STOPPING BY JUNGLE ON A SNOWY EVENING

In this riff on the celebrated poem, a youngster rides a blue hippo with a jingle bell harness through a wintery setting.

The brown-skinned child speaks the opening lines: “Whose woods these are I think I know.” The child then deviates a bit: “My little hippopotamus must think it—” Suddenly, the youngster encounters Robert Frost, peering out of a window superimposed over the trees (no house is depicted). The poet is clearly upset by the word change and the strange sight: “Hippos live in the jungle.” The child, the hippo, and Frost suddenly find themselves in a colorful jungle scene, along with tropical birds and animals peeking from the foliage. The young protagonist continues to rewrite the poem to fit the new environment. When Frost points out that there is no snow in the jungle, the child tries substitutes: Rain? Dough? Deciding that the verse needs more excitement, the child invents disasters such as meteors, a tidal wave, and an alien invasion. Somehow, Frost manages to get through the poem and even starts writing another well-known work. The disconnect between the staid poet and the imaginative child makes for a highly amusing example of metafiction, while the digital art blends elegantly composed wintry backdrops with cartoonish images of the characters and various animals, with gleefully chaotic results.

Sets an American literary classic on a wonderfully wrong turn.