The Art of Storytelling

Craft Matters: Converging Thoughts...

When Two Things Become a Third:

Since Vox.com is dying, I've chosen to import the previous blog and its attendant material over to this one.  Hopefully, the process shouldn't take much longer.  In the meantime, all I ask is that you bear with the occasional quirk or hiccup. 

Inspired: Sometimes...

the thoughts just come, unbidden...




Generations

Same pool,
different jeans




Geseund

A sneeze
brings
immediacy

Craft Matters: In the Beginning...

There was Magic, Old School:
Part One of a Three Part Riff on Contemporary Fables and Folklore

I won't lie.  I grew up during the Golden Age of cartoons, back when animated Disney movies were still good (and overgrown mouse ears weren't synonymous with commercialized satanism).  We had our cherished tropes then: The Hobbit, The Last Unicorn, Flight of Dragons, The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe, The Phantom Tollbooth--just to name a few. 

And let's be brutally honest, had those films gone the live-action route, no one would remember them.  As it stands, I can barely recall the BBC's rendition of the Narnia series--other than the occasional floating lion's head.  In light of this, it makes perfect sense that Beagle chose to translate his works through ink and pen.  After all, who in his right mind would believe for an instant that a horse with a horn on its head was anything else? 

Instead, we remember the unicorn in its forest and the bold red of the bull and Christopher Lee as King Haggard and Angela Lansbury as Mommy Fortuna.  We remember Smaug and Bilbo and Milo and Aslan--not as a thought or a phrase but as a moving presence.  Like the paintings at Lascaux or the visual koans of the Zen masters, the animation "gets" us. 

Just look at Miyazaki and Howl's Moving Castle. Whereas the book tends to drown itself in endless nonsense, the film sheds embellishment in favor of a simple telling: in his version, at least, the magic is secondary to the characters.

One scene in particular illustrates this principle beautifully: in it, Sophie enters Howl's bedroom with the intent of apologizing for having ruined one of his precious spells.  Though she carries a glass a milk directly to his bed, he refuses her.  Frustrated, looks about the room, slowly coming to realize depth of his power. For there are wards and devices everywhere, enough to fill a town perhaps, and he thinks nothing of them.  In fact, when we cut back to Sophia and Howl again, we see there, on the bed, lying in a corner, a single stuffed animal--the kind a child couldn't bear to part with.

Magic, then, of the truest kind, is located always in the affect, not the effect.

Coming up: CGI, Animation's Second Advent...