Albert the Bear (AKA Albert Le Blanc)

This is kind of a weird book. It's almost like what The Pout-Pout Fish would be if it didn't have a message and wasn't bad. It's not an especially good book, it's just weird.

There's a bunch of toys, and then a new toy comes. The new toy, a bear, looks super sad, so all the other toys are like, "Well, we have to cheer him up! How do we cheer him up?" And they decide to put on a show for him. And the bear keeps introducing himself and starts explaining something, but never gets the chance to explain it. Everybody does weird things in the show, and then eventually a hippopotamus crashes into him, and he says, "Hey! You know what, I'm not unhappy! I'm not sad! It's just the way I am! I just look like I'm sad, but I'm not!" And then everybody's like, "Not any more," because the hippopotamus accidentally kissed him, and he has a lipstick mark all over his face which makes him look like he's smiling, and so everybody laughs. And that's how it ends.

So it's not bad. It's not great. As I said, it kind of reminds me of what The Pout-Pout Fish could be if that wasn't a bad book. Instead of just complaining to the bear that he looks sad, they actually try to cheer him up. They could have talked to him first, and he would have explained that he wasn't sad, and they wouldn't have needed to go through all the trouble, but they're clearly all well-meaning about it. They're trying to make him feel better, even though he doesn't feel bad to begin with. The Pout-Pout Fish always confused me with whether he was really supposed to be sad or not anyway.