Brave

The most telling thing that came from our discussion of family media was said in an almost off-handed way. I recognized how important the statement was, but it seemed to glance off of everyone in the moment. The moment I’m referring to is when Benjamin said that the scariest eventuality in his life is the day when one of his boys says that they hate him – or even worse, the day when he realizes they no longer need him. That’s a terrifying prospect for any parent or potential parent; after class I spent a lot of time thinking about how often I call my parents (I watched Tokyo Story and THAT DIDN’T HELP EITHER) and how impossible it is for a child to get out of her own head for a second.
That’s what’s so great about Brave. First, it gives us a super-badass girl protagonist who is extremely good at the things she does. Merida’s archery skill isn’t just perfunctory (remember that this movie came out the same summer as The Hunger Games), it’s a vital part of who she is and her connection to her family’s past. Beyond her general badassery, Merida perfectly encapsulates the unintended selfishness of being a child. She certainly understands deep within her that Elinor cares about her and means well, but in the fog of adolescence she cannot comprehend why her mother would disagree with her. The argument that sets off Merida’s flight into the woods, ultimately leading to a witch and a cake and a bear and a movie, is the sort of perfunctory one that we (and every other person) have had with our parents on countless occasions – but Brave understands that in the moment, those minor arguments are cataclysmic events that shake the foundation of everything we know and understand.
Being a teenager is hard, and that difficulty comes for both kids and their parents. For the adults, it’s tough to see the people their children are becoming, and wondering how it’ll all turn out. But for kids, becoming a teenager means questioning boundaries and feeling the grown-up world out, and part of that experience involves realizing truths about parents. It’s perfectly natural for kids to feel betrayed or misjudged by their parents, because that period of life is intrinsically about both parties learning how to understand each other.
Brave works this principle in a massive way, making Elinor and Merida into different species to further establish the difference between them. For the two to come together, they have to surmount far more than just a tiff, or even just a language barrier. Even with those difficulties, the movie positions that there are primordial family bonds that transcend these differences and allow connections to be made. This movie doesn’t simply end with Merida and Elinor making up and Merida leaving the figurative nest – it concludes with the two basically being best buds! That’s an extremely cool sentiment for a movie ostensibly about growing up, especially in the fairy tale vein. The story doesn’t have to end with a cathartic moment of moving on; rather, it can turn out to be a story about how we return to those we love as parents and children (FAMILIES) having changed for the better.

Life of Pi

            At face value, the most novel aspect of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is how seriously it considers the religious yearnings and questions of a child. Pi Patel is a young boy (I guess we’d consider him a teenager), but the novel never trivializes his search for answers or reduces it to childlike wondering. Rather, the book treats his relative innocence as a virtue when he seeks to find a true church. I’m reminded of a conversation I had in a documentary class, after we viewed a piece of church missionary propaganda from the 1980s named Called to Serve. The movie was pretty sentimental and imbalanced in its discussion of religion, but what else is expected from a primary source? A fellow student mentioned that church videos ought to be sentimental and heavy-handed, because they’re meant to “string kids along until they can find a testimony of their own.”

            That notion troubles me in a profound way. First, I think that children are completely able to rationalize belief and find understanding – our church even agrees, in considering the age of accountability eight years old. Regardless of whether that’s exactly the right age for a child to make lifelong commitments, it seems prudent to assume that children are capable of great understanding. That’s maybe the primary, number one thing we’ve learned this semester, but it seems like Life of Pi is the rare text about religion that takes this idea seriously.

Pi is also a story that rejects dogma in its ideas of religious truth. In that sense, it is a far more spiritual text than a religious one. It values the traditions of Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity on an equal level. There is not a single truth, but rather many relative truths that give humans access to some kind of ultimate power. The means by which we access that higher truth matters significantly less than our willingness to accept it. Life of Pi’s idea of spirituality sort of rests upon Pascal’s Wager, implying that faith alone is worth as much as knowledge.

That premise is tested in the final pages of the novel, when Pi tells the Japanese officials the alternative to his animal story – the one full of human tragedy and nightmare stuff. When the officials say that they prefer the story with the tiger and zebra and orangutan, Pi’s line “And so it goes with God” wraps the entire universe up with a bow.

(sidenote: for all the cool things about Ang Lee’s movie adaptation, his Pi totally blows this moment. The character in the film never seems sincere in his explanation of the two stories. It almost plays as “come on, please believe the animal one, it’s nicer” rather than an actual test of faith).

Much like Babe: Pig in the City’s assumptions about the world and people, Life of Pi doesn’t operate in the realm of right and wrong dictated by doctrine and ancient dogma. Rather, the two advocate for decency, morality, and charity, all without pretense. Both acknowledge the existence of a god in their stories, but both put faith in people to rise up and meet the expectations of that higher power. In the eyes of a child, words like historicity and proof don’t mean nearly anything – these stories teach us that the true value lies in belief; in faith.

Family: I Wish

Hirokazu Koreeda's I Wish is a major motion picture with a budget and a relatively big cast, but it isn't dissimilar to the family home videos that we watched in class this week. In fact, it's startling how clearly Koreeda understands familial interactions and the bonds that shape them. There's an effortless nature to the way his actors respond to each other, and the mundane slice-of-lifeiness dominates the movie, even when it threatens to turn into an adventure.

As we watched home movies in class, the thing that stood out most was how comfortable the people behind and in front of the camera are with each other. We open up as both subjects and filmmakers when we share a close bond with whoever is on the other end. That’s exactly why our faculty so often reiterates that our home movies may be the most important work we ever produce. There’s an intimacy that is difficult to replicate in any other medium, and it’s something that we can’t fabricate — it’s part of our most basic nature.

There’s a particular shot in I Wish that erupts with this sort of intimacy. In a flashback to Koichi and Ryu’s lives before their parents’ divorce, the family sits around a dinner table when their father mentions leaving his job. Their mother responds harshly and both parents begin to yell at each other. The camera remains at a distance, and Koichi tries to intervene as his parents overturn the dinner table. But the younger Ryu runs into the foreground and covers his ears, trying to escape to no avail. He’s trapped in the frame, just as he’s trapped in the house, but the camera affords the opportunity to stare deep into his eyes as he edges towards sobbing. This scene understands the particular way we are trapped by our families, for better or worse, and represents the entire film in a microcosm.

Even in moments that aren’t as fierce as the aforementioned example, the profound connections between the characters is visible. When Koichi and Ryu call each other on the phone, there’s a casualness to the conversation that makes it seem like two kids talking over a great distance. There’s no pretense or push to have narrative tension — it’s simply them living their lives. The factor that brings it together is the implicit love on display, the same that we saw in our own home movies. It’s something difficult to quantify, which makes this a particularly abstract bit of writing, but it’s easy to make family relationships seem forced or insincere, and Koreeda’s film is so close to a natural dynamic that it seems more documentary than fictional film.

Critique: Nausicaa

            The crux of our discussion about critique is the notion that every previous category has involved some aspect of politicization. No media, whether it be for children or not, is infused with some kind of worldview, most obviously that of the creator. We looked into these political readings as early as our conversations on morality, when we looked into the allegorical nature of fairy and folk tales. Those stories were created with the conservative, likely-Christian values of the 16^th to 18^th centuries. Media is defined by its times, and as we saw in much of our viewing last week, the art created for children of the late 20^th century often had a decidedly environmental agenda.

            So when comparing Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind to something like Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, it’s important to investigate the respective motivations and ascertain meaning through tone and messaging. As we saw in class, Ferngully aspires to be a big animated musical, about the struggle between good and evil as depicted with fairies and a toxic sludge monster. We discussed the difficulty a child might have relating to a toxic sludge monster, given that there is no real-world analogue to the Tim Curry-voiced creature. In Nausicaa, the title character is not a fairy, or someone shrunk down to a tiny size, but rather a normal girl in a post-apocalyptic situation. She has a preternatural connection to the environment around her, and as a result is able to bond with the otherized Ohms. Rather than exploiting difference in a binary of good and evil like Ferngully, Nausicaa approaches its conflict from a position of empathy, and its politics are planted in finding common ground rather than defeating opposition.

            In a way, the best comparison for Nausicaa is the English version that was released in 1985 called Warriors of the Wind. The English movie positions that the world has been in a brutal war between people and the Ohmu for thousands of years, and turns the empathetic story into one of battle and conquest. On the VHS box art, Nausicaa herself is even relegated to the background in favor of a trio of warriors (who aren’t even in the movie).

 This more aggressive story is more endemic to the battle cartoons of the 1980s, but it does not reflect the humanity of Miyazaki’s work. When looking at Miyazaki’s oeuvre, his environmental themes are prevalent, yes, but more important is the focus on understanding and empathy. As our class discussion indicates, the politics of a work will always be present, but can shift greatly depending on a creator’s views. The differences between Ferngully and Nausicaa (and especially between the latter and its English dub) are proof that a compassionate messenger and method are paramount to making decent, humane art for children.

Fanfiction

I have always had some difficulty in engaging with fan fiction. My troubles are most likely a result of the social constructs created around what we qualify as legitimate and illegitimate creative material. I often dismiss fan fiction and fan art as a fruitless endeavor and perhaps even a masturbatory one, in that these works only further entrench writers and creators within their own communities, with little chance of breaking out beyond that niche.

This is the curse of our mass-culture perception. In my narrow view of creativity, there is an important dividing line between someone on a Harry Potter fanfic page and Neil Gaiman doing a run on a Batman comic — Gaiman is paid for his work and sanctioned by the IP owners, while someone on fan fiction.net is simply writing for her own satisfaction and for the good of the community. There's nothing inherently right or wrong about either method, but we have constructed the belief that if we pay for something, and it is officially published, it is therefore more valuable than something created independently.

There is no intrinsic value to being "licensed" or "canon." Within the context of our class, it is easy to find the justifications for fan culture and the art and writing that follows. Benjamin introduced me to the idea that fan labor is not dissimilar to standard playground role play, and children inserting themselves into familiar fictional worlds. The value of fan creation comes in finding new perspectives in established universes — for example, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the Triwizard Tournament reveals that there are wizarding schools around the world, making the world of Harry Potter potentially a great deal bigger than the Anglo-centric view of the first three novels. This knowledge opens up the series to expansion from fans who can find themselves better represented in Harry Potter’s world by creating their own space.

While reading a number of HP fan fictions this week, I was startled to see that some total nearly 200,000 words, a length greater than all but Order of the Phoenix. That number is staggering to me, and I wondered why the author would “waste her time” doing such a work. But that’s me coming from the wrong side of the issue. The question isn’t about the value of her time being spent, it’s about why we don’t value work done in established fictional worlds by writers. It’s apparent that exploring familiar characters and settings helps young creatives flex their muscles and learn their craft without having to stretch too far — so why do we stigmatize the same process when it comes to adults? Quality work is quality work, and the truth is that the fan fiction I read was actually pretty compelling. Reimagining the Harry Potter series through, say, Hermione’s perspective opens those books up in a way I’d only ever briefly considered, and fan fiction allows any number of possibilities for creative exploration.

(So I’m still not really sure about fan fiction, but I’m now more certain that I’m part of the problem by constantly joking about it. Then again, I avoided any Harry Potter erotica for this assignment, so maybe there are still jokes out there.)

Play and Disney Infinity

On paper, Disney Infinity nails a lot of the ideas we discussed last week. It is a literal manifestation of the malleability in children’s play, with canons and universes mattering less than the toys that are available.  A kid will mash up Batman and Spider-Man with abandon — the bounds of the DC and Marvel universes mean nothing to her, and The Lego Movie is proof of as much. Infinity allows a kid to throw any idea into a sandbox toybox, which ought to create an infinite sense of play.

But there’s something problematic about the way Infinity operates in practice, both as a video game and as an expansion of playroom exploration. A group of 20 year-olds struggled pretty mightily to navigate the menu system and get into the game. I was able to manage the game’s world solely because I have experience with the cues of video game level design, particularly that of first-person shooters, the HUDs of which Infinity cribs liberally. That’s a problem, though – my knowledge of adult games should not make me more intuitive towards a child’s game. We were directed to an extensive tutorial repeatedly (by Benjamin, not the game), which begs me to ask whether the game is articulate enough in explaining itself.

A game ought to make clear its rules and structures as succinctly and unobtrusively as possible. I think of Super Mario Bros. and the manner in which it teaches players. The YouTube series Extra Credits made an excellent video explaining Mario’s first level and the way it carefully designs an experience that teaches a player all she needs to know through the environment. Infinity’s dialogue-and-text-box heavy aesthetic nerf the player’s ability to figure these concepts out on her own, and in effect pull exploration, or even much feeling, out of her experience.

Moreover, as a kid begins to explore the toybox mode in Infinity, she will shortly discover that she can reach the boundaries of what the game can offer. She will have exhausted all the tools and will be left with the box she has created. In one way, this is not dissimilar to the way Legos or other constructible toys operate — one can only build with the tools available, and must compensate for those gaps with imagination. However, I think there’s a small but important difference between the physical and digital spaces in this regard. Where Legos are tactile, present creations that force a kid to inject shape and meaning, a video game operates like a movie: it is on the screen, and it has been created in front of the player, o naturally it must be at least a facsimile of real.

It is much more difficult to use imagination when the objects are literally created for a player. Minecraft gets away with this because it functions almost exclusively as a tool for construction and building — and the tools allow for a child to create things that resemble her reality. Infinity is neither flexible enough to operate in that manner, nor rigid enough to tell a traditional narrative-based story. Infinity limits the player and forces her to subscribe to its mode of play, with its visible boundaries and rules. By its sheer nature as a video game, the constructs already exist and are much more difficult to break down in an imaginative way, like we saw with board games. As it stands, Infinity functions as an uncomfortable middle ground where children are able to input their imaginations to a very small extent, but are unable to engage and play in a meaningful, productive way.