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.
 

Play

Play is an intangible and crucial part of human development. Having recently read Chris Crawford’s On Game Design I have latched onto his preferred definition of “play” – “A voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy, and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life.’” According to this book, play is metaphorical, play needs to be safe, and play need not be exotic.

I played Disney Infinity on my own after we played it in class. I thought that the possibility for construction, destruction, racing, fighting, narrative, and goal-achieving was a really interesting approach. It made the videogame in an exercise of non-prescriptivist play. It allowed for multiplicity and variety. But mostly, I found it difficult to wield, and I do not know if that is an indication of my personal naïveté with videogames or an indication of less-than-ideal game design. I found the “endless possibilities” of the ToyBox feature very exciting, but ultimately a bit misleading. It was fun and funny to be able to mix and match so many specific pieces of the Disney world, but there was not very much of a difference between riding a racecar and riding a hover board and riding an elephant, for instance. I wanted to do things that the game actually didn’t allow. I wanted to be able to chop up the set with an axe, to paint things, to tie things together. I wanted more chaos, but the game would not allow me to stretch it very far beyond giving me a lot of options within the same few functions. Disney Infinity seemed to promise much more than it could deliver. I could not quite figure out the advantage of playing this videogame over playing with toys and friends, a profoundly intertextual space without any limitations at all.

The most significant conclusion I drew from our discussions of and experiences with play and playing is that the best kinds of game and the best kinds of media are sincerely interested in how children think and function, and then act accordingly. When adults’ formal and aesthetic decisions for designing children’s things make assumptions that children have less sophisticated taste than them, I think the piece itself sufferings inherently. This goes for game mechanics and structures. Challenge and rules are important; a game of Operation with “Bigger holes! Easier to grab pieces!” is making negative assumptions about children’s attention spans and perseverance.

Media that allows for childlike inclinations and their non-adult characteristics is obviously very important. But there is a balance that needs to be struck.