INDONESIA: Kancil dan Raja Hutan (The Mouse Deer and the King of the Jungle)

To kick start our Around the World in Picture Books project, we have selected seven picture books from Indonesia.

​We will feature all the books in the next few days but today, our first book is a popular folktale, both in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Kancil dan Raja Hutan (The Mouse Deer and the King of the Jungle) is a bilingual book, ie, in Indonesian and English. This is a beautiful, luxurious, hardcover book with outstanding illustrations. It is often difficult to produce bilingual picture books as it affects the design of the page and each page becomes crowded. But the text in this book is well laid-out with lots of white space.

Retold by Suyardi, a well-known Indonesian writer, illustrator, painter, animator, cartoonist, story-teller and puppet film maker, the familiar folktale still manages to capture the attention and imagination of readers. 

In addition, the illustrations by Denny A. Djoenaid, are so alive that the animals seem to jump out of the pages. The illustrator used artistic licence and added many different types of animals including a kangaroo and a zebra. An award-winning illustrator, Denny is also an animator for films.

Here's the story: The animals in the jungle were in terror because there was a fierce tiger who was hunting them for food. In despair, they asked Kancil to save them. Using his wits, Kancil went to see the tiger and told him there was another fierce tiger in the jungle who also wanted to eat the other animals. Tiger was so furious he asked to be taken to see the other tiger. Kancil took tiger to a deep well and seeing his reflection, tiger jumped in to attack what he thought was the other tiger. And that was how Kancil saved the animals in the jungle. 
 
Here are some illustrations from the book:

This book is published by Grasindo, PT Gramedia Widiasarana Indonesia.

​Remember, as part of our Around the World in Picture Books project, this book will be added to the lucky draw for our online customers in the month of January. You could be the lucky winner!

Related stories:
INDONESIA: Misteri di Pasar Terapung (Mystery at the Floating Market)