Response 8: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

I can’t remember how old I was the first time I watched Nausicaa. I do remember it, but I can’t remember when it was. I think I couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old. I absolutely loved the film, though I don’t think I understood it. Watching it again, for the first time in years, I can see a lot more of the politics that went into it. It’s very environmentalist and anti-war.

This can be problematic for childrens’ media. For one thing, impressing our own opinions and political associations on young children is not the best way to raise them, and could bias them in unfortunate ways when they are older. For another thing, movies for kids that deal with real social, economic, or environmental problems still need happy endings or kids won’t like them. Often, as in Fern Gulley, the solution to the problem is not difficult and does not require any sort of sacrifice on the part of the characters or the audience. If the main conflict of the story is exclusively some social or environmental problem, then often a film for children will wrap up the problem completely even when the problem is still there in reality.

I think Nausicaa does a better job than most environmentalist films for children. While the politics are definitely there, the problems are a little more complicated than usual. In real life, these sorts of problems are much more complex and difficult to solve than in films, even Nausicaa, but the fact that the environmental situation is so complicated in the film helps to counter the strong bias that the writers of the film obviously felt toward the issue. The environment in Nausicaa, is literally trying to kill off the human race, or at least it seems to be. What it’s really doing is cleansing the earth, but in that process, it is also making people sick. The line between the right decisions and the wrong ones is a lot thinner in this movie than most environmentalist films.

Nausicaa also doesn’t end with a simple solution, and not all of the problems in the world have gone away. Nausicaa saves her valley by sacrificing her life for it. She doesn’t quite die, because the ohm work together to heal her, but she was willing to give up her own life to save the lives of her people. This sort of character is a much stronger role model than a hero who saves the day by fighting hard enough, or getting lucky. After the valley is saved, the work isn’t over. There is still war and danger in the world. There are trees to replant, and political issues to resolve. The people of Earth, if they want to live, will have to learn to make sacrifices and work with the toxic jungle instead of against it. Nausicaa is not about solving the world’s problems, it’s about taking the first step in the path to solving them.

Diversity Analysis: Grave of the Fireflies

War stories are most often told about soldiers or leaders in the winning army. We tell stories about the people who are privileged, and the people who survive, and the people who win, because that’s what we want in our own lives. But in doing that, we forget that there are others. There are people who are not privelaged, people who lose wars, and people who do not survive. Just because we don’t envy them doesn’t make their stories less valid, or less important.

“Grave of the Fireflies” is about a boy and his little sister in Japan during World War II. They are not particularly important people. Their father is in the navy, so their mother is alone in taking care of them. They are not unique. There were probably many children in their situation. I think the creators of the film intended for that to be the case. They were not trying to tell a story about one specific pair of children. They were trying to use a story about one specific pair of children to describe hundreds of children in similar situations.

The children lose their mother in an air raid, and go to live with their aunt. They aren’t treated poorly, but their aunt resents them because food is in short supply, and neither of them are going to school or doing anything to help the food situation. Eventually they decide to leave and try to survive on their own. Despite all their efforts, they can’t get enough to eat, and eventually, both of them die. This sort of character is rarely mentioned in media, or given any attention to. This sort of story is not the kind of story that people want to hear. We want to hear stories about success and survival. However, this sort of thing does happen to people. People really do starve, and people really do die, and for every war where one side won, the other side lost. The story of the losing side is just as real as the story of the winning side.

Despite its depressing plot, and its themes of tragedy and loss, the film is not altogether dark. This is a beautiful story of love and family, and how these things survive even in darkness, poverty, and death. That, also, is unfortunately uncommon among stories about war. War is terrible, and horrifying, and many people die in or because of war. But even so, there is always light. I believe we need more stories, like “Grave of the Fireflies” that show the darkness of war, but don’t revel in it.

“Grave of the Fireflies” is unconventional in many ways. Its protagonists are not particularly unique in their society. In fact, in the beginning of the story, it’s made clear that there are many young people dying in similar ways. They are orphans—not tragic orphans who go on to save the world, but orphans who go on to starve to death because they don’t have anyone to take care of them. The themes of the story do not include overcoming difficulties and coming out on top, and the ending seems to mourn for the nameless children who died because of the war. I think the film contributes a lot to the diversity of our media.

Nostalgia Analysis: The Wind in the Willows

At the end of most adventure stories, there is a homecoming. Often this homecoming is used to compare the adventurer to his or her previous self. It shows how much the adventurer grew during his or her journeying, and what they see differently now that they have come back to their previous life. Usually in story, this homecoming has a little bit of an edge to it because the hero is unable to truly return to his or her previous state of being. This is often how it is in reality, since we grow and change when we leave stages of our life behind. Many people long for the relatively carefree days of childhood, and for homecomings that they can never truly experience. “The Wind in the Willows” describes several kinds of longed-for homecomings which satisfied my need as a reader to return home.

One kind of homecoming that is rarely experienced is a homecoming where everything is untouched. While traveling through the forest to Rat’s house, Mole catches the scent of his home, and knows it is nearby. He and Rat search for it and find it exactly as Mole left it nearly a year before. He and Rat spend the night there, and Mole is grateful he will always have this simple home to return to. So often when we go back somewhere, things have changed. Our friends have made new friends or our old house has been remodeled. We would like things to be familiar and comfortable when we return, as if nothing had changed at all.

Another way to keep our home familiar is to refuse to go too far from it. Adventures are fun, but home is safe and comforting. Rat never has much of a desire to leave. There are times when he considers it, but he will always stay close enough to his home that he can return to it. I’m sure there are people who wish they could just stay in their childhood. They wish they could still be taken care of by their parents and spend time in the places they’d always spent time in. Sometimes, after being away from home for a long time, I’m sure there are people who wish they had stayed.

A more common type of homecoming in fiction is to win back your home at the end of the adventure. In Toad’s absence, Toad Hall is occupied by a clan of weasels. In order to return to it, Toad has to forcibly evict the invaders. He is successful in his endeavor, and learns from it. In our absence, it seems things change a lot. The children of today are different from the children of twenty years ago, who are different from the children forty years ago. Places change, as trees are cut down and replaced and houses and roads are rebuilt. Progress marches steadily forward, keeping us from truly going back to live where we did before. We all wish we could fight that and bring things back or get rid of new things we don’t like.

“The Wind in the Willows” is a book that focuses on home and homecomings. It advocates a return to simple happiness. It doesn’t speak out against going on adventures, but its homecomings are the most pleasant and rewarding parts of the book, and it induces feelings of nostalgia as its adult readers remember homes and times they have now lost and would like to return to.

Response 8: George Washington

In statistical analysis, there’s a method of choosing subjects for a study called stratified sampling. One of the biggest problems with statistics is that it’s hard to get a sample of people that represents the population. There are always minority groups that are likely to be missed. When you take a stratified sample you make sure to pick people from each group. This concept can and should be applied when studying or creating media. There are a lot of kinds of stories, and a lot of kinds of people. Our media says something about who we are, and it’s important for us to make our media representative of our world.

“George Washington” is not set in a city. The main character is not a superhero, though he aspires to be one. Most of the major characters are not white, and none of them have much by way of worldly possessions or status. The storyline is atypical as well. Most of the lead actors were not professional actors, and I doubt very much that the setting was props built in a studio. The portrayal of the story had an artful sense of reality to it, and it focused on parts of our world and our country that we rarely see represented in media.

An ecosystem with very little diversity is rarely stable or healthy. Neither is a culture. We need lots of kinds of people, and we need lots of kinds of stories. I think this film is a good example of something that steps outside of the norm, but it’s also just one kind of movie. In class we watched clips from a movie set in India, and another set in New Zealand—or at least in Maori culture. Before we watched the Maori one, I was considering diversity to be exclusively unfamiliar things. However, my family has lived in Hawaii for the past five years, and Polynesian cultures are very familiar to me. The setting of the Maori clip, including the lighting, building style, and accents reminded me of home. So diversity isn’t necessarily what is unfamiliar. My home town of Laie, Hawaii, which is where BYU Hawaii is, is probably one of the most diverse places on the planet. If you go to any sort of event there and look out over the audience, you will see literally every skin color in the world. It’s a unique place, because there is no racial majority. There’s prejudice, like there is everywhere, but the level of diversity, I believe, makes the town stronger. I think it’s the same with films, and I think our national culture would become stronger if we portrayed a wider variety of characters in our media.

Play Response

Games are a unique form of media, because they require the audience to actively participate. The creator of the game has a lot less control over what their audience experiences, so there are different challenges in creating a game that is enjoyable by the audience.

The audience itself, and the age of the audience is more of a factor when you’re designing a game. I remember playing Hungry Hungry Hippos when I was younger and enjoying it. But we played it in class, and it got old after about two minutes. The same thing went for Candyland. A game is rarely fun if it’s too easy or mindless. For six-year-olds, making plastic hippos eat marbles is exciting and challenging. Not so much for ages 19-25.

Another factor is the rules of the game. If the audience doesn’t understand the rules, then the game isn’t very fun. Sometimes my family will get a new board game, and no one wants to read through the rules, so we just try to figure out how the game works without them. In class, we played Disney Infinity. The first several groups of people tried to figure out on their own how to make things work, and they didn’t have much luck, until we decided to play the tutorial. In the end, someone always gives up and goes through the rule book. When playing a board game or card game,  sometimes we disregard the rules, or make up our own. That is another quirk of game media. Even if you do come up with a game and a workable set of rules there is no guarantee your audience won’t completely disregard those rules, or at least modify them.

Possibly the largest overall challenge of creating a game is making it just the right difficulty level. If a game is too hard, then no one wants to play it. If it’s too easy, it gets boring. But that varies depending on your audience, and depending on the type of game. Most board games don’t get that much easier as you play them, but video games do. Many video games are about improving your ability to use the controls, and are about timing and accuracy. When you start out playing a video game, you’re usually pretty bad at it. It was interesting to watch everyone take turns playing Disney Infinity, because no one had long enough to really get used to the controls or gameplay.

When you make games for children, you have a natural competitor. Children sometimes make up their own stories, but they are always making up their own games. So when you design a game for a child it has to be compelling enough to take them from their own made-up games. Often, children will use game boards and pieces and invent their own rules. I know my brothers and I did when we were younger.

Experimentation Analysis: Who Framed Roger Rabbit

A good strategy for success in any career or endeavor is to use tried and tested methods. Art and media are no exception. If you want to tell a decent story, or make a decent movie, there are certain shapes that the plot can take that almost always work. There is nothing wrong with that. If something works, then there’s no shame in making use of it. But when we step out of the typical, sometimes amazing things can happen.

Experimentation often starts with a “what if” question, especially in storytelling. The initial question in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” is not very difficult to deduce. What if cartoon characters were real? There are a lot of ways you could potentially go with this question. The creators of this film chose to invent a setting where the “toons” are simply part of society.

The initial question leads to a changing of the rules. The potential ramifications of the “what if” must be taken into account. If we are to believe the animated shorts we’ve seen, cartoon characters are mentally unstable, capable of defying the laws of physics, and virtually indestructible. If they were set loose on society and allowed to mingle freely with normal human beings, chaos would ensue. This is taken into account brilliantly in the film. For example, most toons don’t actually live among the humans, but in a place called Toon Town. This limits their contact with normal humans, and accounts for the fact that there isn’t utter chaos in the world. The difference between toons and normal humans is also made clear. You can do whatever you want to a toon and they can just get up and walk away from it, but humans can’t take nearly as much punishment. The main character’s brother was killed when a toon dropped a piano on him. There’s also some suggestion that the toons can’t step out of character. Jessica Rabbit says, during one scene, that she’s not bad, she’s just drawn that way.

Rules are important to successful experimentation. This seems counter-intuitive, especially since experimentation is about changing the rules. During the early days of any media, everything is experimentation because no one has made a standard yet. But once there is a standard, and there are common methods, then experimentation must be about diverging from those rules to try something new. It must be about breaking boundaries, such as the distinction between cartoon and live action. Without those boundaries there, breaking them wouldn’t be notable. Experimentation is also about setting boundaries, and finding new things that work well. You make up your own rules and you see where they take you, and then you decide which ones worked and which ones didn’t. I’m certain there was a lot of trial and error in the creation of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”

Sometimes experimentation doesn’t produce something successful in the minds of the audience. However, I think it’s always important. Even if what the artist tried doesn’t work, they tried something new, and the people who try new things are the ones who will shape the future of media for children and for adults. “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” keeps some of the formula for a typical movie, but bends, breaks, and comments on it as well. It is a great example of successful experimentation.