The Cardboard Kingdom

“The Alchemist and the Blacksmith” illustrates the ways in which unregulated competition become detrimental to consumers, and thus, Sell and his team use The Transformative Power of Play to illustrate real-world concepts in a simplified, whimsical format. Ironically, Alice and Becky both start with noble intentions; Alice wants to earn money, and Becky wants to make fun props for her friends. However, even though the two girls sell completely different products, they are thrust into unavoidable competition because there is only so much of their friends’ money—and attention—to go around. With no oversight and no one to rein them in, this environment causes them to get so caught up trying to best one another that they completely lose sight of their customers’ well-being. Their conflict and its consequences mirror the way that real-world markets often end up malfunctioning. As the girls’ escalating conflict illustrates, whenever resources are limited and competition is fierce, businesses can be forced into taking harmful shortcuts to survive, ultimately detracting from the customers’ goodwill. When the girls join forces to reverse the problem, Sell and his team emphasize the superiority of collaboration over competition, especially when it comes to creating an atmosphere focused on The Celebration of Diversity.

This chapter also provides examples of powerful visual storytelling techniques designed to convey subtler nuances that the dialogue cannot encompass. For example, while Alice remains calm and collected, the background color of her panels is usually a shade of green, blue, or yellow—colors that evoke a sense of calm and reflect her tranquil mood. By contrast, her angry moments are highlighted by an increasingly red background color that emphasizes the approach of her own metaphorical “boiling point” (57-58). Later in the chapter, when Alice and Becky are consumed by their competition, Sell alternates between panels to show Alice’s potions stand in opposition to Becky’s blacksmith shop, emphasizing the fact that the girls are stuck in a cycle of one-upmanship and are more interested in responding to each other than in meeting their customers’ needs (60). Thus, the corresponding artwork of each panel is designed to mirror the emotional tone and contextual aspects of the storyline.

“The Prince” is the first chapter that is not focused on the titular character. While Nate (the Prince) features in the chapter, it is more focused on Miguel’s attempts to navigate his complicated feelings about Nate. Miguel is clearly smitten by the prince in the movie he is watching at the beginning of the chapter and daydreams about him after the fact. However, his feelings are not straightforward, and when he thinks of a line that the princess says about the prince—that the prince is “[h]ilarious and handsome” (72)—he trails off at the word “handsome” and looks concerned. His uncertainty resurfaces later when he and his friends reenact the movie, and he gets to play the role of the princess. It’s an opportunity to experience the thing he has been daydreaming about, but when it comes time for him to be rescued, Miguel feels incredibly uncomfortable and breaks from his role. While his exact thoughts and feelings in the moment are left ambiguous, the text implies that he is embarrassed by his feelings for Nate and is not yet ready to process them. Additionally, it is clear that the role he is playing does not encapsulate his desires; he likes the prince but doesn’t want to be rescued or to take on the role of a princess.

Through this largely unspoken tension, “The Prince” also explores how media influence children’s understanding of the world and the roles available to them, for better or for worse. Part of Miguel’s confusion stems from the fact that he feels something for the prince (or the idea of the prince) but doesn’t want to be a princess; however, this is not an option presented by the movie, so when his friends reenact it, there is no role that satisfies his nascent desires. It is not until they break free of the movie and Miguel creates his own role—the prince’s dashing sidekick, the Rogue—that he is finally happy. The importance of moving beyond the bounds of media influence is underscored by the final image of the chapter, which shows Miguel covering the movie posters on his wall with drawings of him as the Rogue, playing with Nate as the Prince (83). Ultimately, regardless of how his feelings about Nate develop, his happiness stems from the fact that he has finally been able to create an authentic role for himself, rather than trying to conform to a stereotypical role presented in the movies.