Author: Not Alison

Reflections: The Secret of NIMH (1982)

~ Not Alison ~ Leave a comment
photo of the cover of the blu-ray release of the 1982 movie The Secret of NIMH, focussed on a cutely drawn mouse holding an amulet with a reflective red stone

1. The Nostalgic Part
This is another one of those movies I loved as a child, fascinated by and drawn to the dangerous, frightening parts: strange experiments changing you into something you weren’t, companions perishing in a desperate escape, wounds that bleed.

For me this movie has always been blanketed with a layer of tragedy. Bambi is famous for traumatizing children with their first dose of animated death, but in my childhood it was Secret of NIMH that stood out for the weight of physical danger and horrible things being done to you against your will. I wasn’t in any doubt about what happened to those mice that fell down the shaft during the escape, or about the fact that the experiments were horribly painful to the rats. By this time I had seen Star Wars, Clash of the Titans,  and Dragonslayer, but the violence in those live-action movies didn’t affect me the way things in NIMH did. Was NIMH more disturbing because it was less glaringly fantasy-based; because the movie kept things more mysterious; or simply because the story was more intimate so I cared more about the characters? Or was it maybe because all the live-action heroes were fighting back, and the animated mice and rats were so terribly helpless?

2. The Background
The movie is based on a book, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brian, published in 1971. I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard the film changed a lot, which is what you’d expect.

The movie changed the lead character’s name from Frisby to Brisby, and common wisdom says it was to avoid connection with the brand name of a certain “flying disc.” I suspect common wisdom is right, whether that was a legal move necessitated by trademark concerns or simply a worry that her name would make people laugh.

Then much more than now, it was tough to get an animated movie on the theater screen if you weren’t Disney. (This was also before VCRs were common, so there wasn’t even a direct-to-video market.) But this is one of the few that managed it. Don Bluth and his team were helping to blaze a trail for non-Disney animation to be produced and released in the U.S.

3. Scattered Things
Evidently this movie was rated G by people who saw that it was a cartoon and didn’t bother to watch it. It includes vibrant red blood, a deliberate murder, another deliberate killing that was either an effort to save someone else or a bit of revenge (or both), and talk about torture and hearing the screams of laboratory animals at night. The main character is a widow whose husband’s death is the first thing you hear about in the movie. There’s also a quick curse word (spoken by one of the good guys, no less), and I have a suspicion it was thrown in by the filmmakers so the movie would be PG. To no avail.

The movie does an impressive job creating an air of menace and danger in multiple scenes with different threats. Mrs. Brisby is at the mercy of a whole lot of things, whether it’s larger animals or human decisions or illness affecting her children.

I thought the clumsy bird was a crow, but he’s just tiny compared to the cat. On the other hand, the movie—set in North America!—also shows a spider that’s three times the size of a mouse, so I think the animators were a bit unreliable regarding scale.

There’s a quick mention by Mrs. Brisby that her children are better at reading than she is—and while it’s true that learning as a child can be faster than learning as an adult, this is definitely a little nod to the fact that her husband was more than an ordinary mouse and has passed things on to their children.

I am always gripped by scenes of radiant transcendent power summoned by great emotional need to accomplish the impossible just when all hope is gone. And yet I can’t help feeling Secret of NIMH should’ve avoided mixing magic with the science fiction. The amulet, Nicodemus’s whirligig device that shows images from the past, and the rosebush vines that move and rearrange themselves are things I can’t square with the notion that the rats owe their secret world to the intelligence produced in them by medical experimentation.

Before I rewatched this movie, my memory had no doubt that Mrs. Brisby ends up with Justin, the captain of the guard. My memory is wrong. They’re clearly drawn to each other, I wasn’t inventing that, but there’s no hint that they become a couple once the action is over. Which is pretty reasonable but not typical for animated films.

Persephone Speaks

~ Not Alison ~ Leave a comment 
phon-é is not phón-é
So my name does not say “voice,” 
And no one listens to me.

Not my father, Ungreat Zeus, who feels empowered to barter me away
(Both the first time and the second)
He who endorsed the rule that if I ate, I stayed
Perverting the laws of hospitality
And turning them to a curse.
Zeus Xenios, what a lie.

Not Hades, my uncle-husband, who showed me pretty jewels, indeed,
But did not ask if I wanted them enough to stay eternally
Or offer me a choice to come or leave
But imprisoned me from love of my face and shape
Without a thought of what might be my will.

Not my mother, who has never questioned whether I desired to be always at her side
Maiden, decorous, flower-bouquet for her to hold and display
A fragrance for her to delight in
Whatever I might want besides
She was right to protest my capture
But I should like to ask
If she became so angry on my account
	Or on her own.
No use to plant the question, when for me she has no ears.

Then those two brats from Athens
(Or the one was from some other city, it hardly matters which)
Came believing they could steal me from the Underworld
Such fools
And worse believed it did not matter what I wanted or could do
That I either would not or could not stop them
Or have any say in the business of my unending life.
A trinket to be fought for and won by mortal clods:
They actually thought me that.
“Wife,” said Hades, for he must ever grind that in,
“Two human louts have come to abduct you
And are even now roaming the caves in search of this throne-room,
To find you and take you back with them.”
While he described the inventive torments he meant for them to have in place of me,
I thought more and more of what those men must have thought and felt.
And grew a burning rage.
Lava flows beneath the earth as well as rising through volcanoes.
My hands gripped the sides of the onyx throne,
and I looked at my chair here.
Yes, this seemed right.
Let them become what they thought me to be.
I rose and left the throne-room,
To set the trap for those two “heroes.”
A bench prepared, bare stone, but made to look inviting
And there the two mortals, weary from hopeless searching, sat
And forgot everything.
Memory will return if they simply rise,
But there is no reason that they ever should.
They have no thoughts with which to form an intent
No will to carry one out
No voice in which to ask for aid
And none around who would give it.
Let them sit.
Their clothes may rot and fall away, but their bodies will not age or die
And their minds shall forever be empty.
And the longer they remain, the more the stone will cling to flesh
For it should be a part of them
Inseparable
Till no one knows where they diverge
Or can imagine one without the other.

When Hades, uncle-husband, saw what I had done,
His smile grew sour, cheated of the devious torments he had wanted to inflict,
But he said only,
“Ah well! This works too!”
So there the two men sit, empty vases on a shelf
To be looked at and amused by.
While I sit full of other things.

Reflections: Dragonslayer (1981)

~ Not Alison ~ Leave a comment
photo of the cover for a DVD release of the 1981 movie Dragonslayer, showing a dragon flying in the upper right corner and the hero crouching with spear and shield in the lower left corner
Cover of one DVD release of Dragonslayer

1. Movie Background
Dragonslayer is one of those movies you know was made before the PG-13 rating existed, because there’s no way it would’ve gotten a simple PG otherwise. On the other hand, the more-than-PG material isn’t a large portion of the movie, so the studio might’ve chosen to simply trim out some shots to secure a PG and keep the younger audience dollars intact. (And it’s not so much the main dragon fight as the underwater semi-nudity and a sprinkling of gore, since action violence gets more allowance than other non-child content.)

Offhand, I don’t know what made a movie studio put out a sword-and-sorcery fantasy film in 1981. (It wasn’t made in response to Clash of the Titans, because the two movies would’ve been in production at the same time.) Star Wars and its many coattail-riders were still the big thing, not castles and dragons and wizards. I don’t know when Dungeons and Dragons began its 1980s rise, but Dragonslayer did come out before the D&D cartoon and action figures, and also before He-Man.

Then again, there’s Thundarr the Barbarian and Blackstar. IMDB tells me Thundarr was around in 1980 and Blackstar started airing in late 1981. (I thought Blackstar was later, but I guess I won’t argue.) So there was something going on with entertainment in this area.

(Also, an extra nod to Blackstar, a mainstream Saturday-morning cartoon whose hero was specifically identified as a Native American and whose heritage wasn’t, to my memory, played for stereotypes. All the way back then.)

2. The Nostalgic Part
I saw this movie in the theater. I have a suspicion my mother would not have allowed that if she’d known what all was in it. Somehow instead of being frightened by the scary stuff I was fascinated and really enjoyed it. I do remember, though, that at the part where the two leads end up swimming together and the big revelation ensues, I didn’t understand what was going on and had to ask. Watching it now the visuals are clear enough, but either I blinked or I was simply less attuned to the different curvatures of human sexes. (This scene is not wildly explicit, but it’s not especially vague either.) When I first saw it, I didn’t understand why the character had been pretending, but I didn’t worry about it.

I remember playing Dragonslayer in the back yard, crouching down with a make-believe shield and imagining the giant dragon above me ready to breathe down fire.

I also remember, though, my utterly unreasonable prejudice against the hero’s short, curly hair. It just seemed frivolous. Heroes weren’t supposed to have hair like that, in my mind.

3. Points of Interest
By and large, the moviemakers didn’t try to show more than they knew their special effects crew could manage. Compared to Clash of the Titans, this movie is less ambitious, and therefore more visually convincing. It helps, of course, that the dragon is mostly seen in dark, tight caves or flying in the distance at night. In fact the cave scenes are quite effective in showing the menace of this creature in a way that the Kraken fight did not. An effect I especially liked was the sheets of flame moving across the surface of a lake, which I’m guessing was done with simple gasoline but looks great.

There’s a virgin sacrifice who does not stand trembling with shrieks or weeping, or even pleading, but actively fights to get loose and escape. Working resolutely before the dragon appears, she bloodies her hands and wrists to get loose from her manacles, and even when the creature approaches doesn’t scream until she’s actually lifted into the air. There would be nothing wrong with screaming in her situation, but the filmmakers’ choice to have this minor, unnamed character act with fierce determination instead of the conventional helpless-victim routine deserves extra appreciation.

While we’re on the subject, we see another young woman sacrificed, and she is there through her own courage and moral sense of justice. Even when she’s freed she boldly steps forward to go on and meet this fate—knowing what will happen to her, but accepting it because she believes this will save the kingdom and running would make things worse for everyone. She doesn’t need to die, but her reasons aren’t stupid.

Like those two, the female lead of the story is, throughout, courageous and bold and determined. These three are the only women who stay on camera more than five seconds, but they display their bravery despite a scenario in which screaming, wailing, or cowering would be the more typical movie portrayal. They aren’t helpless or passive or mere objects: they have agency and they use it, whether the effort succeeds or not.

Including a Christian priest seems like a setup for a cheap swipe at religion . . . and in some ways it is, eventually . . . but all the same he shows himself to be steadfast and faithful, not a hypocrite or a punchline like I was expecting.

In the middle of the movie there’s a scene where the unlikable villain-esque king condemns the hero as a self-appointed savior who has meddled in things without any idea what the consequences will be. The king is the bad guy of the movie, second to the dragon, but in this speech he is entirely and utterly correct in what he says about the hero. And events prove him right.

At one point the female lead tells the hero, in essence, “We failed. We’d better just leave town before things get worse.” And the hero . . . agrees. Off they go. The movie won’t be complete unless they eventually turn back, but when she brings it up there are no arguments about abandoning other people or running away from the mess you made or unfairness to anyone else, just the acknowledgment that circumstances are terrible and it would be very impractical to stick around. This is unusual for an action hero.

Dragonslayer fundamentally takes itself seriously, as a movie should if it means to frighten you with a deadly dragon. Unusually, it treats sacrificial maidens as being real people, not just screaming audience-bait. There’s a good bit of humor mixed in, but it’s basically in the things characters say (along with a bit of satire at the end aimed at kingly pretension), while the events and actions are treated as bearing real costs and consequences, resulting in significant danger when people make the wrong decisions. Maybe the movie didn’t need quite so much engagement with the baby dragons, though.

Reflections: Turning Red (2022)

~ Not Alison ~ Leave a comment

SPOILER alert: I don’t normally bother with spoiler warnings, but this movie is fresh in the world, unlike most of the things I write about, so be aware that I’m writing as if the reader has already seen the film and knows all the turns the plot takes.

Great stories carry universal themes within the vessel of a specific, closely defined context. One thing such stories do is allow you to connect with one aspect of what’s happening while learning about other aspects you’re less familiar with.

There can be multiple themes in one story, and Turning Red isn’t “about” only one thing. It’s about:

• allowing yourself to feel and to express your own emotions, when other people don’t want you to

• friendship as the nest of comfort encasing you so you are safe to experience difficult feelings

• inter-generational trauma

• puberty

• the cost of hiding things from your children that they are going to have to deal with, whether those are biological realities or family history or something else

• guilt and shame, and the dangers of burying them

• the painful process of separating from your parents as you grow older

• children struggling to protect the emotional well-being of their parents

• going overboard and taking things too far while trying to protect someone you love

• family coming together, or staying together, despite conflicts

• mother-daughter dynamics specific to Chinese culture and how those dynamics interact with a Western cultural environment

• people turning into adorable fluffy talking animals

As a viewer you probably won’t relate to every one of those things, in the sense of having gone through them yourself, but that’s okay. Most people will recognize several of those concerns from their own lives or the lives of those they care about, although the experiences won’t match precisely.

The closer you are to the context portrayed in the film—being a 13-year-old-girl of Cantonese-speaking Chinese heritage growing up in a temple in Toronto in 2002—the more you might find in the film that resonates with your life, but that doesn’t mean everyone else is left out. You can still connect to Meilin and her emotions despite differences in biographical data, just like you can read and appreciate Oliver Twist without ever having been an orphaned English boy with possible family secrets growing up in the slums of Victorian-era London under the malevolent eye of a master pickpocket.

Why “Turning Red”? Why a red panda?

As the film points out, in Chinese culture red means good luck. In Western culture, red often means anger. (It can also mean blushing.) In plenty of cultures red suggests blood, and in this movie it’s impossible to ignore the connection to menstrual blood. (Notice Meilin’s mother using the euphemism “red peony.”)

Oh, right—we also use red to symbolize sexual desire.

The red panda isn’t simply a metaphor for menstruation or puberty. Or simply a metaphor for uncontrolled anger (and other feelings). It’s some of both, and it’s also lucky, providing the means for Meilin to get free of emotional quicksand, and we are reminded more than once that the ability to change into a red panda was supposed to be a blessing, not a curse.

(But there again we run into a menstruation euphemism, this time Western, referring to it as “the curse” when it doesn’t have to be viewed as one.)

A lot of filmmakers would’ve made the main character a loner or given her just a single friend. Not only is Meilin part of a crew, but her friends are the very reason she can manage her inner panda so well.

One suspects her mother did not have close friends when this was happening to her.

So far I’ve only seen Turning Red once, and I don’t remember how specific the film is about when Meilin’s mother first turned panda, or even if she only changed once (when the incident occurred).

But:
– When we see her in the bamboo forest she looks older than Meilin.
– Her parents are surprised this happened to Meilin this young, so much so that her mother’s first response is “period” and not “panda.” (If we accept this as more than just a movie trick to make the eventual reveal more surprising.)
– We know that when she went feral she was already seriously dating her future husband.

It may be that her inner panda is SO much bigger and SO much more destructive than Meilin’s because she kept it in too long, steadfastly suppressing her feelings because she refused to push back against her mother’s grip. (Until.)

Meilin, though, is younger when she first allows herself to have a conflict with her mother, and therefore her panda emerges earlier in her life.

Let’s not forget that the red panda was given to women of this family to act as a defense. Its very existence is explicitly defined as a way to protect the family from harm, and that includes protecting yourself.

It’s sad that Meilin’s grandmother and aunties feel the need to seal their panda sides away again, but it’s not a mixed message. These women have spent the vast majority of their lives with those red panda spirits locked away, and they simply lack the means to cope with them in day to day living. Just “learning a valuable lesson” isn’t enough to address that.

That is not to say it’s too late for the grandmother and aunties, only that if they want to integrate their inner pandas it’s going to be a gradual process and they’ll need slow, steady adjustments to reach a point where they can handle it. Not merely “Meilin showed us the way so now it’s easy!” I deeply respect the filmmakers’ choice to stick with the reality of people’s capacity to change rather than taking the happier ending.

It is essential to Turning Red that Meilin had her friends before she had a secret. Not because those girls wouldn’t have been able to move beyond the weirdness and get to know her, but because she would not have been able to give herself to them while trying to hold that secret inside.

There’s a moment in the film that would’ve been the emotional climax or major turning point in many other movies: Meilin goes to the party in the cardboard panda suit, and the crowd doesn’t like her. She has to turn into the real fluffy panda before the other kids care. Obviously this will spark Meilin’s moment of realization: “They don’t want me, none of this popularity is about who I am, it’s all about the panda, it’s fake and shallow and I can’t believe I thought they liked me!” Right?

Nope. In Turning Red this isn’t even a ripple on the water. There are bigger fish to catch, thematically; and popularity and acceptance by the larger group has never been Meilin’s goal. Think about that: a movie about a thirteen-year-old that gives her sudden access to broad popularity for the first time, and while she’s certainly enjoying it, it isn’t what matters to her.

And when, in Miriam’s words, she throws her friends under the bus, it’s not because she forgot them while chasing social glories (teen story plot #302); she does it because she’s afraid of/doesn’t want to disappoint her mother. This is a critical distinction in the direction and focus of Turning Red.

On the subject of whether Turning Red is a “realistic” portrayal of thirteen-year-olds, I have two observations.

1. In real life, Meilin’s drawings of Daisy Mart Devon would probably have been made over two or three days, not all in one steamy evening. But this is a movie and they have less than two hours to tell the whole story, so they’ve condensed things a little.

2. When Meilin and Tyler see each other again at the concert, the first time since she attacked him, I don’t understand why he has no particular reaction. Whatever apology her mother would’ve made her recite at the end of the party would not be enough. We did avoid the lying macho bravado of “What? I wasn’t really scared!” and I would thank the filmmakers for that if they had given us something else instead. But I saw nothing, not even a glare from him. Tyler gets pulled into the group, Meilin reappears, and he’s happy and easy-going. That part doesn’t feel quite right. (Maybe I overlooked something I’ll notice the next time I watch it?)

The one criticism of the movie I’ve seen that has any standing is that “it constantly uses Black culture but has no Black main characters.” The historical reality is that back in 2002 and before, white boy bands were shamelessly appropriating dance moves, hand gestures, clothing styles, speech patterns, and slang that came from Black communities. (To what degree Latinx communities contributed I don’t know enough to say.) Turning Red reflects that reality, and it would be unfair to blame the film for the actual cultural theft. It also seems pretty true to life that the teenage characters would not be aware of this as being appropriation: to them it’s “boy band culture” and they haven’t reflected on it more deeply that that, because most non-Black kids at the time probably didn’t.

Still, “that’s how it was” is not enough to wash away all of a movie’s responsibility on a subject. When you’re creating a fictional story, you don’t have to faithfully reproduce every single aspect of the time period you’re looking at. After all, the filmmakers proudly stepped forward to offer us a boy band 8000% more diverse and inclusive than the ones that actually existed. Indeed one of the band members, the one our protagonist is most obsessed with, who therefore gets the most screen time, is Black. Even if you think that’s not enough, it should not be overlooked.

Should the film have done more to balance its use of appropriated Black cultural elements? Possibly. How much responsibility does it bear for addressing a situation it reflects but did not create? I’m not sure. Some.

I’m not clear on what the answer should be, but I do see there’s a valid question here.

This is one of my favorite Pixar films. And I’ve never even been to Toronto.

Reflections: Clash of the Titans (1981)

~ Not Alison ~ Leave a comment
photo of the cover of the blu-ray for the movie Clash of the Titans (1981), showing a large Perseus aiming a sword, with Medusa aiming her bow in the lower left corner and Pegasus flying in the lower right corner

If you’ve ever heard someone say, “Release the kraken!” in an imposing voice, you can thank this movie.

The Nostalgic Part
I saw this movie as a child when it was originally released. My siblings and I had the action figures, even though the toy company made Perseus look mean and unappealing. But, I mean, Calibos! How could you resist a figure like that? (Though I don’t think my mom was too comfortable with it.) Sadly, in our household we never had the Kraken toy, which was awesome-looking.

For many, many people of my generation, this movie was a spark that got us interested in Greek mythology. Even if it got things wrong, it made us care about the stories.

The Mythological Background
First, we have to get this out of the way:

1. A kraken is actually a giant squid, and comes from Northern European legends, not Greek myth. The Perseus of myth did face a sea monster, however. (In Greek it was labeled as a kétos, a generic term that could include giant fish and whales as well as unspecified menacing sea creatures.)

2. Perseus did not ride on Pegasus; Bellerophon did, when fighting the Chimaira. Perseus had winged sandals to keep him in the air. Pegasus is connected to Perseus, however, since the winged horse reportedly sprang from the neck of Medusa when Perseus decapitated her.

3. Pegasus is a Greek word, not a Roman one, and if you’re going to be pedantic, the proper plural is pegasoi (not pegasi) and you ought to be spelling the singular pegasos or pégasos in the first place.

4. The Titans were a specific group of beings in Greek myth; Medusa wasn’t one of them, and neither was the sea monster that threatened Andromeda.

Next, some other mythological tidbits:

A. Medusa had two sisters, and all three were referred to as Gorgons, although “the Gorgon” would usually mean Medusa. The tradition is a little unclear about whether all three could kill people with a look, and in some accounts Medusa was mortal and the other two were immortal, though all three were daughters of the same two primal deities.

B. In the original stories, there was a king who wanted to marry Perseus’s mother, and Perseus said something careless to him about getting the Gorgon’s head. Unexpectedly the king took him up on it, saying, “Okay, bring it to me.” More unexpectedly, Perseus did so.

C. Curiously, the earliest Greek sources for the Perseus story seem to assume he used a sickle, not Medusa’s head, to defeat the sea monster. The head was a way to kill his human enemies, not a giant creature.

D. Mythology says Andromeda’s mother got the kingdom cursed with a sea monster by claiming to be more beautiful than the Nereids (a group of sea divinities). The movie changes this to the mother saying Andromeda was more beautiful than Thetis (who in myth was one of the Nereids and also the mother of Achilleus).

The Movie
Although the movie doesn’t stay faithful to the original myths, there is nevertheless some good storytelling here. It doesn’t just throw in bits of myth at random, hoping to “look cool,” it uses those elements to create obstacles for the hero to overcome and add complexity to the story.

Focusing on Thetis, instead of a group of Nereids, makes the plot and character motivations easier to follow and relate to.

Making Andromeda the subject of the “more beautiful” boast creates an obvious reason why the daughter, not the mother who makes the boast, is the one being sacrificed.

Calibos is an invention of the movie, but he makes a good villain, and it’s useful to have a human-but-slightly-inhuman antagonist to mess things up so Perseus doesn’t get by too easily. (Calibos is probably inspired by actual-myth-character Phineus, who had been promised Andromeda and therefore hated Perseus, but he was totally human and wasn’t much of a challenge.)

A little thing like saying Calibos’s worst crime was wiping out all the winged horses except Pegasus helps explain why Calibos finds it so easy to trap Pegasus when Perseus struggled to do so: Calibos is an old hand at this. It also provides an unstated reason why he doesn’t simply kill Pegasus outright: having already been turned into a semi-creature for slaughtering winged horses, he’s not going to risk killing the last one and getting cursed even more horribly. We can assume that he plans to release Pegasus once the immediate crisis is over and figures Zeus won’t throw any thunderbolts just for pinning the animal in a cage a few days.

The early sequence of Argos being destroyed is pretty strong stuff, despite the easy-to-spot superimposed images.

Giving Zeus a little theatre model with clay figures of people has no basis in myth that I’m aware of, but it’s a great device for the movie.

Yes, the special effects look dated and often clumsy. There was no CGI back then, and everything was done in-camera or with superimposed images or with stop-motion miniatures. This may be peak Harryhausen, though. Clay Calibos’s head is too big, but Medusa and the Kraken look quite impressive for what they are.

Other Thoughts
Perseus is an idiot for not retrieving his sword near the end. Come on, this is not a helmet lost in the swamp. The sword is right there. Just because someone’s impaled on the blade is no reason not to get it back.

Charon doesn’t belong in this story at all, but he is just the right kind of creepy and adds an extra tone of menace to the approach to Medusa. I do wonder how Perseus paid the fare to get back, though.

Isn’t it an amazing coincidence how the Kraken has an ape-like face so he can look like a certain other movie monster when he reaches out a gigantic hand to take hold of the woman chained up as a sacrifice?

Much of my information on actual Greek myths is derived from Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1-volume hardback 1993 / 2-volume paperback 1996).