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Robot Dog Mark Oliver

Decent Essays

The children’s picture book ‘Robot Dog’, by Mark Oliver, explores the idea of physical difference through the image of a defective robot dog. While the robot dog is being manuyfactured, it is physically damaged, and it is rejected for not being perfect like the others. He ends up with a group of other ‘defected’ robot dogs, and this group accepts it and they are happy together, and thourhg this tsory the author challenges the idea of how physical differences are perceived.
On the front and back inside covers of this book there are pages which show a blueprint for the design of the robot dog. This represents how there is an idea of how we should look physically, how we are expected to conform to what society sees as normal, or risk having our differences labelled in a negative connotation. The authors simplistic use of colour on these pages highlight how simple , how black-and-white the standards are, how there is a barrier between who is seen as physically ‘normal’ or ‘different’. In this context we see that the idea of having physical differences is considered as negative, but it is only the …show more content…

Alhthough, tthere is another scene in the book which hilghigts how there is a line between what is perceived as normal and different. The defective dogs are playing in the messy junkyard which the author has portrayed using dry, light colours, while the ‘normal, perfect’, dogs are on the other side of a fence on a clean, green grassy setting, highlighting how attaching negative connotations to the idea of physical differences leads to people trying to achieve acceptance through conformity. There is one of the perfect dogs which is in between the two settings, and the author has included this image in his illustration to challenge our perspective of what we consider as

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