Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - Critique

Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) is interesting as a critical film, because instead of seeing the process of environmental pollution, we only see the result. The film starts in the "new normal" achieved after some previous crisis that is mentioned but not fully expounded upon in the film. Instead teaching children how to prevent pollution, the film teaches them how to live in an already polluted world, and how to fix it. By framing the plot this way, Miyazaki is politically preparing his viewers to inherit a broken world and gives them a heroine to emulate in order to begin to heal it. From the beginning of the film, children are encouraged to stretch their critical analysis muscles and ask, “why the world like this?”

Nausicaä also portrays a critical view of history and society because of its alternate Earth setting. The deliberate selection of certain World War II era design choices voice a political opinion—the German-like gas masks, airplanes, and military uniforms visually reminds the viewer of the Nazis and their totalitarian regime, coloring the Tolmekians and their princess as extremists. The Tolmekians also echo World War II not just in design, but in actions too. They’re plan to destroy the Sea of Decay is to awaken a great monster that has a weapon very similar to an atomic bomb.  By designing the Tolmekians and their Great Warrior to echo that of the Nazis and atomic warfare, the film encourages children to make connections between the destruction of war and the destruction of the environment.

 

In contrast, Nausicaä is clothed in blues and whites, pleading for a stop to the violence. This film preaches nonviolence, with Nausicaä leading the way after her own commitment to the ideal after her father’s death. Although the Sea of Decay is spreading and destroying towns, it’s the Ohms that pose the immediate threat in the film. Ohms react violently to any damage humans do to the Sea of Decay, making it not pollution that angers the earth, but violence itself. Nausicaä’s gentle treatment of the spores leads her to discover how to grow them purely, while the Tolmekians’ desire to destroy the plague leads to a deadly rampage of thousands of Ohms. Even with the squirrel-fox Nausicaä practices nonviolence, allowing it to bite her out of fear and realize on its own that there is no threat.

 

 Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind uses a double pronged strategy, advocating both environmental preservation and nonviolence. It communicates these political views through design, color, and (most importantly) story. The film’s ending also encourages active hope in the viewers, as Nuasicaä succeeds in ending the war and finding a cure to the Sea of Decay, but the world is still polluted.

Lego Star Wars: The Video Game - Play Analysis

The Lego game franchise is ever evolving and expanding, but it all began (at least for this new age of console gaming) with Lego Star Wars: The Video Game (2005). Though it retained some aspects of play it had before, such as intertextuality, Lego’s translation from physical building blocks to video game created new aspects of play for children to engage in--elastic game complexity, competition/cooperation, and creative interpretation.

I played Lego Star Wars on an original Xbox, the console I grew up playing the game on. The very structure of the game encourages complex and varied interaction with both the game and your fellow players. The game appeals to a wide age range of players. Younger children can enjoy themselves by smashing blocks and bad guys and easily walking through the levels, while older children (and adults) can engage more deeply with the design as they explore to find secret rooms, strategically stay alive to conserve studs and achieve “True Jedi” status, and unlock the various achievements in each level as well as find all the easter eggs. The fact that none of the characters talk also makes the game accessible to all ages because it isn’t necessary to know how to read in order to understand the game. The game’s procedure is simple, find your way to the end of the level using the characters given you, but it has the potential to become more complex for older players.

Playing solo is fulfilling and successful, but the game is really designed to be played by two people. Here is where the Lego block concepts of construction/deconstruction are translated into cooperation/competition, as players need to work together to win the levels. The shared screen requires the two players to work as a team, as one player cannot run off solo to accomplish the goals on their own. As my sister joined me in play, we went through our bouts of arguing which way to explore, how to jump, destroying each other with light sabers, and working together to unlock secrets. Unlike most team games, friendly-fire is on and it is completely possible to destroy your partner again and again (to their annoyance). Players have to overcome their competitive tendencies and work together to push buttons, build/move Lego blocks, and defeat bosses.

The video game also retains the intertextuality that playing with Lego blocks often creates. During Free Play (an option available once the level is completed) the player is able to rotate through several characters, putting characters in situations that never occur in the original story. For example, you can play as Darth Maul and fight General Grievous, or have a battle droid save Naboo. In the main menu, you can also mix-and-match heads, bodies, legs, and weapons of all the characters and create your own player. This intertextual play (admittedly, only within the Star Wars canon) reflects the creativity and imagination of a child’s natural play. The game also incorporates a child’s interpretation of the iconic story of Star Wars: Episode I-III. Coming back to the no-dialogue game style, the story is distilled down to the narrative moments that strike children the most while viewing the films, and put a kid-friendly angle on them. Violence is translated into blocks coming apart (children accept popping off a Lego head) and bad guys become comical gags.

Within Lego Star Wars: The Video Game, children have the freedom to explore their virtual play space, destroying and creating, solving puzzles, and defeating hordes of droids, all while enjoying the narrative and aesthetics of the Star Wars franchise. Their play within the game builds their skills of cooperation, curiosity, and creativity as they play with others, manipulate their environments and unlock achievements, and use their imaginations to push the game to its limits.

Winnie-the-Pooh - Nostalgia Analysis

Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) has a strong atmosphere of nostalgia, as Pooh Bear and his friends innocently engage with the benign woodland world around them. On his return to England from fighting in World War I as a signaling officer, Alan Alexander Milne continued his writing career. After writing several moderately successful but no longer remembered plays, he created the iconic, universal character of Winnie the Pooh. More accurately, he created a fictional version of his son, Christopher Robin, and his toy bear.

The devastation of World War  I certainly has a large role to play in the appealing nostalgia in Winnie-the-Pooh. The war brought an end to many things—a generation of men, romanticization of the glory of war, and the class system (a progressive but upsetting social and political change). The pastoral setting of Winnie-the-Pooh longs for a simpler past of simpler language and the clean innocence of a child at play. Today, Winnie-the-Pooh still creates a nostalgia for a pastoral, pre-war past, but its legacy has also created new forms of nostalgia.

The writing style itself throws the reader back into an idealized childhood, of a parent reading a bedtime story to their child. Milne acts as both the author and the narrator, interacting with the characters in such a way that he is interrupted by them while he is addressing the reader. It’s as if the reader were sitting in on a scene of a father reading to his son. For example:

“…he likes to sit quietly in front of the fire and listen to a story. This evening—”

“What about a story?” said Christopher Robin.

“What about a story?” I said.

“Could you very sweetly tell Winnie-the-Pooh one?”

“I suppose I could,” I said. …

So I tried.

(pg. 4)

Milne’s use of “you” changes from addressing the reader and addressing Christopher Robin who is also a listener while the narrator tells stories involving him. The texts language also reflects an idealized past as it is very polite and charming while imitating the speech of a child. Pooh Bear is constantly saying things like, “Oh bother!” while Christopher calls him “Silly old Bear!”

Obviously, nostalgia can only be created when time has separated us from a period of life, but experience is also crucial to nostalgia. Children are unable to romanticize their lives as they are in them, not just because they are currently living them but because they lack the experience required to feel the keen sense of loss (at least in terms of time) that makes up nostalgia. Returning to the past is only appealing to us as adults because of the new knowledge we bring with us. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh appeals to the adult experience over the child’s with its small jokes of misspelled words, gentle mocking of social niceties, and a comic appreciation for child logic. Piglet’s sign, “Trespassers W,” (broken sign of “Trespassers Will Be Shot,” not the name of his grandfather), and the logic that Pooh must lose his fat for a week rather than digging him out, are examples of needing adult experience to appreciate the childish aspects of the story.

But most of all, Winnie-the-Pooh calls to our own experiences of our parents reading the story to us, a nostalgia evoked by the narration style and illustrations. It is a common childhood experience that appeals to most adults as they remember a shared memory of an idealized past, listening to a story deep in the Hundred Acre Woods where Christopher Robin was free to play and imagine with his friends.

George Washington - Diversity

Although George Washington isn’t a film that expressly sets out to expose the inequality of poor, black children in North Carolina, it does so by examining their lives and how they react to the situation of their friend dying. It is shot intimately and acted authentically which adds to the underlying argument that these children’s poor situation needs to be heard.

As was demonstrated with the children’s books we read, childhood is a time of identity formation. It is when people begin to attach things like race and culture to their personal definitions. George Washington takes place just before this formation—when children are still naïve to the seriousness of the inequalities of the world. Roger Ebert describes it as “the summer when adolescence has arrived, but…makes you feel hopeful…[and] powerful instead of unsure.” The children see each other as equals in spite of age difference or skin color or medical condition. The adults working on the railway converse with the children as if there was nothing to separate them. Green creates a sort of paradise (later shattered by the death of Buddy) of hot summer days spent in peace with all.

The film assumes that their world is the only world—there isn’t a real binary (besides the audience’s own experience) to compare their situation with. Green privileges this one side of the binary by treating it as if it were the only side. However, he keeps waving red flags for the audience in order to ground their almost surreal existence in reality. For instance, the portrait of Pres. Bush Sr. starkly stands out against its environment , just as George did when he walked by the predominantly white parade sporting beauty queens and fat, white business owners and politicians. These jolting reminders that the children’s situations are underprivileged and not a summer fairytale  emphasizes the plight of the film.

The form of the film contributes to privileging their poor, minority living as we see it through the perception of the children, similar to the way poor life was portrayed in the clip from Days of Heaven. The cinematography is glowing, warm, and beautiful, emphasizing the overgrown, rusty beauty of rural North Carolina, creating an almost surreal environment. However, the subject matter and the acting counteract the surrealist look of the film as they were uncomfortably realistic. Buddy’s death was terrifying in its suddenness and innocence, breaking the spell of these children’s carefree lives and bringing the immediacy of the problem of these children’s situations right to the forefront. Their varied reactions to their friend’s death brings a universality to their characters, peeling away the alienating layers of dialect, race, culture, and economic status that may have distanced the audience before.

Disney Infinity - Play

A child’s play incorporates many learning and social experiences that are crucial to their development—play isn’t simply a recreation to them. As we experienced in class, play involves competition, rules, mimicking adults, agency, intertextuality, interactivity, and interpretation. The clips, board games, and the video game, Disney Infinity, all demonstrate the multifaceted nature of children’s play.

It was interesting to watch those who don’t often (or never) play video games pick up the controller and figure out the mechanics of the game. Several times I heard the phrase, “What are we supposed to be doing?” This might be the key to understanding a child’s play versus an adult’s play—as we grow older, activities must have some kind of purpose and when one isn’t found, the activity isn’t worth our time, but a goal-less sandbox game like Disney Infinity appeals to a child’s curiosity and sense of play. Those of us who were more familiar with video games (or simply, more in touch with their inner child, game experience or not) found the freedom of the game exciting. Some chose to fight with their characters, other wanted to build the world around them. The possibilities of character and environment manipulation/exploration were huge, which I think appealed to some and daunted others.

The design of Disney Infinity reminded me of several other video games I’ve played—Minecraft, Skylanders, etc. Because of my past experience, I felt very comfortable picking up the controller and guessing how the designers had laid out the button commands and level objectives—right trigger for gas, 1^st button (X on the PlayStation) for jumping, left trigger for targeting, etc. This is an example of play teaching skills, even if these skills are only transferable between games. However, I’d like to argue that games teach more than just skills only useful when playing other games. When in the context of society, with other people, games can teach sportsmanship and social skills, patience, dedication, and other general life lessons. They can even teach marketable, tangible skills, such as programming and artistry. It’s when a game is decontextualized, when a child plays a game exclusively and separated from other people, that is when negative skills are learned (and where violent video games gain their bad reputation). If children play intertextually, then they also learn intertextually, and the lessons or skills they learn in a game can be transferred to other situations in their life.

My brother avidly played a video game named Kodu, basically a sandbox game with a user-friendly interface to allow the player to build worlds, create objects/characters, and then program those objects/characters with behaviors. It used standard programming logic, with “if-then” statements and modifications such as “except” and “when.” My brother became extremely involved, programming games, scenarios, worlds, etc., and pushing the game to its limits. At the age of 10 he took up an email exchange with the game’s creator, suggesting patches and new ideas for the game, which the creator took seriously and invited him to beta test every version of the game after that. His play was more than an unwind at the end of a school day. He used his creativity, curiosity, and competitive nature to learn programming, logic, and social skills that has impacted his life now as a 17 year-old being accepted to colleges.

(http://youtu.be/9Hp_T0gVkKY?t=10s)

Fantasia 2000 - Experimentation Analysis

Disney’s Fantasia 2000 uses experimentation of form and animation to bring the highbrow art of symphonic music to general audiences and, specifically, children. It modernizes the idea of high art and tempers its rules and traditions with abstract, animated expressionism. Children in particular respond to this experimental hybrid of high and low art because of its base emotional appeal—the music and the color-rich pictures eliminate the need for traditional storytelling.

Communication through words is not a child’s strong suit, but that doesn’t imply that they’re emotions aren’t complex. The music serves as the dialogue, the character’s (or abstraction’s) voice being a violin, oboe, French horn, or other instrument. The complexities of the musical compositions and the abstract stories expressed through the visuals communicate to children what they themselves have trouble expressing in words.

Three of the musical segments express different aspects of this experimentation with animation, music, and emotion. The film opens with an abridged rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This piece pulls the archetypal theme of light versus dark from the song through an abstract animation of triangles (butterflies?), light cascades, and angular black shapes. The “story” of this segment is more concerned with the struggle between heavenly color and light, and the dark, sharp black of below than it is with any character development or moral. The winging triangles and rapidly changing moods and backgrounds of the animation recall the formal practices of modern art. Children’s identification with the theme of light (good) versus dark (bad) of the music, gained through the visuals, provides them access into the world of high art and emotional expression.

The segments “Pines of Rome” and “Firebird Suite” provide a more narrative-based interpretation of the music, but also abstractly interpret the emotions of symphonic music. Though its title evokes images of trees and ancient Rome, Respighi’s piece is translated into an arctic ocean with giant whales swimming in the water and the sky. The animation stretches the imagination as whales, seemingly by the power of a star, take to the sky and breach breathtakingly in seas of clouds and light. The separation of the baby whale from his parents and the communal flight of the herd of whales to the clouds suggest a theme of familial love and protection, a theme reinforced by the tonal shift in the music from eerie/cold to grand/warm that children respond to emotionally.

The “Firebird Suite” sequence, similar to the “Beethoven’s Fifth” sequence, uses abstract ideas of nature of myth to express the archetypal struggle between destruction and renewal. Using the incredible emotion of Stravinsky’s composition, the animators visualize a soulful elk and a fluid nymph who is destroyed by a volcano spirit, but emerges from the ashes to renew nature once more. At moments the music surpasses the capability of the animation, and at others the animation interprets the music with such skill that it surpasses what the music could accomplish on its own. The hybrid of symphonic music and skilled animation communicate emotional and abstract concepts that dialogue and story alone could not accomplish.

By experimenting with the mixing of high and low art, orchestra and cartoon, Disney brings a legitimization to animation as an expressive art while making symphonic orchestration more accessible to a general audience. The animated visuals of the film appeal to the need for a form of story for the audience, children especially, and the music speaks the characters emotions and compliments the colors and movements of the animation. By demonstrating that Beethoven, Stravinsky, and other composers can express joys, fears, and emotions that children experience, Disney legitimizes the childish experience and condition.

Little House in the Big Woods - Documentation Analysis

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book, Little House in the Big Woods, is a selected account of her memories as a child growing up in a settler family. Because they are remembered experiences rather than current, recorded ones, the memories are boiled down to what impacted her as a child the most. Woven in with these experiential memories are pragmatic descriptions of common processes (making butter, cheese, etc.), creating a book that both documents a child’s perspective and the type of life a child lived in the late 1800s.

The story begins with what concerns a child most when being introduced to a new place—her home. Laura’s world centers on the “little gray house made of logs” (1) and expands outward from this center of gravity. Next, Wilder describes the large surrounding forest, filled with both benign and dangerous wild animals. The forest is simply referred to as the “Big Woods” by Laura, a child-like name that captures her straightforward view of the world around her. Similarly, Wilder capitalizes “Butchering Time” (18) to characterize how a child groups together time by the activities associated with it. Wilder captures the main concerns of a child—where you sleep, where you play, what you eat, where you are safe—through describing the world, expanding from the familiar house and out into the unknown woods.

Wilder is also careful to document not only the descriptions of her life as a child, but her childish mindset as well. In one passage, Laura personifies her corncob doll, casually treating it as if it were living: “Mary was bigger than Laura, and she had a rag doll named Nettie. Laura had only a corncob wrapped in a handkerchief, but it was a good doll. It was named Susan. It wasn’t Susan’s fault that she was only a corncob. Sometimes Mary let Laura hold Nettie, but she did it only when Susan couldn’t see” (21). This short passage captures Laura’s jealousy of her sister and her own imaginative compensation for that jealousy with language that rings authentic. A child’s logical thought process is also documented, with “Santa Claus did not give grown up people presents, but that was not because they were not good…It was because they were grown up, and grown people must give each other presents” (79).

Most of the book, however, is spent describing the work processes of living in a cabin in the woods. Smoking meat, making cheese, churning butter, tanning leather, Sunday routines, and many other tasks are described simply but with enough description to peak the curiosity of child readers. Each chapter is an episode describing a different event or chore to be done, moving the reader through Laura's life based on the work of the season. Though Laura is set several chores and works her fair share, her time to play is also included. Though many of these tasks are menial or mundane, it captures the true experience of a child living in the late 1800s.

Pa’s stories in particular impact Laura because it’s through stories that children learn about the world around them, and, in particular, learn about correct behavior. Each story has a serious moral that is important to Laura’s everyday life, whether it be to obey her parents or behave reverently on Sundays. Wilder’s inclusion of these stories documents their importance to her childhood experience, and captures the integral role stories play in a child’s development.

Little House in the Big Woods is a documentation of a child’s perspective and experience growing up in a cabin in the woods, doing chores and playing with her family. Its simple language expresses Laura’s young age while the episodic stories document the hard work and happy rewards of an industrious life.

----------

As a side note, I love this physical example of documentation. I read my mother's copy of the book that she received when she was eight years old.