Reference Desk

Forrest or Hunter? Every Lisa Frank character, told apart

Key to the Lisa Frank cast: Forrest the tiger cub has stripes and Hunter the leopard cub has spots; Markie is the unicorn, Casey and Caymus the golden retrievers and Purrscilla the cat. — Stripes are Forrest and spots are Hunter, and on 6 September 2026 listings that named a character asked a $50 median against $35 for those that did not.Illustration: LinkToLooks

Lisa Frank’s animals are not generic. They are a named cast, and resale listings mislabel them constantly — which matters, because the name in a listing title is worth real money. Here is the cast, the sources for each identification, and what the market does with the difference.

The cast, and how to tell them apart

Forrest is the tiger cub — rainbow-gradient fur with stripes. Named after one of Lisa Frank’s sons.
Hunter is the leopard cub — the same rainbow gradient, but with spots. Named after her other son.
Markie is the unicorn: white body, rainbow mane, tail, hooves and horn. She lives in the clouds above the Fantastic World of Lisa Frank, on Airfluff Island. Named after a friend of Frank’s who died young.
Casey and Caymus are the golden retrievers, named after Frank’s own first dogs.
Purrscilla is the cat.

Small tin buckets filled with coloured pencils and pens lined up along a classroom table. — Photo: “School Supplies” by nick.amoscato, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr

Where the sources disagree, and which one we follow

This is worth stating plainly rather than papering over. Mental Floss’s widely-cited feature describes Hunter and Forrest together as “tiger cubs”. The Lisa Frank Wiki’s individual character pages describe Forrest as a tiger cub and Hunter as a leopard cub. We follow the split version, for one reason: it is the one that matches the artwork. Put the two cubs side by side and one is striped and one is spotted. A source that collapses them into a single species cannot explain the drawings.

If you are cataloguing a collection, catalogue on the artwork, not the article: stripes are Forrest, spots are Hunter.

What naming the character does to the price

Computed from 738 live Lisa Frank listings pulled on 6 September 2026:

Listing type	Listings	Median ask	Range
Names a character in the title	68	$50	$7 – $350
Does not name a character	670	$35	$1.99 – $450

A listing that names its character asks a median of $50; a listing that does not asks $35. That gap is not the item being better. It is the seller having done the research — which is also why the unnamed half is where under-priced pieces hide.

Median ask by character

Character	Listings	Median ask	Range
Markie	27	$75	$7 – $250
Forrest	7	$125	$9 – $181
Hunter	9	$38	$15 – $350
Casey	5	$40	$15 – $50
Caymus	2	$50	$50 – $50
Zoomer	9	$90	$20 – $275
Tikanni	12	$21.50	$9 – $67

Last verified 6 September 2026, against 738 Lisa Frank listings in the CJ product feed. Each asking price is read from the listing’s sale price where it carries one and its list price otherwise. Prices move; read them as the market on that date, not a promise. Marketplace asks of $500 or more are excluded as seller placeholders; retailer prices are used as published.

Read these medians carefully. Several characters appear in only a handful of live listings, so their medians describe what a few sellers are asking this week, not a settled market value. We have printed the listing count beside every figure so you can weigh it yourself, and we have not published a median for any character with fewer than two.

Questions collectors actually ask

Is the Lisa Frank tiger called Forrest or Hunter?

Forrest is the tiger cub. Hunter is the leopard cub. Both are rainbow-gradient; stripes versus spots is the difference.

Who is the Lisa Frank unicorn?

Markie — white, with a rainbow mane, tail, hooves and horn.

Were the Lisa Frank characters named after real people?

Yes. Hunter and Forrest are named after Lisa Frank’s sons, Casey and Caymus after her first dogs, and Markie after a friend who died young.

Sources

Lisa Frank Wiki (Fandom), character pages for Hunter, Forrest and Markie
Mental Floss, “19 Bright and Colorful Facts About Lisa Frank”
Wikipedia, Lisa Frank Incorporated
CJ Affiliate product feeds, US advertisers, queried 6 September 2026 — the listing counts and price statistics on this page are computed from that pull, not estimated