support for a son who doesn’t fit the traditional mold. Charley is immediately painted as a five-year-old who does enjoy being loud and raucous with his friends, but equally enjoys being alone when he can “sit and think and draw” all by his lonesome. And this—this—is what makes Charley feel different in that not-so-good Fantastic Mr. Fox’s characterization of his son with the squiggly air quotes sort of way: “he’s different.”
“Why does she look so weird, mommy?’
It is essential to set up Charley as feeling “different” early on so that the shock of his meeting Emma is tempered without being diluted. When Charley first sets eyes on Emma he wonders thing like whether she was the victim of a partial alien abduction or a would-be feast for some sort of monster. All of which leads to this assessment which he speaks out loud to his mother. It is a harsh scene and would be easy enough to misapprehend Charley as an entirely different sort of kid if we didn’t already know different. Charley has come to face to face with some whose difference is quite visceral and palpable in a way that even his own internal sense of feeling different stunts. He is instantly, for a moment, transformed, into something he is not by the sight of a young girl in a wheelchair with no hands.
“Some people are different on the inside and some people are different on the outside. But we’re all different!”
Chloe is Emma’s big sister. Her observation in this quote is situated on a two page spread that features a blind man in dark glasses walking with both a cane and the assistance of a young girl, a little boy playing with soccer ball using a walker, a mother signing to one or two presumably deaf children as well as Emma in his wheelchair. Charley has just confessed how preferring to be alone sometimes makes him feel different. Chloe’s wisdom is simple yet in this panorama is also revealed as profoundly underappreciated. Merely the stating of the obvious is often enough to reveal that it may not be entirely as obvious as one assumes.
