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.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

            Experimentation in children’s media generally is about process as much as product — in the examples we watched in class, it was Winsor McCay or Walt Disney’s breakdown of their medium that allowed a child viewer to further engage with the work. Pulling back the curtain, as it were, was an important part of the ultimate work, and that trend seems to exist in nascent mediums like animation and film, particularly in their earliest days when there were not codes and concrete languages of understanding.

            So how does one experiment in a novel for children? The written text has existed for thousands of years, and the aforementioned codes are pretty locked down. More than any other medium, children understand how books are supposed to work, which is why something like The Book with No Pictures seems so transcendent. But Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is similarly transcendent simply because of its subject matter and not necessarily its form. In those terms, Charlie is relatively straightforward, telling a narrative about a boy actualizing himself and becoming a sort of hero. The experimentation here happens in Dahl’s audacity. Where most children’s stories worship the child and the young imagination, Dahl seems to repel it, and makes definitive statements about what makes for good and bad children.

            It is the presence of bad children that makes Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Veruca Salt, Augustus Gloop, Violet Beauregard, and Mike Teavee are villains of the highest degree, repulsive creatures that the author labels as such. But the novel idea at play is that these are children, and perhaps children that the reader may recognize from their playground or school. A child is accustomed to morality tales that treat badness in the abstract, as wolves in the woods or evil witches. Charlie offers them the opportunity to see themselves as the bad children, a novel idea that borders on revolutionary.

            Dahl would later go on to romanticize naughty children in works like Matilda, but in Charlie he is deeply concerned with punishing bad kids. Perhaps there is a distinction between the exploratory naughtiness of Matilda Wormwood and the straight-up evil of a Veruca Salt, but that’s less the point. It’s telling that Dahl wrote drafts involving upwards of 20 bad children — there was no shortage of bad habits or trends to criticize. As remarkable as it is, Charlie is an angry, rotten book, furious at the bad children and the parents who make them so; its beauty and specialness come from its ability for the child reader to see themselves within it.

The Wind Rises

The nature of documentation changes dramatically when discussing works intending for or including an audience of children. The rules of documentary do not necessarily apply when involving children, as we explored during our unit on inquiry. There is a malleability to reality that a young viewer can latch onto even when an older person cannot. The works of Hayao Miyazaki all explore a sort of magic in their worlds, but most are grounded in a sort of documentation of a young person’s experiences. The same is not necessarily true of his final film, The Wind Rises (2013), a historical story about Jiro Horikoshi, a Japanese engineer who helped design the fighter planes which would be used in World War II.

            This story does not immediately seem applicable or relevant to an audience of children, as it is an impressionistic look at prewar Japan that romanticizes the era, not to mention a movie that emphasizes romance in its characters. But Miyazaki’s childlike voice still comes through in his fetishization of flight — during scenes of Jiro’s childhood, Miyazaki frames airplanes as a literal childhood dream, something imagined as fantasy. This is not simply because of the early 1900s setting, when flight was only available to a select few, but also because it reflects the experience even modern children have with airplanes. A child does not inherently understand that flight is a possibility — they learn to crawl, stand, and walk, but to fly is something outside of their understanding. The magical mystery of simply soaring in the air is tantamount to finding a forest of magical creatures or climbing aboard a moving castle.

            In fact, Miyazaki explored that same kind of childhood adrenaline rush in Kiki’s Delivery Service. But The Wind Rises aspires to be more of a document than that movie; it never hides its nature as a biopic of sorts, aiming not to tell a small fantastical story but rather a grand story about the decline of an empire (through the lens of one man). This seems more inaccessible for a child than Miyazaki’s other films, but he makes more efforts to engage childlike ideas than simply depicting things that kids think are cool. The best example of this is the sound design of the movie — rather than use authentic engine and propeller noises, every sound coming from an airplane is manmade. The onomatopoeia includes “brrrrrrroooms,” p-p-p-p-p-p-ts” and “whoooooooshes,” and it is never treated as an aberration from reality. It is reality, a document of which filters the events through a perspective and mode that children can not only understand, but also engage with and feel on a profound level.