So I’ve now actually come up with my idea. I am going to keep with the anxiety and use animals to indicate this, as I think children do relate to animals especially in stories. To begin with, I thought perhaps I would use a child, but my drawing skills quickly rendered that moot. Instead, I began sketching out the idea of a mouse. Mice in general media usually indicate anxiety or terror, so I thought that this would resonate with children quite well. Then immediately from mice, my brain conjured up the idea of an elephant.

Normally, elephants are the ones scared of mice in television or cartoons. But I wanted to flip it on its head because I felt that the elephant scared of the mouse was a little cliché. So what if the mouse was the one scared of the elephant? He’d have every reason to be. So my idea has become a mouse afraid of the world, and he befriends an elephant somehow. Initially scared of the elephant, even though it is very friendly, eventually the elephant (named Eliza, perhaps) teaches the mouse that although there are scary things in the world, it’s okay if you have a friend to help take them on.

I think I quite like this idea. It addresses a serious issue, as described by the brief, but it also teaches children compassion and how to treat a friend suffering from anxiety, when it might be easy to brush them off. Also, it teaches the importance of friendship.