Mo Willems

Willems came to picture books from animation, and it shows in every line he draws. He wrote for Sesame Street, created The Off-Beats, and made Sheep in the Big City for Cartoon Network, a series whose jokes were aimed squarely over the heads of the children watching it. He voices two parts in it himself.

Then he took the animator's toolkit to the page. Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! is one gag with a perfect structure: the reader is left in charge, the Pigeon negotiates directly with them, and the book only fully exists when it is read out loud. The Elephant & Piggie books strip that further, down to two characters, speech balloons and white space, with the comic timing carried entirely by page turns. Almost nothing else in early-reader publishing trusts blank paper that much.

Knuffle Bunny is the outlier and the most personal of them, setting hand-drawn characters over photographs of real city streets. Willems is one of very few children's authors whose books adults volunteer to read twice in a row, and that is an achievement of design rather than of sentiment.