On Thanksgiving, Amazon quietly published its contribution to the Christmas canon. The Snowy Day is an adaptation of the award-winning 1962 children’s picture book of the same name, written and illustrated by Ezra Jack Keats.
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Odds are you’ve seen the book, or had it read to you. Its cover art, with a tiny boy wearing a red coat and a pointy hat, is iconic. And the book itself is a staple of kindergarten bookshelves.
At 37 minutes long, the animated short has a meatier plot than its 16-page source material. But don’t let the book’s diminutive length short-sell its significance. In 1963, Keats won the Caldecott Medal for The Snowy Day. Critics and educators praised his book as a touchstone for racial representation in literature. Peter, the book’s protagonist, is black, though the book never mentions his race. A 2012 NPR story digs into the criticisms Keats, who was white, faced in the 1960s from civil-rights leaders who wished the book went further into Peter’s racial identity. As Deborah Pope, the executive director of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation, told NPR: “It was no longer necessary that the book say, ‘I am an African-American child going out into the snow today.’ They realized that you don’t put a color on a child’s experience of the snow.”
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