This is a flying whale, from Respighi's "The Pines of Rome" sequence in "Fantasia 2000".
My daughter had the original request for a whale, I came up with the idea of making him fly up out of clouds. Originally the base would have been "water", but everybody knows that whales don't jump entirely out of the water.
The whale itself is hand carved from balsa, based on pictures downloaded from the web. We started out by cutting the basic profile and top view into the balsa with a coping saw, and finished rounding the body with a potato peeler. (This allowed my 8-year-old daughter to do the work without any danger to herself, or risk of large unfixable mistakes.) The fins and tail are from some 1/8" mahogany doorskin plywood scraps I had laying around.
After some Elmer's-and-water sanding sealer and spray painting the whole thing in white, we overpainted the whale with a little sponge, dabbing the paint on to produce the texture.
The base with the axles and wheels is the only part left of the original pine block. Since the whale is balsa, it's incredibly light, so I had to put a lot of lead on the bottom. Surprisingly, we did rather well in the race (possibly because all the weight was below the axle line?), until one of the lead pieces fell off, unnoticed until I got the car home. Ripped off!
Anyway, it won us another Creative Design award, and that's what we were hoping for. (She's got a funny look on her face because she's trying to hide the huge wad of gum she's not supposed to have in her mouth.)