No Lighting Necessary
"Is your conversation so bright that you don't need other illumination?"
Saturday 28 May 2016
Tuesday 28 April 2015
Robert Talbot And The Bride Of The Head
Discussing the concept of authorship in
relation to mini-mogul Charles Band is more complicated than it might
first seem. On the face of it, Band is a latter-day Roger Corman,
heading a series of production companies specialising in low-budget
cult horror and sci-fi films. As the 'studio head' and initial ideas
man for his early companies (Charles Band Productions, Empire
Pictures, Full Moon Entertainment), Band could ensure that his
personal interests were present in films that he had little actual
involvement in. Most prominent of these interests was the fascination
with 'small things that kill you', which he himself traces back to
his love of the final segment of 1975's Trilogy of Terror.
We can see this interest expressed in films such as Parasite,
Dolls, Troll,
Ghoulies, and most
successfully the Puppet Master
series. Full Moon Entertainment established another important
tendency in Band's output – the franchise. Full Moon produced films
for the direct-to-video rental market of the early 1990s and the
establishment of connections between the films helped to distinguish
a clear brand and encouraged video renters to try all of their
related products (adverts for future instalments, or Band himself
showing off poster art for films in production were included after
the films on the VHS cassettes).
Nowadays,
as head of Full Moon Features (the third iteration of Full Moon),
Band is more closely involved in production, directing some 20 out of
35 films. Here, Band's authorship is even less in question, as we can
trace not only the premise back to him but also the execution of the
individual film. Franchises and small killer objects have not
lessened, with films like Doll Graveyard,
Ooga-Booga, and the
Gingerdead Man and
Evil Bong series
continuing the trends in a cheaper and dafter way. But there is an
interesting middle period to Full Moon, when the company was known as
Full Moon Pictures, that I think casts Band's authorship in quite a
different light. We can almost see in the late 1990s that Band is
something of a victim of his own success. He had already made a point
of bringing all of Full Moon's successful franchises to a close while
the company was still Full Moon Entertainment, but found that he was
pressed to make more Puppet Master
and Trancers films
during the 'Pictures' years. These were uninspired and limp entries,
seemingly designed to sabotage their franchises, and unusual in that
the Pictures years were otherwise devoid of sequels.
Band
instigated several new labels during this time, each aimed at a
slightly different target audience. While Full Moon continued to make
mainstream horror and sci-fi films, other labels focused on more
specific variations. 'PulsePounders' produced kids adventure genre
films, 'Filmonsters' likewise aimed at younger audiences but focused
on resurrecting the classic monsters (Dracula and Frankenstein and
the like), 'Monster Island Entertainment' produced Godzilla-style
tokusatsu movies, 'Alchemy Pictures' focused on the highly dubious
notion of ‘black’ horror movies made for an African-American
audience (by white American filmmakers). Several other labels dealt
with other markets. These new labels functioned as the equivalent
of franchises, giving audiences 'more of the same', but without
direct continuity links between films.
What does this tell us about how Band
felt about his company at this point? Well, on one hand, it certainly
reveals a level of optimism; he was confident that the company would
be capable of producing such a variety of films without having to
fall back on sequels and repetition. Yet at the same time it implies
a certain degree of disillusionment with the success of some of his
ideas. Instead of more specific Puppet Master films, Band
wanted to make more general ‘small things that kill you’ films.
Ragdoll, Totem, Hideous! and Blood Dolls
can be seen as continuing the idea without continuing the series. It
seems as if the company-cohesion of the 'Entertainment' years became
a straight-jacket for Band, who wanted more variety in his output.
This labels-approach would give Band more creative freedom,
certainly, but it would also allow for diversification and marketing
opportunities (each new film offers up the opportunity for new
collectible figures). But what about more personal reasons? Did Band
actually have a more – for the lack of a better word – ‘artistic’
agenda with this idea? To answer this question, we have to call upon
two fictional characters that Band created during this period:
Eugenia Travers and Robert Talbot.
Both of these characters have only ever
appeared in a short promotional video for the still-unmade Bride
Of The Head Of The Family (a project that I shall return to
later). Eugenia is the titular Bride, the fictional star of the
story, but Robert Talbot is more complicated – he is the pseudonym
employed by Band at certain points during the Pictures years. In the
promo video, his face is covered with a black hood and his voice has
been digitally altered, establishing him as an intentionally
ambiguous figure, just as much a work of fiction as Eugenia. Talbot’s
credits include directing Mystery Monsters (for PulsePounders)
and The Head Of The Family (for another label, Pulp Fantasy),
and as the writer for Blood Dolls (for Full Moon Pictures). It
is important to understand that each of these labels did not, at the
time, explicitly relate themselves to Full Moon as the parent
company. So, although nowadays Head Of The Family is
considered a Full Moon film that Band is particularly fond of, at the
time of its release, all reference to Full Moon or Band were
removed. Why?
Robert Talbot was created as something
of a 'get-out' for Band, allowing him to make films that he wanted
to make, separate from the pressures of delivering the product that
people expected from him and Full Moon. Head Of The Family
is an exceptionally quirky film; although revolving around murder and
a family of freaks, the film is a far cry from horror and instead
opts for a more comical cult film tone. Myron Stackpool is the
titular head, literally a gigantic MODOK-like cranium with tiny and
ineffectual limbs. He controls his three siblings like puppets with
something akin to telepathy. When local diner owner Lance
accidentally spies the Stackpools abducting a man for experimentation
(Myron wants to transpose his intellect into a more normal body), he
threatens them with the police and blackmails them. The plot then
thickens with schemes and counter-schemes between Lance and Myron,
eventually culminating in a fire and the apparent deaths of most of
the cast.
The
following year, Talbot/Band made Mystery Monsters
(subsequently released under the title Goobers),
a strange story ostensibly aimed at children, but with little to
appeal to anyone under the age of thirty without an understanding of
the cut-throat business of television. Tommy has just landed a role
on the top children's TV show 'Captain Mike's Mystery Monsters',
starring three highly realistic monster puppets that seem to be
alive. Shortly after he arrives, Tommy discovers that in fact the
monsters are alive;
they are demons from another dimension and their former mistress
Queen Mara has travelled to Earth to retrieve them. As kids movies
go, it's probably the only one you'll find that makes jokes about
child stars needing analysts and comparisons between television and
Hell. The same year, Band directed Hideous!
for Full Moon under his own name. This film revolves around two rival
collectors of medical oddities, Emile Lorca and Napoleon Lazar, who
fight over a new specimen – a highly deformed human foetus with
four eyes – only to discover that the creature is alive and has
brought three other specimens back from the dead. All of the above
films star J. W. Perra (a.k.a. Michael Citriniti) as Myron Stackpool,
the demon Squidgy, and Emile Lorca, and are also unified by their
lack of any traditional 'good guys' or strict villains. Instead, all
three films play out more like episodes of Dallas or
Dynasty but with
freaks; their stories are of groups of amoral characters screwing
each other over. The films are all written by Benjamin Carr (who
would become the go-to writer for much of the late 90s at Full Moon)
and revel in their casts of self-absorbed characters with
Machiavellian designs on one another.
The
glorious soap opera storytelling would reach its height with Blood
Dolls, a Full Moon film directed
by Band but 'written by' Talbot. The story is about the power
struggle between the enigmatic billionaire Virgil Travers and the
manipulative dominatrix-cum-businesswoman Moira Yulin. This film
seems designed to be the encapsulation of everything that defined
'Full Moon'; Virgil Travers is a freak, a genius with a head the size
of an avocado, and his trusted right-hand man, Mr. Mascaro, wears
clown make-up and has his teeth sharpened to points. As figures, they
are homages to the Puppet Master
character Pinhead and the Demonic Toys
character Jack Attack respectively. On top of this, Phil Fondacaro (a
long-time Band collaborator appearing in Empire movies such as
Ghoulies 2 and Troll
and later Full Moon movies like Decadent Evil 1 & 2)
appears as an eye-patch wearing butler with an electric cattle-prod,
who forces a caged punk girl band to play mood music. And it wouldn't
be a Charles Band film without killer dolls; this time they are a
team of three racial caricatures that execute Travers' business
rivals.
It is as if Band
wanted to reclaim the essence of Full Moon for himself, condensing it
down into a purely personal project (it is one of the few screenplays
that Band wrote himself, albeit as Talbot). Killer dolls, kinky
girls, weird machinery, clowns, freaks, Phil Fondacaro and
franchising opportunities (the caged girl group were initially
planned to tour as a Full Moon-backed musical act) are all contained
within the film's eccentric 84 minute runtime. This consciously
quintessential Full Moon movie was to then be incorporated into
Band's more personal 'meta-franchise' of the Bride of the Head.
Which
returns us to Eugenia. Head Of The Family,
Hideous!, Mystery
Monsters and Blood
Dolls are all arguably linked by
the unmade film Bride Of The Head Of The Family.
This film remains a passion project for Band (17 years after its
initial announcement he still hopes to get it made) but it is its
very absence that makes it all the more interesting. Although the
Talbot/Perra/Carr films described above have little relationship to
one another in continuity terms, they are all intertextually
unified by Bride Of
The Head; the film is,
obviously, designed as a direct sequel to Head Of The
Family, with Myron meeting and
falling for Eugenia, but the basic hair and make-up design
for Eugenia is utilised in Mystery Monsters
for the demon Esmerelda. The various deformed foetuses from Hideous!
are implied to be Eugenia's
creations, not least of all because of Virgil Travers' comments in
Blood Dolls where he
discusses his mother Eugenia's brilliant experiments in genetic
engineering and describes himself as “perhaps her most perfect
creation... although not, as you can see, altogether perfect”.
The
late 90s saw Charles Band attempt to expand his Full Moon company
into a media empire whilst at the same time carving out a far more
personal and offbeat mythology that tied certain favoured films
together. These were linked not through franchising, but through
implied references to non-existent films and the use of non-existent
cast and crew (Robert Talbot, J. W. Perra and others). Shortly after
Blood Dolls Full Moon
Pictures fell into hibernation for several years, eventually
resurrecting as Full Moon Features. Though Band would helm many of
the films from this point on, they would never display quite the same
idiosyncratic vision as those that he made between 1996 and 1999.
- P.S.
Saturday 28 March 2015
Lovecraft, Cthulhu, Ambiguity & Simultaneity
Imagine
a novel that tells two concurrent subplots. Plot A is about a
character called Steven, going about his daily life, while Plot B
follows the character Mr. Blande, whose adventures as a bounty hunter
lead him to visit many of the same places that Steven frequents, but
the two characters never meet. Then, years after the author of the
novel has died, an academic puts forward that Steven and Mr. Blande
are actually the same character. The author, being dead, can neither
confirm nor deny the interpretation, but because the novel is
ambiguous
– it does not commit to any detailed physical description of the
two characters – the interpretation can stand up. As a result, the
novel becomes two books simultaneously:
one where Steven and Mr. Blande are two separate characters, and
another where Steven Blande juggles his mundane day-to-day life with
his freelance bounty-hunting. Neither one is the 'correct'
interpretation and both are equally 'true'. For those of us who
indulge in fiction for the sake of diegetic immersion, of getting
lost in the story, this would be a nuisance. Such people would want
clarification on either one or the other as being the 'reality' of
the story. But for me, it is this very simultaneity that makes the
text
(an object that exists in our world) far more fascinating than the
story (a
window into a fictional world).
This
post is going to look at the idea of ambiguity and simultaneity in a
particular literary phenomenon, namely, the Cthulhu Mythos and the
author H. P. Lovecraft. For those who don't know, the Cthulhu Mythos
is a vast body of stories and gaming material that takes place in a
shared fictional universe where all of reality was once ruled by the
malevolent Great Old Ones, a pantheon of near-omnipotent alien beings
who exist outside of the traditional three dimensions. Another race
of godlike beings eventually appear and lock the Great Old Ones up in
different prisons (sealed away in other dimensions, in forced slumber
beneath the ocean, and so on). In the present day, humanity is more
or less totally ignorant of the horrors that lurk in our ancient past
and only a few terrifying tomes, such as the Necronomicon, describe
the truth in any detail. The Great Old Ones have various insane cults
and non-human minions working tirelessly to try and free them 'when
the stars are right' and bring their horrific rule back over the
world. The Mythos has a special place in modern culture, it gets
ripped off or parodied everywhere, and it owes its origins to
horror/sci-fi author H. P. Lovecraft.
Except...
not really.
H. P. Lovecraft |
Although
pop culture still describes Lovecraft's writing and the Cthulhu
Mythos as more or less interchangeable terms, the reality is that
Lovecraft's rather slim body of work is far more nuanced and
nihilistic than the 'good gods vs. bad gods' set-up that the Mythos
presents. Lovecraft wrote genre-bending 'weird fiction', essentially
sci-fi stories that masqueraded as horror stories, where the clichés
of the latter genre – demons, witches, magic, monsters – were
explained in scientific, though no less horrific, terms: our
human-centric perception of the universe is a complete fallacy, we
are not special, we are just one in a continuous parade of life-forms
that briefly hold dominion over a fairly unimportant speck in a vast
and indifferent emptiness. What we think of as demons and gods are
just other beings, perfectly natural in a cosmic scale, that are
genuinely beyond our limited comprehension. They are not evil,
because evil is a human invention – they just don't care about us
any more than you care about a dust mote that floats past your face
as you read this.
Not to say that there
isn't evil in his stories. There is, but it nearly always has human
origins. People can be degenerate and reprehensible in Lovecraft's
tales, tainted by the influence of the ancient beings that lurk
beneath the surface of reality, but they are not 'following the
orders of the gods' in any direct sense. Lovecraft liked to give
these entities barely-pronounceable names, (Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth,
Azathoth, Nyarlathotep) and kept their descriptions ambiguous and
uncertain. The first-person narrators that occasionally catch a
glimpse of these beings lack the linguistic skills to express what
they see – or more accurately, our language itself is unable to
express what they see.
Cthulhu |
So, how did we get from
Lovecraft's anti-humanitarian view of an empty and uncaring universe,
to a riproaring adventure world where humans fight against evil gods
and monsters? And what has this got to do with the opening spiel
about ambiguity and simultaneity? The man generally understood to be
the real creator of the Cthulhu Mythos is August Derleth, a writer
friend of Lovecraft's, one of the many writers for the magazine Weird
Tales with whom Lovecraft kept a longstanding correspondence.
Derleth never subscribed to Lovecraft's world-view, in fact he didn't
really seem to understand it, and he often misinterpreted the more
experienced writer's subtleties and intentions. During his lifetime,
Lovecraft politely corrected Derleth's misunderstandings, but when he
died of cancer at age 46, with no estate to take over his body of
work, Derleth stepped in and arranged the stories in such a way that
suited his more Christian good-vs.-evil ideas. Vague references
became solid links between stories, explanations that were provided
by ill-informed support characters became facts, and the degenerate
nastiness that Lovecraft occasionally imbued his human characters
with was projected out into the gods that they worshipped.
August Derleth |
Because Lovecraft kept
his references to Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and friends intentionally
vague, this gave Derleth plenty of room to manoeuvre and indulge in
some 'wilful misinterpretation'. My favourite example of this is
Hastur. In a Lovecraft story, The Whisperer In Darkness, a
character reels off a list of the races, places and entities of myth
that he has discovered are in fact true. A list of cities bleeds into
a list of gods, with Hastur being the last city mentioned. Derleth
read this passage and chose to interpret Hastur as first name
in the list of gods, essentially creating a whole new entity that he
could flesh out and use and – most importantly – always claim
that it originated in Lovecraft. Hastur became Cthulhu's half-brother
and nemesis, adding a bit of very human soap-opera style dissension
to ranks of evil. Although we know that it was not Lovecraft's
intention, we can read this passage and see Hastur as a city and a
god simultaneously. The individual reader can choose the
interpretation that they prefer.
The Cthulhu Mythos has
continued to grow in this manner, with authors choosing to follow and
accentuate links between stories by 'Lovecraft Circle'/Cthulhu Mythos
authors while ignoring other connections. Some Mythos stories feature
Hastur prominently, others refuse to acknowledge him it all. Although
fans will try to comprehend the Mythos as a hugely complex but
nevertheless unified system, for me the Mythos is interesting
precisely because it can be a million different bodies of work at the
same time. To demonstrate on a smaller scale, I will try a bit of
'wilful misinterpretation' on the Lovecraft story The Thing On The
Doorstep.
The Thing On The
Doorstep is narrated by Daniel Upton, who has just walked into a
sanatorium and killed his friend Edward Pickman Derby, though he
maintains that it was not murder. He proceeds to explain how Edward
had married an intense young woman from the nearby port-town of
Innsmouth by the name of Asenath Waite who soon begins to exert her
will on the young man. But this is more than simple hen-pecking;
Asenath is literally trying to transfer her mind into Edward's body
and leave his in her body. As it turns out, Asenath had a very
strong-willed father who died in a mad fit – and now Edward
confesses his fears to Daniel that Asenath has in fact possessed the
father's mind from the start of their relationship. I won't give away
the end, as what is important to our (mis)interpretation here is the
background details. The fact that Aesnath and her father hail from
Innsmouth is important. As is the fact that Edward catches glimpses
of what Asenath gets up to whilst in his body, which includes unholy
rites and a pit filled with Shoggoths.
In the Cthulhu Mythos,
the people of Innsmouth are worshippers of Cthulhu and many of them
are actually interbred with bizarre fishmen known as Deep Ones, while
Shoggoths are vast protoplasmic horrors that can warp and consume
anything. They are both 'villains' in this context, dedicated to
resurrecting Cthulhu and his ilk and opposing the 'Elder Ones' that
supposedly imprisoned them. We can read the story as set very clearly
within the good vs. evil backdrop of the Mythos; Asenath is an evil
wizard who needs a fresh body to continue his/her nefarious ways. But
if we focus entirely on Lovecraft's body of work, the references here
are to two earlier stories, At The Mountains Of Madness and
The Shadow Over Innsmouth. In these stories we learn that,
indeed, the Deep Ones and their human companions do worship Cthulhu
and are allied with the Shoggoths. But the reference to the 'Elder
Ones' has a very different meaning here. In At The Mountains Of
Madness, an expedition to Antarctica makes the horrendous
discovery that life on Earth was created by a race of alien beings,
referred to as the Old Ones, who created mankind as a side-effect.
The Old Ones were also responsible for waging war on Cthulhu when he
turned up on Earth a few millennia later, and were the creators of
the Shoggoths, which eventually gained sentience and rebelled against
their masters. Taken as a cycle on their own, these three stories
(and another, The Dreams In The Witch-House) simply tell a
rather straightforward science fiction history of the world,
involving the power struggles of ancient alien races that still have
ramifications for human beings today. The 'Elder Ones' are not gods
that banished Cthulhu but simply an alien race that the Deep Ones and
Shoggoths have decided to team up against. The personal story of
Edward Pickman Derby and his wife is just a drop in the ocean of this
bigger story.
A Shoggoth from At The Mountains Of Madness |
But let's take this a
step further in our 'wilful misinterpretation'. Let's ignore At
The Mountains Of Madness and Shadow Over Innsmouth and
instead link The Thing On The Doorstep to two or three stories
by other 'Lovecraft Circle' writers. In Donald Wandrei's The
Tree-Men Of M'Bwa, an evil wizard-dwarf, at the bidding of a
vague demonic force, uses black magic to turn men into trees. On the
face of it, the link seems rather tenuous. Both stories feature
humans using apparent magic and serving unseen non-human entities and
that's about all. But the missing link comes with Robert Bloch's
Notebook Found In A Deserted House. In this story, a young boy
moves in with relatives on the edge of an eerily empty forest. After
several strange experiences – hearing odd sounds, people uttering
bizarre words, inexplicable slime and markings on the ground – the
boy and another man are attacked by a tree-like creature, identified
in the story as a Shoggoth (Ramsey Campbell would later expand on
this version of a Shoggoth by describing it as a tree spirit covered
in hundreds of mouths). Taking this cycle of stories together, we can
construct a world where cults of dark magicians dotted throughout the
world indulge in wicked rites, including the transformation of human
victims into tree-like Shoggoths. Now, the moment where Edward
glimpses the Shoggoth pit in The Thing In The Doorstep can be
interpreted very differently. When he says that he “saw a Shoggoth
– it changed shape!”, instead of the protoplasmic creature from
At The Mountains Of Madness, we can now argue that what Edward
saw was a human being transformed into a tree-like creature.
A Shoggoth of the Bloch/Campbell variety? |
We know that this is not
what Lovecraft intended when he wrote this moment, but because of the
ambiguity of the writing (he never describes a Shoggoth in this
particular story), we can happily read this very different meaning as
'true'. This process can be repeated indefinitely with stories by
Lovecraft and others. One can group any random collection of stories
together and link them in ways that are unrelated to the authors'
intentions, or those of the wider Cthulhu Mythos context. The Cthulhu
Mythos, rather than a unified world, can be an infinitely shifting
'super-text' that alters in content and meaning for each reader.
- P.S.
Saturday 28 February 2015
Hayao Miyazaki: Authorship And Aesthetic Influence
Following on from the end of last
year's discussion on the complexities of authorship, as well as last
month's post on Studio Ghibli, this post will explore how much we can
attribute certain aesthetic and stylistic elements to director Hayao
Miyazaki. When we think about authorship in relation to either art,
illustration or film and animation, we often draw upon a continuity
of visual style, recurring images, particular colour palates,
specific ways of presenting characters, objects or places. Salvador
Dali's paintings do not look like anybody else's, the films of Wes
Anderson are unmistakably his own. Miyazaki is no exception; we
associate his films with particular stylistic traits that recur
across his body of work. A strong environmental message, a fondness
for fantastic but almost plausible technologies (most often drawing
their look from the earliest days of air travel), the use of thick,
oily slime as a means to denote corruption, a rich and densely
populated mise-en-scene filled with elaborate architecture and
vibrantly coloured characters – these elements can be found in many
of Miyazaki's works. What I will be looking at now is an example that
complicates the idea that we can describe Miyazaki as the definite
origin of these aesthetic tropes.
During the 1980s Miyazaki – as well
as other Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata – was involved in the
turbulent production of Little Nemo.
Although his ultimate contribution to the final product was
practically zero, I will talk in detail about it as it bears more
than a few passing resemblances to his directorial style. The film is
an oddity in animation history, the ball started rolling on
production as early as the late 1970s, but the final film wasn't
realised until 1989. Based upon Winsor McCay's newspaper strip, the
character is significant to animation buffs because McCay himself
animated the Nemo
cast in what is regarded by some as the first fully animated
short in 1911 (there were in fact earlier instances of animation, but
they lacked the same level of craftsmanship and 'believability' as
McCay's three minute opus). On top of this historical significance,
the film also boasts a veritable hoard of animation and fantasy
'superstars'; initially George Lucas and then Chuck Jones (the master
of Looney Tunes) were
each approached (and declined) to helm the project and the production
itself was overseen by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson, two of the
legendary Nine Old Men of Disney studios and authors of the
definitive book on Disney animation The Illusion Of Life. The songs were provided by the Sherman Brothers (who scored The
Jungle Book, Mary
Poppins, The Many
Adventures Of Winnie-The-Pooh,
and Bedknobs And Broomsticks
among others), and drafts of the story and script were provided by
the likes of Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451,
The Martian Chronicles
and The Illustrated Man),
John Canemaker (animation scholar and historian as well as
accomplished animator himself, such as the Oscar winning short The
Moon And The Son), Chris
Columbus (screenwriter of Gremlins
and director of the first two Harry Potter films)
and Jean Giraud (better known as the comic artist Moebius, whom I
shall return to later). Some visual development was provided by
artist Brian Froud (concept artist on Dark Crystal
and Labyrinth) and the
studio producing the film, TMS, was simultaneously working on
Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira.
And Brad Bird (The Incredibles
and Ratatouille)
briefly served as a producer.
With such a pedigree of talent, how
could the film possibly fail? Well, it seems that the sheer weight of
talent simply crushed the project into a rather dull and lifeless
story that lacks much depth in either characterisation or direction, and yet - for those with an interest in the craft of animation itself - the film is actually beautifully designed and animated. The story
follows young boy Nemo as he is summoned from his Edwardian New York
life by the King of Dreams to become the heir of Slumberland.
Unfortunately for all concerned, he gets mixed up with the
mischievous Flip and accidentally releases Nightmare into the land of
dreams. Nightmare kidnaps the King and Nemo sets off with a group of
allies to rescue him from Nightmareland. Several aspects of the
film's visual style resemble that of Miyazaki's films.
For instance, Slumberland itself is a
highly ornate and elaborate setting, its vast and beautifully
decorated palaces calling to mind the interiors of Yubaba's bath
house in Spirited Away and
even more so the fantasy-land setting of Howl's Moving
Castle.
Little Nemo |
Howl's Moving Castle |
Spirited Away |
Nemo
also features vast and bustling mise-en-scene, filled with bright
figures and strange contraptions. Not only does this evoke the
atmosphere of the early peace-time scenes of Howl
but also the Ghibli Museum short Imaginary Flying Machines.
Little Nemo |
Howl's Moving Castle |
Imaginary Flying Machines |
A
fascination with the early technology of flight is found not only in
Nemo and the short,
but also in a great many of Miyazaki's films (also worth noting that
Bradbury has a similar fascination with the history of flight; one
suspects that the flying squirrel Icarus – not found in the
original strip – was an addition from Bradbury).
Little Nemo |
Howl's Moving Castle |
Laputa: Castle In The Sky |
The
King's playroom, filled with a variety of toys and conjuring up a
sense of the 'outside on the inside' can also be related to the far
less healthy playroom of the giant Baby from Spirited Away.
Little Nemo |
Spirited Away |
The
presentation of Nightmare also evokes famous antagonists from
Miyazaki's most popular works; the demon god from Princess
Mononoke's opening, the
corpulent No-Face from Spirited Away
and the Witch of the Waste's slimy henchmen from Howl
all share the viscous, oozing quality of sentient crude oil (or
Shoggoths for those Lovecraft fans among us).
Little Nemo |
Princess Mononoke |
Spirited Away |
Howl's Moving Castle |
Nightmare's
two emotionless pinpoints of red for eyes also resembles Mononoke's
demon god.
Little Nemo |
Princess Mononoke |
All of these examples might suggest
that Miyazaki's aesthetic and thematic concerns are so clear and
strong that they shine through in a film that he was only involved in
for a few months (and has openly stated was the worst experience of
his career). But the eagle-eyed Miyazaki fan will already have picked
up on the key detail here: Little Nemo
was released in 1989, not only predating the cited films by at least
eight years but – much more importantly – predating Miyazaki's
adoption of these aesthetic preferences. Put another way, Little
Nemo looked like Miyazaki before
Miyazaki started to. By 1989, Miyazaki's feature career encompassed
Castle Of Cagliostro,
Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind,
Laputa: Castle In The Sky,
My Neighbour Totoro
and Kiki's Delivery Service.
Aside from the fascination with flying machines, none of these other
tropes had appeared in Miyazaki's own work.
So,
what might be going on here? To answer this question, let us return
to two of our famous faces from Nemo's
production history – the comic writer and artist Jean Giraud a.k.a.
Moebius and the original creator of the strip Winsor McCay. Giraud is
perhaps most famous for his work for Metal Hurlant
(the original French version of Heavy Metal).
Not only is he responsible for both short and longer narrative
comics, but he has collaborated with the likes of Alejandro
Jodorowsky (cult director of El Topo
and The Holy Mountain)
on the unproduced movie epic of Dune
and the comic saga The Incal.
He was also the main visual stylist for Rene Laloux's animated sci-fi
Les Maitres Du Temps.
His style of illustration and art has a clear and identifiable look,
and we can reel off several recurring elements: a fascination with
vast, alien wildernesses and wastelands, populated by bizarre flora
and fauna, exotic architecture that does not always seem to have a
functional purpose and implies a long-forgotten history, and sweeping
aerial 'shots' as characters (most famously the recurring hero
Arzach) fly through the air.
Artwork by Moebius, including images from Les Maitres Du Temps |
These
elements can also be found in Miyazaki's Nausicaa Of The
Valley Of The Wind. Miyazaki has
openly stated his love of Moebius' comic work and cites it as a major
influence on Nausicaa
and so the resemblance is unsurprising – it is a conscious homage.
Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind |
Moebius/Giraud
was not only responsible for one of the drafts of the screen story
for Little Nemo, he
also worked on visual development. Looking at the film, one suspects
that the greatest influence comes in the second half of the film,
once Slumberland has been destroyed and the characters venture into
Nightmareland. The strange wastelands of each setting evoke the world
of Arzach, albeit in a slightly more conventional vein.
Artwork by Moebius |
Little Nemo |
It is
possible to see a clear resemblance in the purged Nightmareland from
the end of Nemo with
the purified caverns beneath the wastelands in Nausicaa.
Little Nemo |
Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind |
Miyazaki's directorial influence on the aesthetic of Nausicaa is undeniable, and we can clearly relate the themes and visuals of the film to other works by the director, but the film still remains tied to the aesthetic of the French comic artist. Let us now turn to Winsor McCay, the original creator of Nemo and his friends.
To say that McCay was a newspaper comic strip artist and earlier animator is a preposterous understatement. To say that McCay pioneered each of these mediums and pushed their artistic possibilities further than any other contemporary is far closer to the mark. Today, we think of early pre-Mickey Mouse animation in terms of the early mass-produced cartoons featuring heroes such as Felix the Cat or Koko the Clown. But McCay, with no prior reference point, animated fully rounded figures that looked consistent from all angles and displayed an array of minute details in their design and movement. Likewise, we might think today of Garfield or even Peanuts when we think of newspaper strip; a brief three or four panel gag. Back at the turn of the twentieth century, McCay was producing huge art-nouveau style images for the daily papers.
What these beautiful images demonstrate is that a) McCay was a bit of a genius, but b) the aesthetic of the 1980s movie draws heavily on the style of the original author/artist. I've argued that Nemo looked like a Miyazaki film almost a decade before Miyazaki made films that even looked like that, but could we say that McCay's own aesthetic and ideas have had an unconscious influence on Miyazaki? Could it be that his brief stint working on the film adaptation of McCay's work led to a belated/delayed influence; maybe the horrible experience of the actual production caused him to suppress any direct acknowledgement of the aesthetic style of the film, and these influences only came out years later, the suppressed finally making a return into Miyazaki's conscious design choices?
It's impossible to say, of course. It is also difficult to really recommend Little Nemo on the basis of its enjoyment-factor, but for those interested in the work of Miyazaki, for those in love with his particular visual style, it might not hurt to give the film a go, just to see a bizarre prophetic vision of the aesthetic that was yet to be born in Miyazaki's own work.
- P.S.
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