I Wish

Family, in all its modes and variations, is a series of usually biological iterations of sometimes-similar selves, distinct in experience, personality, and identity but woven together by heredity of all sorts.

These ideas ought to be explored within children’s media since they are so essential to the experience of every child. The home is what children know first, and family is what children know best. Until a child leaves, this unit makes up most of their reality and influences quite nearly everything he or she experiences. A family of active and present members is an embodiment of the nature and nurture that makes up the basic essence of who someone is.

In I Wish these familial overlaps and departures are gently suggested and sometimes mentioned. Koichi, the older brother, is a grave boy, neat and tidy, often flummoxed by the indifference he observes in others. He is chubby. He seems to be a little wary of girls, and his best friends are all boys. Ryu is the younger brother, skinny, smiling, and always flitting from person to person and place to place. Ryu is as lively and joyful as he is astute and perceptive. But despite these differences and despite the distance between them, Ryu says he and Koichi are connected by an invisible thread. These brothers long to be with each other after the divorce of their parents. Their love and friendship drive the narrative.

Koichi’s deepest desire is for his family to be reunited. He has a dream where they are all together again, having a picnic at a park and laughing and singing while their father plays the guitar. When he tells his little brother about the wish, Ryu also has a dream about their family’s reunion. But in his version, their mother yells at their father about his unemployment, and Ryu turns away from the dinner table in fear. Between two close brothers, there are two distinct perceptions of the reality of their family. It is unclear why Ryu and Koichi chose to live with their father and mother, respectively, after the divorce, and it is unclear why their experiences were so different. But their family is inextricably connected to who Ryu and Koichi are as individuals.  

When their mother mentions that Ryu is like his father, and always has been, she says it with affection and amusement. But Ryu is confused by the sentiment. He wonders if it means that she doesn’t like him anymore, since she doesn’t like his father. Their grandfather, who is stern and quiet, plods along, attempting to recreate a cake from his childhood. He, like Koichi, is trying to realize a dream. These are just two examples of the familial lineages of personality, strengths, flaws, and ambiguities in this film.

Adults are also represented as distinct individuals in I Wish, some kind and helpful, others selfish and immature. Their strengths and their flaws impact the children around them. The children are depicted as knowing very well what their parents’ shortcomings are. When the group of seven friends finally reaches the spot where the two bullet trains pass, several of the children make wishes that reflect the concerns they have regarding their parents. One boy wishes for his dad to stop gambling. Ryu wishes for his dad to have success in this music career. Megumi wishes to be an actress, the very desire her own jaded mother used to have.

When characters are as beautifully and deeply rendered as they are in I Wish, emotional evolution is not merely a possible place for a narrative to go; it is a cinematically realized ideology. Progress has stopped for none of these characters. Understanding can be cross generational, even when there are gaps and blips. Realism is the balance of joy and sorrow. Family represents a network of influences to draw from, externalized pieces of self against which a person can compare and assess who he or she is and how he or she might wish to change, improve, and grow.

Nausicaa

            Nausicaä is powerful because she is courageous, empathetic, and peaceful. This is a pacifistic film that has a sense of impending destruction throughout, punctuated by moments of chaos and violence. The violence in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is archetypal and cyclical, but it is not utterly inevitable. This is significant. The world of Nausicaä is a desolate and dangerous place. One thousand years ago, there was an apocalyptic war called the Seven Days of Fire. Since then, human civilization has only existed in small pockets, avoiding the ever-growing Toxic Jungle and its giant mutant insects. Nations are in violent conflict against each other as they try to decide what to do. Princess Kushana, the leader of the Tolmekian nation, is preparing a Giant Warrior with which to fight the Ohm and burn the Toxic Jungle. This Giant Warrior is a genetically engineered bioweapon, the very cause of the Seven Days of Fire in the first place. Even Nausicaä has violence within herself; when her father is killed, she goes berserk and kills several Tolmekians. No one is impervious to his or her innate violent impulses.

            But Nausicaä’s love and understanding of nature is the only effective and productive solution to the conflicts between both humans and nature – fighting and bloodshed is shown as unnecessary harm, nothing more than roadblocks to progress. While everyone else dismisses the life within the Toxic Jungle, avoiding and fearing what they do not know, Nausicaä is able to find life, beauty, and wonder there, even drawing resources from the underground lakes. While the impulse of Princess Kushana and the Tolmekians is to destroy the creatures that appear dangerous to them, Nausicaä has the impulse to understand them. By observing and listening to the Ohm and the other mutant creatures of the Toxic Jungle, she is able to soothe them and gain their trust. The climax of the film is not a battle but the evasion of a battle.

            The environmentalism in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is optimistic. The futility of violence and war is obvious and weapons of mass destruction are represented as less useful than reaching a state of empathy and symbiosis. This film is invested in ideas of change and progress.

The most powerful people in the film are women. I found it disappointing that despite all of Nausicaä’s strength and autonomy, the film still managed to sneak in a few moments of scopophilia. Underneath all the beautiful messages, there is a tinge of sexualizing the female protagonist who we are supposed to be identifying with. Women’s bodies are still things to be looked at, even when they are occupied with saving the world.

            The ideologies within all works of art are essential to identify and analyze. Children’s media is not exempt from this. Whether quietly hidden or overtly addressed, every film, book, television show, videogame, etc. includes implications, assumptions, or assertions about morality, political standpoints, social and societal issues, systems, institutions, and worldviews. This is why media literacy is so important – so that viewers can decide for themselves which ideologies they want to support, even when these messages are unintentional or harmless or positive.

George Washington

Since our demographics in this BYU film class are largely similar (all of us are college students, most of us are white, middle-class, and LDS), George Washington offers a narrative from a very different perspective. George Washington takes place in a small town in North Carolina. The characters, a group of kids in their early adolescence, are mostly African American, and all living in poverty. Their summer becomes a frightening period of regret and secrets when one boy named George accidentally kills his friend Buddy.

It is a beautiful and sorrowful film full of haunting moments, and as I was watching it I could not stop comparing it to John Steinbeck’s novels. The character vignettes evoke Cannery Row in their goodness and their quiet strangeness. The inciting incident of George Washington echoes the troubling climax of Of Mice and Men. The poetic voiceover narration also reads deeply Steinbeckian, as Nasia observes her microcosm and reflects on its joys and defects. In all three of these narratives, poverty encourages meandering, gentleness, and idiosyncrasy, but also violence and tragedy.

 George Washington was written, directed, and produced by David Gordon Green, who grew up in Arkansas and most likely knew people like these people and had walked in places like these places. But just as Manthia Diawara is skeptical of films about black people made by white people and the inauthenticity that often encourages, I think this film may have been more justified if it were created within the perspective of actual experience. I do not think Green is fetishizing poverty or blackness. But he might be fetishizing something about comparisons, and something feels guilty about the multiple violent catharses that are thrust on our young protagonists. The amount of violence in this film turns the narrative deeply nihilistic. There is a death due to a head bashed on a bathroom floor. There is a seizure. There is a near drowning. There is hospitalization. There is a bloody car accident. There is the murder of a dog. Is it warranted? To what end? Is the truth we are supposed to glean from this film that these people are utterly stuck and completely victim to random, unavoidable, persistent violence from within their own community? I prefer a sympathetic perspective to an accusatory one when someone from outside makes something inside. But I am not sure I like what this one is saying. Ultimately, it seems that the most useful pieces of diverse media are created by people who are part of the diversity being explored.

I recognize that this is an essentialist perspective. Ideally, characters ought to be distinct and established enough that every person represented in a narrative is an experimentation with diversity. Every person’s life experiences, physical appearances, and internal psyches, even within a narrow or relatively homogenous group, is unique, valid, and worthwhile to explore. But the unfortunate truth is that the distribution is off kilter in favor of the culturally preferred binaries, not only in regards to who the stories are about, but also who are creating the stories. Children’s media that focus on introducing characters, stories, values, and situations from a wide range of cultural, political, economic, racial, ethnic, national, and linguistic perspectives will encourage empathy and understanding. As things currently stand, we are portraying more of these perspectives than we are hearing directly from.