I'm pretty sure the Babar book series was one of the earliest, if not the earliest, exposures I had to the concept of a series of books, each with different stories set in the same world featuring the same cast of characters. And yes, the elephant king in the room about these books is that once you have knoweldge of France's historical colonization of African nations, you cannot unsee the influence on these stories. That said, I'd not classify the books as "propaganda", as the world of Babar where fully sapient, talking elephants can be taken in as pets by an old French lady, be domesticated, dress in human clothes and become anthropomorphic and then bring that back to the wild so that all the other animals follow suit and become a human-like society, is still distinctly enough its own weird thing for children to get into so that the colonialism background just stays as an influence on the lore of the works rather than The Whole Point.
Babar The King was the title of what was my favorite book in the series, and it was probably my favorite because it had no story. Yeah, it has a premise - Babar establishing "Celesteville" where the anthro animal society he and his family rules over can flourish - but beyond that, there's no coherent narrative to it: things just keep happening. And the way what little story we have reaches its "climax" in, I shit you not, an in-universe fever dream that is so off-tone with the rest of the series, so out of nowhere, and so strange in how it comes and goes that it's stuck with me for ages. It's so bananas and I love it.
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