Award-winning French Canadian author and illustrator Dominique Jolin has developed a successful empire based on the adventures of Toopy, a mouse with a wild imagination, and Binoo, his silent-but-game cat companion. The original stories translated from French are vividly illustrated and simply written, moving quickly from one fantastic scenario to another, thanks to Toopy’s active imagination.

The success of the spinoff animated children’s show, Toopy and Binoo, seems to have set the wheels of commercial glut in motion, however: along with reissues of translated versions of the original French stories, there now appears a second series of cartoon episode tie-ins that aren’t up to the standard of the originals.

The reissued translated titles – Super Toopy, The Lost Sleep, Little Red Toopy, Funny Halloween, Abracadabra!, and Robinson Toopy – range from simple retellings of familiar tales to uncluttered and beguiling originals based on experiences appropriate for very young kids. These board books remain excellent choices for toddlers.

Not so with the four TV tie-in books – Toopy Goes Bananas, Toopy’s Story, Sneezing Toopy, and The Big Race – where Jolin has collaborated with writer Carole Tremblay. The concrete differences between the books and the Treehouse TV show make for a dog’s breakfast on the page. The stories are choppy and meander through events with little purpose, rather like connecting the dots without the payoff of a picture. Here, Jolin neither illustrates nor really writes the stories, but interprets selected animated stills taken from the show and reconstitutes the story around them. The resulting texts try to recreate the pace of the show and in doing so sacrifice the natural pace of the stories, all of which betrays the ethos of the original books.

The TV tie-ins are strangely listed for a younger age group (12 months and up) than the originals, even though the stories are notably more complex and text-heavy, covering Toopy’s search for a banana for Binoo, an outdoor race, a bedtime story, and Toopy’s trouble with sneezes. With so few strong Canadian children’s series enjoying this level of success, it’s a bad idea to dilute the material by flooding the shelves with books such as the TV tie-ins, which are far beneath the quality that children have come to expect and love from this author.