VEHICLES

From skateboards to space probes, a pop-up panorama of ways to get around.

Each of the 10 tableaux in this French import gathers a thematically unified fleet of vehicles, beginning with buses, cars, utility trucks, commuter trains, and bicycles arrayed in a spacious urban scene. They take readers along to a construction site, a traffic accident (with no visible casualties), a busy highway, a race scene, a crowded waterway, and finally into the sky and beyond. Everywhere except outer space human figures are visible, and Picard casts them as diverse in both age and race. The pop-ups are just two-dimensional cutouts without flaps or moving parts, but the openings are arranged horizontally to make the terraced scenes display well. Poulain adds brief commentary that is as generic as the vehicles themselves (“Marine vehicles are specially built to travel in water”), but both they and the background images are labeled, along with various elements in the settings, from “bale of hay” and “tires” to “Earth” and “Mars.” Some of the scenes have logical integrity, such as the construction site and the accident. At the latter, a variety of expected vehicles converge after a car rams an apartment building. Others are composites, as with the race that seems to involve a Formula One racer, a go-cart, two different kinds of bicycles, an ATV, and a bobsled.

Suitable for displays of the staid, matter-of-fact sort.