Real-Life Superheroes

SOME THOUGHTS ON REINVENTING YOURSELF AS A MARKETABLE ICON

The phenomenon of ‘real life superheroes’ is interesting on several levels for several reasons. We could talk about the psychology of such people and why they would want to put themselves in such high risk situations? Is it the thrill of danger? A death wish? A genuine inability to see the real world as more dangerous than the fictional worlds of comics and movies? Or we could talk about the sociological conditions that have led to these groups of people springing up now. Is it some increased juvenilesation of culture that leads to grown adults playing children’s games out in the streets of major cities? Why now and not in the middle of the seventies? What differentiates these ‘real life superheroes’ from standard vigilantes or neighbourhood watch groups? They don’t actually, after all, really have superpowers.

But rather than pursuing these kinds of cultural questions I want to look at the element of this phenomenon that most strongly resonates with my personal interests, and also speaks to something quite fundamental to the phenomenon: the decision of ordinary people to do good deeds as someone else. The fascination for me is how these people – who I actually have the utmost respect for in terms of their altruistic intentions – feel compelled to reinvent themselves as marketable icons, as distinct entities that can be differentiated from other ‘products on the shelf’ thanks to a specific look, gimmick and name.

A 'marketable icon' is a pretty vague category. I don’t mean it to be taken literally, as something designed to be tied to particular advertising strategies, but rather that it is some kind of individuated entity, distinct from all others through a particular set of visual, and sometimes conceptual, codings which are – it must be said – usually enforced by copyright laws. Mickey Mouse is clearly a marketable icon. But so too are the Universal Studio Monsters, though as characters Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster are in the public domain and exist in numerous instances, it is their 1930s and 40s incarnations that remain the marketable icon. Would Kenneth Branagh’s take on the monster really have made a particularly good action figure?

This question is actually quite important, because the benefit of a marketable icon is that it can exist in a variety of media; movies, toys, posters, t-shirts, video games, collectible cards, etc. We can probably all recognise Robert DeNiro as a distinct individual, but he’s not a marketable icon in that he cannot be successfully translated into other media in the way that Frankenstein’s monster can. The simpler the figure, the more easily translatable to different contexts it is. Cartoon characters, monsters and superheroes are the most common kind of marketable icons that we come across in our day to day lives, not least of all because the genres that these types turn up in naturally lend themselves to extending into franchises of various kinds. Few superheroes only exist in one single issue of a comic.

Ownership of a marketable icon is also important. Icons are designed to be easily read as belonging to a particular company or group. Mickey Mouse does not endorse Warner Brothers products; Spider-Man is not going to convince you to eat Kellogg’s Frosties. DC and Marvel are the two biggest owners of marketable iconic superheroes, indeed, they each make sure to spread their characters across as many mediums as possible at any given time. Whatever variations Spider-Man might take across films, cartoons, video games or action figures, he is still recognisably the same icon that appears in the original comic.

The common academic cliché surrounding superheroes is that they are the myths of today, the equivalent of Hercules’ adventures or the saga of Odysseus. This is perfectly acceptable as an explanation, that superheroes feed a basic need that we have and have had since our earliest ancestors started telling each other stories. We like to invent people who are more than human so that we can aspire to be them. But Hercules wasn’t owned by a corporation. If an ancient Greek pre-school put on a play of The Odyssey, they weren’t going to get sued by the estate of Homer. The ownership issue surrounding superheroes is precisely what defines them from previous generations of heroes. We like to think that superheroes belong to us all, but they don’t, they belong to Time-Warner and Disney.

In the HBO documentary Superheroes (sometimes known as Real-Life Superheroes), we are shown the lives of a selection of would-be heroes who don costumes each night and set out into the city streets to fight evil doers. Of course, the majority of these are slightly overweight well meaning middle-aged men who are just comic book geeks living out their dreams. The documentary draws attention to the fandom of these men (and women occasionally) in a few ways. Self-proclaimed superhero Mr. Xtreme spends his days watching episodes of Power Rangers on TV. We are given the opinions of comics legend Stan Lee on the phenomenon of real-life superheroes (he’s a little concerned, obviously). During the interviews with Lee, Mr. Xtreme and another hero, Master Legend, the camera pans across posters and action figures of various Marvel superheroes. All of these associations seem perfectly harmless, even commonsensical, until one realises that HBO is owned by Time-Warner, who also own DC comics. The references to DC heroes are surprisingly sparse. Practically non-existent, in fact. The documentary functions as reverse-propaganda; Time-Warner tells us that the phenomenon is the responsibility of Marvel – DC comics don’t inspire such nutty behaviour, blame Disney (who also owned Power Rangers when the documentary was filmed).

This continues through what is not said by the documentary. Several of the heroes during the documentary cite the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese as a prime reason for their actions; the kind of apathy that led to her death, when there were dozens of people who could have helped her, is exactly what they’re fighting against. It seems highly unlikely that any of these people knew about this 1964 event through any means other than Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen. In that work, the somewhat imbalanced but highly morally indignant vigilante Rorschach is inspired to become an ultra-violent crime-fighter because of the Genovese murder. Though the heroes of the documentary claim to be inspired by the real life event, they are actually replicating Rorschach’s actions, recasting themselves as the character. Their inspiration for becoming real life vigilantes is not a 1964 stabbing, but a seminal comic published by DC and owned by Time-Warner.

So why reinvent yourself as Rorschach? Why decide to put on a mask, kit yourself out with a variety of home-made gadgets, call yourself an odd name and fight the good fight? Why not simply do good as yourself? It seems to me that there are two answers. Firstly, there’s the desire to transcend the boundaries of your own identity and become the heroic figures of myth, to stop being Joe Nobody and become Hercules. These actions of vigilantism and charity are not about ego (well… mostly), or about making sure that your neighbours know all about the good deeds that you do. They are about the actions themselves, doing good for good’s sake and separating it from an individual person. But there’s also a more culturally specific reasoning behind it. As has already been said, nearly all of the known superheroes are owned by major corporations. The people don’t really own these heroes, the money-men do. But by becoming the next generation of heroes, equally distinct, equally iconic, equally ‘marketable’ (not literally, but I’d be happy to own a Black Monday Society action figure set), but not owned by any of the major corporate power brokers that dictate the majority of our day to day lives. Becoming your own marketable icon allows you to distinguish yourself from the rest of society, to be an individual in the crowd, to become that transcendent icon that Spider-Man is without having to put money into Sony Pictures’ pocket.

There is a third reason, of course, one voiced by another of the documentary’s subjects: “It’s hella cool!”

                                                                     - P.S.

Depiction and Fiction: An Epilogue

As an afterthought to that post, I thought I would quickly add one more example in the form of the ‘Dreamland’ amusement park – a fictional fairground that exists within the world of Satoshi Kon’s Paprika. It was one year ago today that I first posted on the subject of Depiction and Fiction in relation to this film, as a tribute to mark the death of Kon. He has now been gone for four years and as such I find this particular moment all the more pertinent.

The story of Paprika is about a machine that allows one to enter into another person’s dreams, and so we can read the name of the park ‘Dreamland’ as a play on this. Like the rides of Pooch Island, what we have here is a fairground that exists only as a depiction, with its rides and attractions only appreciable on the aesthetic rather than experiential level. But if we look at the mascot figures appearing on the sign, the story becomes more conceptually complex.

As many of the previous posts on this subject would have pointed out, we have a multilayered complexity to the mascot figures; they are animated depictions of model depictions of fictional characters – doubly-fictional characters in the diegesis of Paprika. But eagle-eyed viewers will notice that these figures are the lead characters of Kon’s last – still unfinished – film The Dreaming Machines. The moment is designed as an inside joke, a reference to a film still in preproduction, but it turns Kon’s film into a text-within-a-text, a fictional film that the characters of Paprika might go and see.

The fact that the film will probably never be completed makes this moment all the more bittersweet – our only glimpse of Kon’s final work will always be nestled within another fiction, a depiction of a film appearing in his actual final film. This makes the end of his career, quite fittingly, a little like a cinematic ouroboros, always conceptually folding in on itself, much like the subject matter of his work.

                                                                                                                             - P.S.

Depiction And Fiction: Evaluating The Virtual

When confronted with a character or an object that only exists as a depiction, we can comprehend it on at least two levels. We can think about the thing that is being depicted – the diegetic figure or object that exists within the story-world – but we can also appreciate the depiction itself, the skill with which the person or object has been rendered by the artist. Generally speaking, we tend to appreciate the craftsmanship of the depiction rather than the thing that is being depicted. We are impressed by the skill of applying paint to canvas in order to create the sense of a three-dimensional object. The paintings of Ron English are prime examples of this. We look at a painting like Road Story and are struck by the photorealistic quality of the image. The creation of space, distance, and solidity through the capturing of light in paint is artistic craftsmanship at its height.

But it is also true that the series of figures that populate English’s composition can be aesthetically evaluated on their own terms. Each of these improvisational mash-ups of toys and objects can be considered as a work of art in and of themselves, each with their own meanings and visual appeals. The creation process of a painting for English is a complicated and unusual one. Road Story looks like a diorama because that is essentially what it is. Or was, at least. English first makes the hundreds of figures that we see here, either drawing on his ever-growing army of mutant toys or creating new ones from scratch; then he arranges them in small settings until he has the effect he desires. He then takes a photograph of the arrangement and begins the process of recreating the image on canvas – sometimes slavishly following the photograph exactly, other times making changes to light, colour or composition as he goes along.

As such, we can see a painting like Combrat House as multiple works of art simultaneously: a collection of hand-made art-objects, arranged in a specific photographic composition, and meticulously rendered in paint. The clown-featured army ‘combrats’, the multicoloured dinosaur hybrids, the gasmask wearing Mickey Mouse pilots, not to mention the layers of stratum made out of hundreds of tiny figures, could all be appreciated as artistic endeavours in themselves, juxtaposing innocent iconography with associations of violence. On top of this, the specific arrangement of these figures within the setting is a work in own right, with the particular composition creating its own effects – for instance, the vibrant orange of the gas cloud emphasises the combrat on the left hand side of the image, while the multicoloured house on the right almost blurs into the vapour trail left by the pilot Mickeys. And finally we can appreciate the application of paint to canvas in the creation of this elaborate piece of work, how the flat image creates a sense of solidity and depth. But what distinguishes this example from the paintings of Todd Schorr or Robt. Williams (discussed in previous posts) is that the idiosyncratic toy collection of Ron English actually exists in the real world. We can easily evaluate the figures separately from our evaluation of the painting itself.

But when we are faced with virtual art-objects, which only exist within the painting, can we actually evaluate the object distinct from its image? Can we see past the depiction to evaluate the artwork within the fiction? Does the virtual art-object have less validity than the real one? If we return to a Robt. Williams painting we have previously discussed, In The Land Of Retinal Delights, we can better explore this question. Looking at the Tyrannosaurus Rex toy in the background of Combrat House, we can evaluate it in almost the same way that we can with the real dinosaur toy upon which it is based (other than its tactile qualities), as well as on additional aesthetic levels specific to the depiction. So why can’t we likewise evaluate the nonexistent objects of the Williams painting in the same way? The image provides us with a collection of meticulously rendered objects that span back into the distance, each one separated from the others, each with its own distinct look. Each one has had to be invented, imagined in three-dimensions in order to be successfully rendered in the two-dimensions of the canvas. Isn’t Williams here just as much of a toy designer as English is?

If we can consider an object that only exists within a depiction, with no solid reality outside of the painting within which it appears, as an art-object in its own right then might it be possible to extend this even farther into the realms of experiences and events? Can we comprehend and evaluate a theme park attraction or a work of performance art if it only exists within a filmic or animated text? A real amusement park like Disneyland is filled with rides and mechanical marvels that depict fictional conceits (the automata of Abraham Lincoln is an impressive depiction of the real historical figure, the ghosts of the Haunted Mansion depict diegetic ghosts). But what happens when people create non-existent amusement parks, which themselves only exist as depictions?

First, let us break from ‘Depiction and Fiction’ tradition and look an example from a live-action film. In Dark Castle’s remake of The House On Haunted Hill, we are introduced to the character of Stephen Price showing reporters around his latest amusement park on the day of its grand opening. He dismisses allegations of construction problems and health and safety issues with his rides. Suddenly the elevator that the characters are riding shudders to a halt and begins to rapidly fall back to earth. Yet, rather than crashing and killing them all, the doors simply open and reveal the top floor of the ride. The elevator is part of the ride, with video screens in place of windows to create the impression of free fall. When the press get on to the actual ride, similar moments of ‘orchestrated disaster’ follow (including a rail coming loose and flinging a carriage full of dummy patrons into oblivion).

These extreme thrill-rides would of course be impossible to make in the real world (or at least, impossible to make and not get sued). Their placement within a fiction film allows director William Malone imagination to run riot without the unfortunate repercussions of reality. But we as audience members vicariously experience these rides through the film. We are none the wiser than the press regarding the elevator or broken rail and so can extra-diegetically appreciate the ride on the level that it is meant to be appreciated within the story-world.

But this example is limited to the fact that recorded imagery is (largely) tied to real-life laws of space and time. The elevator with its video-windows was built as an actual model (though not as an actual elevator) on the film set. When we look at the paintings of Pooch Island, however, we are met with a greater variety of possibilities in the fictional rides. ‘Pooch Island’ is a loose conceptual setting for the paintings of tattooist-turned-fine-artist Pooch (real name Michael Pucciarelli), a kind of nightmarish Coney Island/Disneyland seen through the spectrum of Juxtapoz Magazine. Many of these paintings depict theme park rides and attractions, but more than a recurring motif that functions within the composition of the painting, these rides can be understood in terms of their function as solid attractions.

In all of these paintings, the depicted rides have a three-dimensional logic to them – although constructing any of them in reality would be impossible without unlimited funds. Each one is impossibly high, overlooking a vast landscape that stretches far into the distance, the angles of the rails do not always guarantee that patrons will be able to remain in their seats; gigantic figures loom threateningly over the tracks and it remains unclear if they are some animatronic part of the ride or a monstrous creature waiting for the right moment to pluck passengers out of their carriages. The rides also seem to play like conveyor belts to death – often the rails lead to unavoidable obstacles to oblivion. Luckily, most of the riders are monsters, devils or skeletons. Impossibly huge and dangerous though these rides might be, we can still appreciate and evaluate them in terms of their construction and function – even though this only exists on the canvas.

What we can’t do, however, is experience these rides in the way that we can the falling elevator of House On Haunted Hill (albeit in a second-hand capacity). We can only look at Pooch’s rides as constructs, as very big and elaborate objects. Is it possible, then, to evaluate something more fleeting if it only exists as a depiction? Can we evaluate a moment of physical activity that never actually occurred?

In Masaaki Yuasa’s Mind Game, we are given a complex tapestry of works-within-works (we are often treated to dream sequences or enactments of Manga stories that the central character is writing), but one of the most striking moments – for me at least – is a brief sequence when one of the characters entertains the others in what can only be described as an amazing piece of performance art.

The film has several other moments of ‘depicted-art’, that is, works that only exist as depictions of art within the story-world. A vast and elaborate collection of art-objects brings us back to Ron English – we can appreciate the artistic merit of these objects as objects (some real, some imagined), as well as the specific way in which they have been arranged and combined to create particular compositional effects, and finally on the artistic merit of the depictions themselves.

At one point, a character creates gigantic water-balloon sculptures filled with (what turn out to be) prehistoric fish.

These works are, unlike the object collection, less likely to occur in the real world. And yet, it is still possible to imagine an artist creating these same sculptures, filling them perhaps with real fish (or models of prehistoric fish). We can therefore quite successfully entertain the thought of how such artworks would be evaluated if they were to exist in the real world. But these are still just depicted objects. What about the performance?

It begins with the character appearing dressed in a mask and a costume with water balloon attachments on each breast and groin. There are hoses connected to the back allowing these balloons to be expanded with water.

The groin balloon is filled with an increasing amount of water until it is several times the size of her, and we can make out small baby dolls swimming about inside. The balloon is clearly representative of a womb – a monstrous womb for a horde of inhuman offspring. The girl takes a bow and arrow, and pierces the balloon – essential performing a self-caesarean.

Then she drenches herself in paint and throws herself up against a makeshift sail, leaving a crude imprint of her body in a running position. She repeats this in several colours until the circular piece of cloth has been covered.

Then the others take the cloth and run around with her in the centre. As they run faster, the images begin to blur and create the effect of a phenakistascope (an effect that can’t be captured with stills). As the painted imprint figures run around her, the breast-balloons expand and expand until they finally explode, raining water and glitter down upon the participants.

If this performance had occurred in reality, I for one would have been quite blown away by it. The events that comprise the performance are all achievable within the real world and the performance makes use of the body to communicate ideas about sexuality (expanding breasts), reproduction (the baby dolls), individuality (the repeated copying of the body in different colours), and physical achievement (the accumulated effect of the printed figures creates animation of a runner – combining both proto-cinema and sport). I could easily write an analysis of this performance as a performance. But, only being a depicted performance, one that exists as the end result of several animators drawing the events, can we really evaluate it in this light?

Just as I argued that Williams’ non-existent toys were just as valid as English’s real toys on an aesthetic level, I would say that in this instance we can certainly evaluate certain aspects of this sequence as a performance. Although we cannot talk about the impressiveness of the hydro-powered outfit (as it does not exist), or the physical achievement of creating the animation by hurling a painted body against a sail (as there was no real body performing these actions), we can still understand the events as a communication about bodies being expressed through bodies. To my mind, examples such as these demonstrate that we can always look through a depiction into the fiction that it conveys and understand it on its own terms.

                                                                                                                               - P.S.

Depiction And Fiction: Toys & Cars

I have previously written about the difference between created imagery (animation and paintings) and recorded imagery (live-action film and photography), claiming that the former is far more complex than the latter on an aesthetic level and yet far simpler on a fictional level. That is, in animation a character will always have a dual status as an image; they will always be both the character and a depiction of the character. Yet at the same time, as a fictional being, the animated character is more ‘true’ than the live-action character – Michael Corleone from The Godfather is the character and Al Pacino purporting to be the character, while Mickey Mouse is always ‘really’ Mickey Mouse. When we apply these ideas to the Pixar films, we can see that there are a multitude of levels of understanding at work in even the most straightforward of moments.

The early Pixar films in particular – both shorts and features – can be seen to form something akin to a ‘meta-franchise’ in that they are linked in a variety of extra-textual ways. While some argue that all of the Pixar films take place in one consistent universe, attempting to cohere everything into a single text (http://jonnegroni.com/2013/07/11/the-pixar-theory/), I would argue that this is a) stretching it a bit, and b) far less interesting than viewing the films as distinct texts that have a range of interpretative relationships to one another. Put another way, the references, cameos and in-jokes in the Pixar films do not unify them but create highly complicated interactions between them, turning some works into fictions within other works of fiction. The first character animation by the Pixar team (though not under that name) was the short The Adventures Of Andre & Wally-B, a fleeting chase cartoon between the vaguely human Andre and the antagonistic bee Wally-B. In itself, the film is a straightforward narrative taking place within its own diegetic reality. As an animated character, Andre is both the diegetic figure and a depiction of the figure. But in their third short film, Red’s Dream, the first in-joke reference adds even more layers to the depiction and fiction of Andre.

On the wall of the Bicycle shop where Red the unicycle lives a clock can be made out as portraying the character of Andre, his arms indicating the hour and minute. As an inside joke, we can take it on the same level that we take the floor pattern within Red’s fantasy (emulating the ball in Luxo Jr.) – a reference to entertain the animators and anyone else eagle-eyed enough to notice. But the nature of the reference is more complicated. The fact that the clock is a clear reference to the famous Mickey Mouse watch of yesteryear, means that we can interpret the clock as a piece of Andre & Wally-B merchandise, casting those characters as fictional characters within the diegesis of Red’s Dream. We could take the appearance of the clock as evidence that the unseen Bicycle shop owner is a fan of Andre & Wally-B and has bought this piece of memorabilia; making the clock a depiction (within the cartoon) of a depiction (on the face of the clock) of a depiction (of the original character). Andre & Wally B therefore is both a film in its own right and a story-within-a-story as part of Red’s Dream.

This approach is continued in the first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story. When Woody gathers everyone around to discuss the impending influx of new toys on Andy’s birthday, we can make out behind him the spines of several books – including Andre & Wally-B, Red’s Dream, Tin Toy and Knick-Knack. Once again, this is an inside joke that renders all of these earlier works as fiction within the world of Toy Story. Red the unicycle is not a diegetic character, but rather a doubly-fictional character akin to Buzz Lightyear.

When I say Buzz Lightyear, of course, I am not referring to the character of Buzz who we follow through the film, but the concept of Buzz Lightyear, the character that Buzz thinks he is, the – as Woody puts it at one point – ‘Real Buzz Lightyear’. Initially, much of the comedy in Toy Story stems from this confusion in terms of depiction and fiction. Buzz thinks that he is the real thing, not a depiction of the real thing. The ‘real’ Buzz Lightyear is a doubly-fictional character within the world of Toy Story, the main character of the Buzz Lightyear Of Star Command franchise (which begins life as a fictional franchise, but then became an actual franchise when Disney produced an animated series by that name). This is true of most of the toy characters appearing within the films.

Woody differs from Buzz because he knows full well that he is a toy, a depiction of a generic Old West Sheriff. But this in itself becomes a complicated point in relation to how we understand the diegesis of the franchise. In the sequel, Toy Story 2, we learn that Woody is actually a depiction of a specific character from an old puppet TV serial Woody’s Round-Up. Woody therefore becomes a depiction of a toy, which itself is a depiction of a TV puppet, that is a depiction of the fictional Woody. But, unlike Buzz, Woody is initially ignorant of the fiction that he depicts; he only knows that he is a depiction. How is it possible for Buzz to know his fictional back-story so well that he actually believes it to be true, while Woody is oblivious to the fact that he is merchandise from a TV show? Why does Woody define himself so overtly through his relationship to Andy when, as a toy from the 1950s, he must surely have had owners decades before Andy was ever born? These texts-within-texts complicate how much sense the story makes.

In a later Toy Story short Small Fry we are treated to a slew of new characters that exist, seemingly, to indulge the filmmakers’ love of ridiculous puns. Sidestepping the glorious silliness of Tai-Kwon-Doe or Beef Stewardess for now (though I’m sure I’ll return to them in a future post), let us focus on the fact that each of these characters have been given the same kind of doubly-fictional contexts. In the audio commentary, director Angus MacLane states that every toy appearing in the ‘happy-meal’ toy support group belongs to a franchise that, like Woody’s Round-Up, only exists within the world of Toy Story. For instance, Franklin is a depiction of a character from an animated film that tells the history of America using anthropomorphic birds. On the level of fiction, Franklin is simply an abandoned toy that can’t understand why he doesn’t appeal to kids. But on the level of depiction, the character is infinitely more complex because of this context. Franklin is a depiction of the Pixar character, who is a toy depiction of a non-existent animated character, who is a depiction of the fictional character of Franklin who – we might surmise – is supposed to be Franklin D. Roosevelt (or maybe even Franklin Pierce), the real historical figure depicted as a bird.

This idea of depicting characters as something introduces yet another layer to our understanding of depiction and fiction. The world of the Cars franchise is more complicated than that of Toy Story; the toys exist within a human populated world, they are created objects that lead a secret life of their own. But the cars and other vehicles exist in their own world that functions on its own laws, it is much like the real world but seen through a kind of ‘car-o-vision’ (in the same way that Franklin is Roosevelt seen through ‘bird-o-vision’). This makes Lightning McQueen and Tow Mater double-depictions, but in a different way to Woody or Buzz. We understand the characters as people, but we see them as cars. In Cars 2 we glimpse John Lassetire, the ‘car-ified’ version of Pixar founder John Lasseter, a perfect example of a ‘real’ person that we see depicted as a vehicle.

The first Cars provides us with clips from A Bugs Life, Monsters Inc. and Toy Story, but with the characters all reimagined as cars. Unfortunately, Lassetire is not introduced as a maker of animated films within Cars 2, so we can’t attribute these movie clips to him, as productions of PixCar studios.

But nevertheless the appearance of Woody and Buzz as toy cars is particularly interesting, when we consider the fact that these characters were released as toys in the real world.

So: The character of Woody is a human sheriff living in the Old West, thwarting villains that poison the waterhole and so on, but he is depicted by a puppet in the show Woody’s Round-Up. This puppet is then depicted by the toy of Woody that we meet in Toy Story; and because this toy is also a character with its own distinct personality he is both a depiction and a character. But because he is an animated character he is still yet another depiction (a depiction of the Pixar character). In the Cars clips, the characters are seen through the ‘car-o-vision’, making them depictions of the depictions of the Pixar characters. And in the real world, therefore, the Woody Wagon and Buzzmobile toys are toy depictions of animated depictions of car depictions of animated depictions of toy depictions of puppet/animated depictions of fictional characters…

Phew!

                                                                                                                        - P. S.