Illustrations
Pello
Añorga: Jokin Mitxelena in
Denonarte, Pamplona, 2023

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Pello Añorga and Jokin Mitxelena have a long and fruitful career in the production of children's books in Basque. Another result of this collaboration of over 40 years is the album Pantxo zezena.

From the surface of the book we can see that Pantxo is a strong bull with long horns, but at the same time it is an animal that lives peacefully in the Pantxo farmhouse: “Swamp bull along with other animals living in the farmhouse: geese, sheep, pigs, mackerel and cows. Despite its small size, its branches were large and passed through the green grassland at ease.” But the quiet life of Pantxo changes radically when the diapers appear and put them in a truck so that in the town festivities he chases the runners. And so well Pantxo did his job, that not in a single day, but he wanted to go out every day to run in the bullring. Until Pantxo pleases.

He was forcibly forced and Pantxo fled the square, putting a banderilla on his back, until, thanks to the help of his friends, he was again free and at ease on the grassland towards the farmhouse.

I took Pantxo an air from the Ferdinando bull, a book (made between Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson) which in many countries was banned (for example in Franco’s Spain, or in Hitler’s Germany, ordered smoking) because it conveyed a message against violence; this Pantxo does not want to branch people, does not want to legitimize, wants to regain their lives, and gets tired.

Añorga offers us a short and rich text to tell (read) the story. For its part, Mitxelena, offering strong images and the greatest importance to the bull, manages to reflect the strength and message of relato.En this sense, the reader who walks into this book will have a pleasant, enjoyable or fluctuating experience of sensations and feelings, but besides all this pleasurable in texts and images and, like Pantxo, reassured with a smile at
the end.