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Credit: Art work by Balint Zsako / Courtesy Enchanted Lion Books

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Many of the best such books pursue simple ideas but demand more from adults as readers, and as caregivers: collaboration, improvisation, engagement.

Balint Zsako’s recently published “Bunny & Tree” is built from primal fairy-tale stuff: a cute moppet—in this case, a rabbit—runs away from a big baddie (a wolf), becomes lost, and seeks refuge with the maple-ish Tree. Bunny, who needs to find his rabbit family and friends, and who is armed with a forceful personality and advanced tunnelling skills, uproots Tree and enlists it as the literal vehicle for his search mission. Tree curves and twists its trunk and branches into the shape of a train, then a boat, then a plane, as the duo travels across seasons, geographies, and climates. Zsako, an accomplished painter and collagist who has contributed to The New Yorker, turns every page into a stand-alone canvas; the brilliant gouache skies constantly change color, to communicate the passage of time or the flickering of a mood. And, when the quest appears to be completed, the drama is not yet done: the smaller, more vulnerable creature comes to the aid of the far bigger and mightier being, and what started as a magnificent riff on Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree” begins to evoke William Steig’s masterpiece of reciprocal altruism, “Amos & Boris.”

“Bunny & Tree” is a hundred and eighty-four pages long—almost exponentially bigger than some of its peers. It is also unusual, though hardly unique, for being essentially wordless. The characters do sometimes speak, but in a language of pictograms—images of images that, in Zsako’s hands, convey emotions more efficiently than most text. When Bunny, atop a lonely mountain at dusk or dawn, cries out for his lost fluffle, the gigantic word bubble towering above him and Tree is jagged-edged—a dynamite blast of anguish—and full of little bunny heads.

In an essay that accompanied the 2021 exhibit “Speechless: The Art of Wordless Picture Books,” at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, the children’s-book author David Wiesner laid down milestones for the genre to which “Bunny & Tree” belongs. Wiesner started with “What Whiskers Did,” by Ruth Carroll, from 1932, a joyous work of black-crayon pointillism that was, according to Wiesner, “the first completely wordless picture book published in the United States”—and, oddly, the only one for some thirty years. Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” from 1963, was a second inflection point, owing to its “three consecutive wordless double-page spreads that encompass the Wild Rumpus and that exposed millions of readers to the idea of ‘wordlessness.’ ” A third, Wiesner wrote, was Peter Spier’s “Noah’s Ark,” from 1978, the first wordless picture book to win the Caldecott Medal, the highest American honor for a children’s-book illustrator.

“Bunny & Tree” is a wordless milestone, too, for its sheer length—it’s a grandly capacious, generous book about grand and capacious generosity. And as a title from Enchanted Lion Books, the independent children’s publisher, it’s part of a rich lineage. Enchanted Lion is a champion of the wordless format, dating back to its Stories Without Words series, from a decade ago, which includes Gaëtan Dorémus’s “Bear Despair” (2012), about a bear who will eat anyone who dares to steal his lovey, and “Fox’s Garden” (2014), by Camille Garoche (working under her enviable pen name, Princesse Camcam), about a boy who finds a surprise family in his back yard. Although based in Brooklyn, Enchanted Lion happens to have a deep bench of wordless books by French illustrators—none of which, of course, require much translation—such as Blexbolex’s tapestry-like “Vacation” (2017) and Olivier Tallec’s “Waterloo & Trafalgar” (2012), about a pair of stout, obstinate sentries who are able to resolve their differences with the intervention of a budgie. Whereas the soldiers in “Waterloo & Trafalgar” are named for two sites of French defeat, my daughter used to act out extended arguments between them in an English-ish accent she apparently picked up from repeat viewings of “A Hard Day’s Night.”

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