Lest you forget, this column not only puts comics in context, but also movies and television shows that relate in some way to comics and cartoon art. I can’t really analyze the meaning and structure of a work without dealing with the ending, which not only resolves the plot but completes the ideas the creators were trying to convey. So here is the spoiler warning for those who wish it.
EXTREME MAKEOVER
We begin with the latest animated blockbuster, Shrek 2, which opened last week (as I write) both nationwide and at the Cannes Film Festival, of all places, perhaps in acknowledgement of the excellence and wide popularity of the original film. I should mention in passing that the first Shrek also spawned a witty and cleverly imagined comics series written for Dark Horse by the reliable Mark Evanier. I wondered when I read it why Evanier picked up the Shrek saga with Shrek and his new bride, Princess Fiona, on their way to their honeymoon but not quite getting there. Shrek 2 makes it clear: it opens with the honeymoon!
I got the impression that many movie reviewers liked the original Shrek because they regarded it as an attack on Disney, both the company itself and its canon of animated fairy tales. I agree with the first half of the equation: Shrek‘s villain, Lord Farqaard, was widely recognized as an unacknowledged caricature of Disney boss Michael Eisner. But as for the second half, no. I observe that many people seem to have a knee-jerk reaction against core Disney creations like the animated features and the theme parks. That the Shrek movies kid fairy tale characters is not particularly original: Disney itself tweaks its own versions of them in the TV series House of Mouse, and Jay Ward’s “Fractured Fairy Tales,” from forty-year-old Bullwinkle shows, were far more subversive towards the genre. The real point that Shrek makes is that Farqaard has driven the fairy tale characters out of his realm, leaving his castle (which, yes, resembles Disney’s Magic Kingdom parks) empty and sterile. (So Shrek was a foreshadowing of the current rebellion by so many Disney stockholders against Eisner, whom many accuse of mismanaging the classic Disney legacy.) The Shrek movies are actually pro-fairy tale, kidding them affectionately. In fact, Shrek is at heart a contemporary fairy tale itself.
The original Shrek was a revisionist version of the Beauty and the Beast story. In its usual form, as followed by the Disney animated version, Beauty and the Beast fall in love with each other, and the Beast is rewarded by being transformed into a handsome human being, a form that supposedly represents his true self. If indeed one of the themes of Beauty and the Beast is that outer appearances do not truly matter, then the traditional ending seems somewhat hypocritical. In both Jean Cocteau’s classic live action film version and the Disney animated version, the Beauty has a handsome human suitor who proves to be the real monster, spiritually. It is also said that, after watching the end of Cocteau’s film, in which the Beast turns into a human, Greta Garbo said, “Give me back my beast.” When Disney did a video sequel to its Beauty and the Beast, it was a flashback to a time before the Beast became human again. Similarly, when Disney’s Beast shows up in Disney World or on the House of Mouse animated series, he is back in bestial form.
In Neil Gaiman’s 1602, its counterpart to Reed Richards points out that by “the laws of story,” the Thing can never be permanently returned to human form, because he is so much more interesting as a monster. That principle seems to apply with these two Beauty and the Beast films as well.
In the first Shrek film the outwardly bad-tempered but inwardly sensitive ogre Shrek falls in love with the beautiful human Princess Fiona. She has a secret: she is under a spell that transforms her into an ogre at night. Comics fans may recall that originally Bruce Banner transformed into the Hulk at night (another bad-tempered green “monster” like Shrek!). Night, the time of sleep and dreams, is the time when the subconscious emerges, and perhaps Fiona’s ogre self represented the side of her psyche that she concealed from “daylight.” Is it the “shadow” side of her personality, Hyde to her daytime Jekyll?
In the end Fiona was magically transformed into ogre form permanently. This, it seemed, was her true self, and Shrek was indeed her true love. The “shadow” self turns out to be positive, representing her capacity for love.
So, obviously, Shrek is a contemporary fable about accepting one’s true self, not trying to hide it. It’s a parable about the pressure to conform: it states that one does not have to look like everyone else, it conform to standards that prevent one from fulfilling his or her potential.
And it also seems to be a very American fable, one suited to a multiethnic, multiracial, multicultural society. The ogres are a minority in Shrek‘s world, and they even have differently colored skin – green – than the human majority, who are white. It’s like the way that X-Men, with its theme of racial tolerance, is particularly American. (So, am I the first person to find similarities between Shrek and Marvel heroes?)
This is not the digression it will at first seem, trust me: when Sex and the City had its final episode a short while back, there was talk that there might be a theatrical movie version. I wrote to a friend that the problem with a movie would be that, in order to create dramatic situations, it would have to tamper with the carefully designed happy endings that the TV series had given each of its four lead characters.
This is part of the problem with Shrek 2, which I enjoyed and found pleasant, but didn’t impress me as being the equal of the first film. (Then again, I didn’t get why so many people liked the first Shrek so much until the second time I saw it, so perhaps my opinion of Shrek 2 will also change on a second viewing.) Though the opening honeymoon montage is a funny and joyful celebration of Shrek and Fiona’s “happily-ever-after” style love, the film ends up having to create discord between them. The excuse is that Shrek and Fiona visit her royal parents in the land of “Far Far Away,” where everyone, including the king and queen, are appalled that she has not only married an ogre but become one herself. It doesn’t seem to me all that convincing that Shrek and Fiona would come anywhere close to breaking up over this. Perhaps it didn’t to the writers either; they don’t even seem satisfied with the King’s deep dislike of Shrek. Instead, they bring in a new villain, a Fairy Godmother, to manipulate matters so as to separate the two newlyweds.I find her something of a disappointment. There was an edge to Farqaard, since people detected his resemblance to Eisner. Perhaps the Fairy Godmother seems too bland a villain to me because she does not seem based on anything more than reversing the motivations of a familiar archetype from kiddie stories. She deals in blackmail and manipulation, but what if the Fairy Godmother had been more Godfather-like, running a criminal “family” of fairy tale bad guys? Or what if she had been, say, more like a caricature of a Martha Stewart type, a control freak who insists on beautifying castles, princesses, and ogres whether they want it or not?
Similarly, the “Far Far Away” setting lacks the bite that Farqaard’s kingdom, based on Disneyland, had. “Far Far Away” is a parody of Hollywood, but there’s no more to it than palm trees, a variation on the “Hollywood” sign, and puns on the names of various high profile companies. But Hollywood is the center for a culture that abhors ugliness, where people are not satisfied with the way they naturally look, where they alter their appearance with plastic surgery, Botox, liposuction, and the rest. You might think that this would be the perfect target for a Shrek movie. But no. The movie doesn’t go any deeper than having Joan Rivers turn up to cover red carpet arrivals of celebrity fairy tale characters.
Still, I’m surprised and pleased that the makers of Shrek 2 chose to build its story around the same thematic concerns as the earlier movie. Shrek 2 is also about the contrast between appearances and the inner self, societal pressures to conform, self-esteem versus insecurity, and prejudices shown towards people who look different from the majority. New York Times critic A. O. Scott compared the scene in which Shrek and Fiona have dinner with his new human in-laws to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the landmark 1960s film about interracial marriage. Shrek 2‘s version is funny, but thematically the comparison is apt.
In the course of the story, Shrek steals the Fairy Godmother’s “Happily Ever After” potion, which transforms both him and Fiona into human form, and as a bonus, Shrek’s companion Donkey into a handsome stallion. Here I should mention a paradox. I admire the beauty and realistic look of the movie except for the human characters. As in the first film, the human figures and their skin just aren’t persuasive. Perhaps if the entire film had a more artificial look, that wouldn’t matter as much, but the awkward-looking humans stick out badly amid the convincing realism of so much else. When Shrek gets turned into human, I don’t know whether he’s supposed to be handsome or funny-looking.
But I should also mention that I’m very impressed by the skill with which characters’ emotions are delineated through their facial expressions. I thought the King looked wooden until he began grimacing in anger: then he came to life. Shrek and Fiona’s expressions are particularly good, and I’m surprised at how pretty the animators make her in ogre form, with soft, appealing features.
So Shrek has changed his appearance in order to conform to what he thinks Fiona (and society) want.
In the end, Shrek and Fiona have to decide whether to make the spell that turned them into human form permanent. Shrek is willing to remain in human form for Fiona’s sake, but Fiona says she wants Shrek to look like the ogre she fell in love with. (This is a nice sentiment, and no one points out that Shrek fell in love with Fiona in her human form.) Thus they allow the spell to lapse, and Shrek and Fiona return to being ogres, the form in which the audience presumably likes them better. Would we really be interested in seeing a Shrek 3 in which Mr. and Mrs. Shrek were both humans?
But I still wonder of Fiona’s choice really makes psychological sense. Perhaps in part it depends on how one interprets the “ogre” metaphor. There is some suggestion in Shrek 2 that ogres are a persecuted minority. During the blissful honeymoon sequence, Shrek is abruptly attacked by villagers, who automatically hate him because he is an ogre. The movie doesn’t do enough with this. There are references to other ogres (Puss in Boots is said to specialize in fighting them), but Shrek and Fiona (who is not an ogre by birth) are the only ones we see.
If being an ogre is a metaphor for being a member of a minority group, especially an ethnic or racial one, then Fiona made the only correct choice. Could you imagine a movie in which two black people were given the choice of magically becoming white and accepted it? That would be horrifying. In choosing to remain ogres, Fiona and Shrek are accepting their true identities.
But what if one interprets being an ogre as a metaphor for being physically deformed? If one were offered the opportunity to have the deformity cured, wouldn’t he or she take it? We the readers know that Ben Grimm of the Fantastic Four will never be permanently cured of being the Thing. But we also know that he will always long to be in human form.
Even if being an ogre is just interpreted as a metaphor for being physically unattractive, is there anything really wrong with looking better? Most people don’t disagree with the goal of looking more attractive: otherwise people wouldn’t try to dress well, or stay in shape, or use makeup or good grooming. What many people object to is going to what they consider extreme measures in the pursuit of beauty, like surgery. But Fiona and Shrek are offered the chance of staying beautiful (if indeed that’s what the human Shrek is supposed to be!) without suffering pain or adverse side effects. How many people would really turn down an offer like that?
Put it another way. If characters in a movie were offered a million dollars, with no strings attached, would we believe it if they said, no thanks, we’re happy being poor?
Perhaps the real question, then, is whether or not Shrek and Fiona regard themselves as ugly or deformed. In the first movie Fiona was certainly ashamed of her nightly transformations into an ogress. But then Shrek seems to find her just as attractive, perhaps more so, in ogre form, and that suggests that he doesn’t see anything ugly about ogres. He simply has a different standard of beauty than most humans do. Perhaps if we were ogres, we’d think ogres were handsome.
Still, I find myself more easily sympathizing with Donkey’s joy at being transformed into a stallion, and his disappointment when he returns to his donkey self. If Garbo was voicing the real feelings of the audience about Cocteau’s Beast, which his movie did not acknowledge, perhaps Donkey is Shrek 2‘s devil’s advocate.
The trouble with serious analytical discussions of art is that one may end up neglecting its sheer entertainment value. So, let me make it clear: whatever my quandaries about the philosophical implications of this movie, it was indeed enjoyable, if inconsistently so. Less gruff than he was in the first movie, Shrek himself was not as funny this time round. But I intend to recommend the new Puss in Boots character to all my fellow cat lovers: voiced by Antonio Banderas, he is at once a wonderful burlesque of Banderas’s role Zorro, a funnier parody of Banderas himself than the one Chris Kattan used to do on Saturday Night Live, and a winningly affectionate portrayal of a real cat, from its hairballs to its big, sad eyes. (Actually, most cats I know deal in severe glares, contemptuous of humans, so I guess Puss in Boots’s over-the-top but endearing expressions reflect more what I’d like more cats to be like!)
A particularly subversive gag involving Pinocchio’s lying rightly brought down the house at the showing I attended. And a celebratory musical number and dance, uniting the community, is the classic way of ending a comedy: Shrek 2 raises the roof with the concluding and utterly anachronistic performance of “Livin’ la Vida Loca” by Puss and Donkey.
THE PROPER DIRECTORIAL ATTITUDE
In his introduction to Dark Horse’s Hellboy: The Conqueror Worm paperback, Guillermo del Toro, director of the Hellboy movie, says about the character’s creator, “Yes, Mike Mignola is a genius.” He continues, “this introduction. . .will merely point the reader to a few more reasons for groveling at the feet of a comic-book god like Mr. Mignola, here.”
Well. This is so different from the movie professional who makes fun of the comics creator on whose work his film is based, or the movie professional who acts oblivious of the comic creator’s existence. (I haven’t seen any reference to Gerry Conway, co-creator of the Punisher, in any ad or article about the new Punisher movie that I’ve read. Then again, considering the critical reaction to the movie, perhaps Mr. Conway is grateful for this.)
But Mike Mignola as a “genius” and as “a comic-book god”? Mike does indeed do good, valuable work, but if he’s a genius, then what words can we use to describe the likes of Jack Kirby and Will Eisner, before whom surely Mignola himself would bow?
Here again I am reminded of the strange paths that life can take. I can recall back in the 1980s when Mike Mignola was part of the Friday night comics pros groups in New York City that would head out to dinner and/or a movie. (I specifically remember his being there when we saw the dreadful Supergirl movie.) So I used to watch movies with him; now I get to see his name in big letters up on the screen!
But never mind del Toro’s hyperbole. The real point is that he so clearly respects the original comics on which he based his movie. He says in his introduction, “I tried to honor and expand upon the universe created by Mike in his series and in his masterful short stories.” In fact, Mignola was present during the filmmaking. In his interview about his Hellboy movie for FilmForce, del Toro reports, “And Mike was there, just to keep his blessing on everything. I mean, we argued, we argued a lot, and I said to him, ‘Your duty is not to agree. You convince me or I convince you.’ And we won both ways.” And that’s my ideal of how it should be done: a genuine collaboration. Of course, Mignola owns the Hellboy series, so he had more clout than the various Marvel and DC writers who did their stories on a work-for-hire basis and see neither money nor credit when a studio does a movie based on their work. But surely this also reflects well on del Toro, since it’s rare for a director to consult with screenwriters on the set, much less the author of the original material on which the screenplay was based.
It’s an interesting coincidence that the Hellboy movie and Shrek 2 should come out so close together. In the FilmForce interview, del Toro points out that it too is a variation on Beauty and the Beast.
He says, “You have a message that is anti-programming, almost, where they’re telling you to be yourself. It’s a beauty and the beast story where, number one, the beauty kisses the beast at the end, but instead of the beast turning into a prince, she turns into a beast.” He is referring to the final shot in which the fireproof Hellboy and the pyrokinetic Liz Sherman kiss, as both are engulfed in her flames, which here take on sexual symbolism. “The final shot, for me, is beautiful, because it works at the level where you’re telling people it’s okay to be a monster. Just accept it and make it part of yourself. . . To me, the theme of the movie is, what makes you a human is not anything to do with your birth, the place of your birth or what you’re supposed to do, but what you choose to do.”
So, in this respect, Hellboy treats the same theme in the superhero adventure genre that the Shrek movies do as satiric fairy tales. Indeed, in his FilmForce interview del Toro refers to Hellboy as both a “fairy tale” and a “fable.”
In preparation for my review of the Hellboy film, FilmForce arranged to have Dark Horse Comics supply me with review copies of some past trade paperbacks of Mignola’s Hellboy comics. I received Book 3, The Chained Coffin and Others, a collection of short stories, and Book 5, the graphic novel The Conqueror Worm. Alas, once again I find the same problem I encounter over and over in today’s comics: a failure to introduce the main characters and their situation to new readers. It’s as if Dark Horse can’t believe that anyone would read Books 3 and 5 unless they had read Books 1, 2 and 4. But they didn’t send Book 1 or 2; they sent 3 and 5! Is Hellboy a demon? How did he get here? Who are these people he is working for? Well, luckily the movie explains all of this: he is a demon, who was brought to Earth as a baby in a mystical ritual in the 1940s, was raised by a kindly scientist, and grew up to became an operative for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, which combats supernatural menaces.
Although in the comics Hellboy may bare his teeth in an annoyed grimace, and will at times vent his rage, he and the other characters more often have a stoic look: facial expressions are minimal, distancing the readers from them. In contrast, in the movie Hellboy and other characters more visibly emote. The Hellboy in these two volumes seemed, despite his demonic appearance, to have the personality of an American everyman with super-powers, with no really distinctive traits. In reading an interview with Mignola published some years back in The Comics Journal #189, I see that in many stories, this is intentional: Mignola’s principal interest in such stories lies in adapting material from folk tales, fairy tales and mythology from various cultures. “I think of Hellboy as not having a lot of baggage, So I tend to just drop him into the material and let the material work around him.” In the two paperbacks, while Hellboy remains at the center of the action, Mignola seems to take more interest in exploring the personalities of various supporting characters, notably the haunting figure of Roger, the artificially created “homunculus.”
In contrast, the movie concentrates on Hellboy as a character, drawing on his origin tale and presumably other stories not included in the collections that I was sent.
Reviewing the movie, New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell said that actor Ron Perlman, who plays Hellboy, had a “mastery of bad-tempered volubility [that] makes ‘Hellboy’ a kind of screwball-comedy version of the Thing from the ‘Fantastic Four’ comics.” I believe Mitchell may be confused here. It’s not as if, say, the old Stan Lee-Jack Kirby scenes of the Thing being the victim of the Yancy Street Gang’s pranks were the sort of elegant farce that Noel Coward might have written. The Thing, with his irreverent wisecracks and his tussles with the Human Torch, is a far more comedic character than the Hellboy of the movie or of these two volumes, as well as a much more tragic figure. (In none of these three sources does Hellboy wish he were an ordinary human, as the Thing so often does, and at the movie’s end, Hellboy gets the girl, whereas the Thing traditionally has worried that his beloved Alicia would reject him if she could see him.) I would not be surprised if the Hellboy of the comics were inspired in part by the Thing, but, at least in the material I’m reviewing here, he’s not as dramatically vivid or colorful a character as his predecessor.
(I may quarrel with this phrase of Elvis Mitchell’s, but otherwise he did a perceptive review of the movie, demonstrating his knowledge and appreciation of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics; he even makes a point of acknowledging John Byrne as scripter of the first Hellboy series. I quite like Mitchell’s insightful description of Mignola’s “expressionist woodcut cartoonishness.” Mitchell recently resigned from the Times, allegedly in protest after fellow critic A. O. Scott was promoted above him. Mitchell was one of the few writers at the Times, the nation’s leading newspaper, who took the comics artform seriously, and of those, he was the most talented, insightful, and knowledgeable about comics. That by itself is a major reason to regret his departure.)
In the movie, in large part thanks to Ron Perlman’s performance, Hellboy’s personality comes across much more vividly. As a demon, he ages far more slowly than humans. Hence, though he arrived on Earth as an infant in the 1940s, we are told in the movie that he is now psychologically and physically the equivalent of a human at age 30. Perlman, on the other hand, is middle-aged, and even under all the demonic makeup, comes off as a gruff, tough veteran fighter with a heart, puffing on his Kirbyesque cigars: in short, much closer to the Thing. The movie concentrates more on Hellboy’s personal dramas: his longing for Liz, the fellow agent he loves; his mixed feelings towards his adoptive father, Dr. Broom, and his simmering resentment towards the Agency head who effectively holds him captive to do his bidding but does not treat him as human.
The movie sets up a familiar nature and nurture opposition and tries to make us think that Hellboy will turn away from his upbringing by humans towards his demonic heritage, and serve the forces of evil: he even grows long horns on his head. But this is a character who keeps kittens as pets, watches TV, is in love with a co-worker, is clearly devoted to his work of helping others (even if he resents his employers) and seems so utterly human in personality. Does anyone in the audience actually believe he would switch sides?
Both the comics stories and the movie strike me as enjoyable entertainments, but lacking in the kind of thematic depth I prefer. They’re triumphs of visual and storytelling style over literary substance. In the comics I am impressed by the creation of a somber, ominous mood through the variations of darkness – the grays, blues and browns in the coloring; the black shadows and silhouettes – and in contrast, the occasional bursts of bright light. The stories take on an epic, sometimes cosmic scale through enormous creatures, settings like castles and Alpine mountains, and even panoramas of the starlit sky. Mitchell rightly notes the Lovecraftian influence in the Hellboy comics, and it’s in the film’s grotesque monsters, too. But the movie takes a more direct, action-oriented approach to such menaces. Certainly, the comics have Kirbyesque fight scenes in which Hellboy punches monsters, but they also have what del Toro terms “the moments of quiet, almost elegiac horror,” which OI think that the action-oriented movie lacks. The comics can create a genuine sense of eerieness. Often this is visual: the gigantic werewolf in “The Wolves of St. Aygust,” whose resemblance to an actual wolf is disturbingly exact, or the immense boar in “The Corpse.” Or the various ghostly presences who haunt these tales, like the ghost of a young woman in the same story whose head abruptly becomes that of a wolf. Other times the eerieness is conceptual, like the spirit of “The Conqueror Worm” in the story by that name, taking possession of the body of Hellboy’s homonculos ally. In Mignola’s best writing, the eerieness can even exist within a character’s personality: in “almost Colossus:” Roger the homonculus encounters his sinister “elder brother,” a previous creation, who takes on colossal size: his ranting about being God seems not the usual comics villain’s bluster but a look into true insanity. Or there is the ghostly wolf-girl’s lament that God must hate her to inflict this fate upon her. In “Conqueror Worm” the vision of Earth burnt to a planet-sized cinder seems more chilling than the more familiar sci-fi image of the planet blowing up. Though Mignola says in an introduction that his short story,. “A Christmas Underground,” is based on a folk tale, I see in it a variation on the Greek myth of Hades’ abduction of Persephone to the underworld, and hence I was surprised by its far bleaker denouement. Hellboy’s vision of an encounter between what are presumably his parents – a great devil and a human woman – in “The Chained Coffin” is perhaps the most unsettling scene in the two volumes.
What impresses me most about the Hellboy movie is something I haven’t seen mentioned in any reviews. In his Conqueror Worm introduction, del Toro says, “I humbly confess that many a time I have aspired to imitate Mignola’s mysterious style in the design of my films, especially the cold, velvet backdrop of darkness from which his characters emerge.” What struck me in watching the movie is the degree to which the movie duplicates in live action terms the look of the Hellboy comics: the look of Hellboy and his fiend Abe Sapien, the red color of Hellboy moving through a blackly shadowed world, the designs of sets and props. We’ve seen a previous movie adapted from Mignola’s art style, Disney’s animated Atlantis, but it is more impressive to me to see del Toro evoke the look of Mignola’s fictional world within a live action movie. (And when the movie shows us a comic book about Hellboy, it is clearly done in an imitation of Jack Kirby’s style, a fine and unexpected homage!)
That in turn changes my standards for evaluating live action movies based on comics. What if the Daredevil movie had genuinely looked like Frank Miller’s artwork? Wouldn’t it be amazing if the forthcoming Fantastic Four live action movie captures the look and feel of Jack Kirby’s art? (What if its set designers, matte painters, and CGI artists modeled their work directly on Kirby’s?) I’m not holding my breath, but it would be so wonderful if it did.
ANALYZING NEMO
Lately I’ve watched the Disney-Pixar Finding Nemo again twice, once in its recent premiere on the Starz! cable network, and before that, on its DVD with a commentary track by its director Andrew Stanton and others.
Now I have a trick for listening to DVD commentaries: I activate the subtitles, so I can follow the movie’s dialogue while listening to the commentators. But when I listened to the commentary track, the subtitles turned out to be transcriptions of the commentary, not the film’s dialogue! Foiled! Then again, the people for whom DVD subtitles are really intended, the hearing-impaired, are no doubt delighted that Pixar, Disney, or both, has thus made it possible for them to follow the commentary, something other DVD makers apparently don’t care about.
Watching the movie (without the track) I once again admired its genuine humor, its appealing characters – not only the leads, but even minor supporting cast members – and, of course, its sheer visual beauty in depicting its underwater universe. Most of all, this time around, I was impressed by its story construction. There are two major story lines that begin and end together, but diverge for most of the film. The lead character, the clownfish Marlin, has never gotten over the death of his mate and most of their eggs; as a result, he is both obsessively overprotective towards his surviving child, Nemo, and himself fearful of taking any chances in life, or of venturing beyond the safety of home. Nemo, on the other hand, longs to move beyond the boundaries of home, and hence feels stifled by his parent.
When Nemo is captured by divers, their stories diverge. Marlin embarks on a classic, Campbellian quest, leaving his “normal” world, the coral reef he calls home, to journey through a symbolically enchanted realm, the vast ocean beyond, in search of his son. Marlin even spends time in a literal version of Campbell’s “belly of the beast,” in this case, the mouth of a whale.
Nemo, in contrast, has a very different kind of adventure, built on a motif that Michael Chabon would appreciate: an attempt at escape. Nemo finds himself trapped in a fish tank in a dentist’s office and must join forces with new allies, the tank’s other inmates, to somehow get back to the ocean and then home. Surely we are meant to think of prison movies and The Great Escape as parallels.
Marlin and Nemo are each ultimately seeking the same goal: reunion with each other and return to home. But each must take a different route.
Moreover, each is facing his specific fears. Nemo, who felt confined by life at home, is now genuinely imprisoned and must escape. Marlin, so shattered by past tragedy that he never wanted to let go of his son or leave home, has now indeed lost his son and must traverse the great ocean, risking many dangers, to find him and become “whole” again.
Audiences will identify with both protagonists, but kids will no doubt relate more fully to Nemo, while adults will identify more with Marlin. Nemo’s own saga is, unsurprisingly, about learning to function as an independent adult. It makes mythic sense that his new comrades in the fish tank even enact a tribal-style initiation ritual as if to mark his entrance into their world, the adult world.What I find most intriguing is that Marlin and Nemo are each paired with a surrogate version of the other. Nemo is mentored by his cellmate, er, tankmate Gil, who, unlike his father, encourages him to escape their confines and to take chances to achieve his goals. Gil even ends up risking his own life to ensure Nemo’s escape. Marlin is paired with Dory, wan adult fish with a childlike personality, complicated further by her comic difficulties with short-term memory. She embodies Marlin’s fears that his son is too irresponsible to act without him. If you want a sign that this is what the filmmakers intend, consider a dramatic moment in which Marlin angrily scolds Dory for her risk taking and finds himself calling her “Nemo.”
Marlin and Nemo each gets a few symbolic death and resurrection scenes. A particularly good one comes in the scene in the whale’s mouth, in which Dory encourages Marlin to let go and fall down the whale’s throat. That would seem to be giving in to death, but Marlin, who would remain trapped if he remained where he was, nonetheless trusts Dory, lets go, and instead he and Dory are shot out to safety through the whale’s blowhole.
Towards the end, when Marlin and Nemo are reunited, each shows how he has evolved as a character through their rescue of Dory, who in part represents the helpless child that Marlin thought Nemo was. Nemo insists that Marlin allow him to execute his plan to enable Dory and many other fish to escape a fishing net (another escape motif), and Marlin, after initial refusal, consents, recognizing his son’s ability to take charge of his actions, and even helps him out.
As for the Finding Nemo commentary track, I quite like the way that the commentators appear on screen initially, and at times the movie will be interrupted so as to show us video clips of related artwork, or of the voice actors performing their lines, or of other members of the Pixar creative team making observations. Moreover, everyone from Pixar who’s on the commentary track seems genuinely enthusiastic about his or her work and about being part of this creative team. This is clearly a creative group that is a true community, that is performing at their artistic peak, and that isn’t afraid of being shoved out the door by corporate overlords. In short, it reminds me of what the comics industry used to be like. Now if only they needed someone to write The Official Handbook of the Pixar Universe. . . .
-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson
Comments: None
Leave a Reply |