It was summer at the beach when Viola made a new friend, Giulia. The two girls splashed in the water and played along the shore for days while their mothers chatted in deck chairs under an umbrella. One afternoon—slipping unnoticed up to the beach umbrella to grab her green bucket—Viola overheard her mother telling the other woman something troubling. A sad and dangerous trend had spread from Britain: some parents were putting their disabled children through cosmetic surgery to hide their disability. Viola had already come to understand this much: though disabled children ought to receive extra care (don't we all show more affection to the kitten who lags behind?), they face far more violence and abuse. They are rejected, insulted, hidden away.
Viola has already decided how she'll help her classmates in her own way. Through an animated series—because people who don't know how to see must be taught to look.
Her favorite characters are Roxy the Rabbit, a sassy rabbit in a wheelchair (complete with wide eyes and a lilac bow dotted with white spots), and Peg the Hedgehog, an elderly porcupine with a perfect British accent (tartan and teacup included) who bristles at the way people assume that sitting in a wheelchair means your brain is broken too. Then there's Flash the Sausage Dog (a dachshund whose back legs are a wheeled cart), Tim the Tortoise (missing one leg, getting around on crutches), and Callum the Chameleon, a blind chameleon guided by a ladybug on a leash. These are just some of the characters in the cheerful, disabled, and fiercely determined cast of Creatures Discomforts, a British animated series named after the wildly popular 1990s cartoon Creature Comforts, which was set in a zoo. These cartoons are a clever, never heavy-handed protest, crafted with care and precision. They simply show young viewers that disability is not something else, not something different—it's a natural part of life.
I'll show them to my classmates, Viola thinks, smiling—maybe during English lessons. It's a shame we never got to see the parents of the children who had surgery, she adds quietly to herself. Mimosa will definitely love them!
Giulia Galeotti, 2013