THE PRINCESS AND THE PEA

If anyone can make kids see the tongue-in-cheek satire in Andersen's oft-maligned fable it is probably Paul Galdone, whose 1978 version pointed up the characters' personalities and the foolishness of their pretentions. Stevens' klutzy crayola-colored pictures simply make all the developments blatantly obvious, and the characters--cast here as overweight animals--vulgar and tawdry. The retelling, too, is so flat that Stevens herself seems bored by the undertaking.