Philip and the Missing Stripes

Philip and the Missing Stripes is a cute heartwarming tale of Philip the Zebra who 'loses' his stripes and sets out on an adventure to find a 'cure'. Along the way he forges greater friendships with Linus the Llama, Hugo the Hippo and Hannah the Horse. After spending an evening playing in the mud in the pig pen with his new friends, he awakes the next morning looking brown like a horse. He elicits the help of his new friends and Philip tries eating pasture grass with Linus, lily pads with Hugo and racetrack hay with Hannah, but still has no stripes and looks, frankly, like a horse. The friends then on the suggestion of Hannah, venture deep into the forest to seek advice from the mysterious Wise Owl. The Owl suggests a long swim to an isolated island which is home to a rare blue flower. Philip is skeptical but goes anyway. When Philip returns from the island he finds that he is 'cured' and his friends celebrate. However, the friends are uncertain about how the flower helped Philip. The Wise Owl reveals the fact that the flower did not really do anything to help return Philip’s stripes, but instead the swim to the island acted as a bath and washed off a coating of mud, revealing the stripes that were never really gone... Philip remembers that he had played in the mud at Peggy the Pig’s Pen and then gone straight to bed, essentially becoming covered in mud to the point of looking like a horse. When the mystery is finally solved, Philip and his friends come to realize that sometimes solutions to problems can be simpler than they first seem, and Philip learns that true friends will stick with you- 'stripes or no stripes'.