Final Presentation

For my proposed project, I decided to try and personify the mental and emotional transition between childhood and adulthood.  I based my ideas on the development stage of puberty, or at least, on the idea of a transitory period between childhood and adult.  Just as boys and girls go through a physical change during puberty, I believe there's a similar transitory period that children go through in relation to their childhood beliefs.  Children transition from childish idealism to adult realism (and sometimes cynicism), and I feel the easiest way to do that is in the following children's book (or collection of animated shorts, not sure yet):

Hayden and Chelsea are two 11-year-olds who enjoy reading stories of the past, and they constantly imagine what it would be like to live in the past, fulfilling the roles of the characters in the stories they read. Suddenly, a magical genie named Bob (name subject to change) appears and grants them their wishes, transporting them into their stories and showing them the not-so-pleasant realities of the occupations and masculine/feminine icons that they adore so much.

The purpose of the story (or series of shorts) is to contrast the idealistic way that children view certain occupations and icons with the uglier reality of what these roles entailed.  I've included the roles that would be deconstructed, as well as facts that contradict how these roles are viewed with children:

Childhood Icons:

Traditionally Male Icons:
- Astronaut

- Cowboy

Myths/Misconceptions:
- Astronaut: Basic requirements for being an Astronaut include, according to NASA's own website:
1. Bachelor's degree from an accredited institution in engineering, biological science, physical science, or mathematics. An advanced degree is desirable. Quality of academic preparation is important.

2. At least 1,000 hours pilot-in-command time in jet aircraft. Flight test experience is highly desirable.

3. Ability to pass a NASA space physical which is similar to a military or civilian flight physical and includes the following specific standards:

• Distant visual acuity: 20/100 or better uncorrected, correctable to 20/20 each eye.
• Blood pressure: 140/90 measured in a sitting position.
• Height between 62 and 75 inches

Not to mention that Astronauts have to continually work out in space, or else their bodies will decrease in bone and muscle mass as they slowly whither away.  Not to mention all of the different ways that an astronaut can die horrifically in space. Space wants you dead.

- Cowboy: technically, although it's associated with being a purely American creation, the Mexican Vaqueros predate the American Cowboy, and created a lot of what we think of as cowboy culture.  Also, traditional hats were not worn by old time cowboys, who instead preferred to wear flatter-brimmed Stetson hats or bowler hats. Also, gun use, especially the traditional six shooter gun, wasn't as prominent as Hollywood films make us believe, and the guns were extremely inaccurate, with only a range of about 50 feet.

Traditionally Female Icons:
- Ballerina/Dancer

- Princess

Myths/Misconceptions:
- Ballerinas: trained for years, starting as children, physically and emotionally grueling, very low salaries, unstable job security.  Also, may ballerinas sustain injuries, especially in the ankles and tendons, and many have to stop dancing in their 20s or 30s, depending on their health.
- Princess: this would have more to do with the fact that many princesses were forced to marry princes of other nations in order to secure relations between country. A description of court life and daily struggles of royal politics might work in this section as well.



Now, the final product doesn't necessarily need to be structured this way.  Hayden and Chelsea don't need to be interested in only these icons, and it might be interesting to mess with gender perceptions and have them switch interests. It's not necessary for the story to be divided into strict gender lines. It's just been presented this was for convenience's sake.

This format of education involving the debunking of commonly-held myths has been utilized by the TV show Adam Ruins Everything, where the titular Adam appears to random people in order to "ruin" normal conceptions on topics such as politics, video games, and entertainment.  Similarly, these books (or short, animated films) would attempt something similar for traditional children's icons and heroes.

The original Adam Ruins Everything, as a structural prototype

Now, there is one big challenge inherent in this project: tone. Even now as I describe it, it's unclear to me if the final product would end up being a piece of children's media commenting on challenging childhood assumptions as we grow up, or adult media commenting on the transitory period of childhood.  The material could go either way, depending on how it's written. Personally, since shows like Adam Ruins Everything already exist, I think it would be interesting to aim for something that's tonally more childlike, or at least, something that children and young adults could read/experience.

With all of that said, I feel that having media that addresses this difficult transitory period in a child's life would be beneficial to both adults and children.  It could serve as a way to show children that learning the truth or hard reality of an idealized fantasy isn't necessarily a bad thing and that it's a natural part of growing up.  It also serves as a way to remind adults of the idealism of our youth and the difficult transition into adult ideas and emotions.  And in this way, I feel like this project would be beneficial to all, and serve as a means of education and possibly enlightenment.

The Iron Giant

Speed Racer

          Disclaimer: I did not enjoy watching Speed Racer. This is the only film that we’ve watched in this class that I did not enjoy in some way.  I found it to be overly long with poor editing, acting, and production design.  Also, I’ve never wanted to hurt a child character more than Spritle Racer and that stupid monkey.

Don't look so surprised, you knew it was coming.

          Every single joke they made (and it was clear that the filmmakers found these characters to be the hilarious comedy relief of the film) fell flat on its face.  True, these jokes weren’t aimed at a 24 year old man who is probably dead inside, but I had a hard time believing that even a kid would find the humor funny.  Another disclaimer: I never watched the show as a kid.  I have no idea if the characterization, production design, plot, and even editing are all a reference to the original show’s animation style and design.  So there are my biases and flaws, completely exposed, as I feel like I can’t analyze the film honestly without those being on the table.

          That being said, there were some interesting attempts in the film to criticize not only our current society, but film making as well.  The film’s plot revolves around Speed Racer discovering the truth about the Grand Prix race: it’s been fixed for the last 50 years.  At this point, the film becomes overtly anti-capitalist, or at the very least, semi-Marxist, in that it promoted the importance of equal opportunity and the corrupting evil of capitalism and industry.  It is not truly Marxist, however, in that the film still promotes the value and importance of self-interest, self-promotion, and individual accomplishments and talents, things that Marxism does not value quite as highly.  Indeed, the film rejects capitalist and Marxist principals and aligns itself more with Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and some of the principals of Objectivism, which seek to raise up and reward those who are truly exceptional, such as Speed Racer.  Howard Roarke (protagonist of The Fountainhead), just like Speed Racer, is exceptional in his field of Architecture, and his refusal to conform to the majority eventually puts him ahead of the competition, just like Speed Racer’s refusal to accept bribes from Mr. Royalton and his insistence on racing honestly.

So basically this, but with cars and rainbow-colored racetracks.

          In another way, the poor CGI backgrounds and settings are a way of telegraphing to its audience that the film is not realistic in any way.  The world presented on the screen is not meant to be a realistic depiction of the real world, but an obviously artificial one.  Based on their previous films, the Wachowski siblings have shown that they can make realistic looking worlds using computer imagery, so the choice to make the world of Speed Racer look plastic, inauthentic, and cartoony was probably an intentional one.  This may have simply been an homage to the original Japanese anime, or a commentary on the artificiality of cinema. By intentionally creating a cinematic world that is fake looking and unrealistic, the audience is not sucked into the world that is on the screen, and by being removed from the story, the audience can better focus on the parable and messages being displayed without getting too immersed in the fiction. 

          Even though I hated the film, it was still an interesting exercise to analyze a film I despise for deeper meaning and thought.  Even bad movies have something of value that can be gleamed from it.  At the very least, the film remains committed and consistent to some of its more off-putting choices, such as the weird editing and cartoony, fake CGI backgrounds, and these weird choices do give the film a unique look and feel. So hats off to the Wachowskis for making an Objectivist fable that criticizes our current society as well as the artificiality of Hollywood filmmaking, even if their final effort made me want to vomit all the colors of the rainbow.

You know, to match the color palate of the film

To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird

The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Nightmare Before Christmas tells the tale of Jack Skellington, the leader of the residents of Halloween Town, who comes in contact with a similar yet completely foreign city: Christmas Town.  In attempting to understand their foreign culture and customs, Jack decides that the citizens of Halloween Town should bring the joys of Christmas to everyone in the world instead, leading to disastrous results.  By analyzing the film’s appeal to nostalgia in both content and form, the film’s themes of the dangers of cultural appropriation and

The film becomes a metaphor for cultural appropriation, and the dangers of appropriating elements of another culture without properly contextualizing it or fully understanding its role or purpose within the foreign culture.  When Jack and his Halloween friends attempt to recreate Christmas through their distorted, creepy lens, it leads to disaster.  All of the

     

      The film’s stop-motion animation is also a callback to a more nostalgic era of animation history.  Films such as the Rankin/Bass Christmas Specials such as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus is Coming to Town.  By the 1990s, stop-motion films had all but been abandoned in Hollywood.  Jack attempts to analyze several iconic Christmas elements and ions.  He dissects a teddy bear, dissolves a Christmas ornament in chemicals, cuts a paper snowflake in the shape of a spider, crushes mistletoe under a microscope while attempting to study it, and draws complicated Christmas equations on his chalkboard.  He attempts to understand the emotional with the logical and analytical, and this is where his

Whale Rider

Whale Rider is an interesting film.  It's beautifully shot, well acted (especially by its star, Keisha Castle-Hughes, who was nominated for an Oscar) and a wonderful story about change, tradition, and community.

The most obvious example of deconstruction and de-centering in the film is the binary gender roles that are central to the film's conflict.  Paikea, having been born a female, cannot inherit the role of chief, even though it is her right as one of the original Paikea's descendants.  This conflict allows us to think about the role that gender plays in our own lives.  Does it make sense for opportunities and advancements to be denied to someone because of their gender? Is it okay to go against obvious signs of destiny and tradition simply because it goes against your idea of what a leader should be? The film argues no, and even shows that Paikea has a connection to her ancestors and even whales, which the original Paikea famously rode on (hence the, uh, title).

Nobly pictured here.

Paikea does everything that tradition says she shouldn't do.  She fights with a taiaha.  She rides whales.  She gives amazing speeches.  Her every step contradicts and fights against the patriarchal standard, and by the end of the film, her actions are finally recognized by her grandfather Koro.  By isolating the role of gender in terms of leadership, the film is able to boldly state that gender should not be an issue when it comes to who gets to rule, and challenges the traditional patriarchal construct of not only her culture, but all cultures as well.

It's interesting to note that while the film in many ways subverts tradition and fights against the patriarchal society presented in the film, in many ways, it also upholds these same ideals.  Having Paikea fight to be the leader of the tribe is seen as progressive (and in terms of the culture and story being presented, it is), but traditional concepts such as "right to rule" and leadership through birthright are not questioned.  Paikea's ability to rule the tribe is never brought up on issues of age, credentials, or experience, only on her gender being the only obstacle.  The film never truly challenges the concepts of destiny or predestination (and honestly, that's not the film's purpose, but I digress) True, the chief does train and teach the other boys of the tribe to see who will become the next chief, but the conclusion of the movie suggests that he was doing this in spite of all the evidence that Paikea should be the chief.  He was, in actuality, fighting against tradition and his ancestors by not having the firstborn descendant of their first chief, Paikea, become the chief of the tribe, even if she is a female. So the film does a really good job of analyzing and evaluating gender biases that are present in culture and society, but other biases and traditional ideas are upheld.  This suggests to me that traditions are not changed all at once in a radical revolution, but slowly over time.  Progress does not happen in a day.  In reality, it is by both looking into the past for strength and inspiration that we can truly change the future, one steep at a time.

I'm just gonna leave this here. Try not to cry too hard.

Play

Last week, I had the opportunity to revisit many childhood games and apply principles on the importance of play in a child's development.  After playing through several games, these are my extremely scientific findings:

Game 1: Operation

Poor man; having surgery without anesthetic.

Operation terrified me as a child.  It was like I was defusing a bomb rather than playing a game.  I was completely underwhelmed when I revisited it.  Maybe it's just that my fine motor skills have improved since childhood, but the game was super easy.  Too easy.  Ray and I never even came close to hitting the edge.  In fact, my current theory is that the game publishers have made the game easier, widening the holes and making the pieces easier to grab.  When I was younger, many of the holes were in the shape of the piece you were trying to remove, and they were much smaller.  The chance of you striking the metal edge with the clamp was much greater, and therefore the risk of losing was higher.  This led me to think: what are the benefits and risks of making games easier for children? The benefits seem obvious: if it's easier to play, then it's easier to win, which results in fewer tantrums and upset feelings.  However, by lowering the risk, you also lower the reward.  If it's easy to win and everyone can win, then there's no real satisfaction in winning at all.  I don't know which is better for a child, since these are more adult thoughts on winning and losing.  Young children probably don't think about this ramification, and they enjoy winning regardless of the difficulty of the task.  I don't know which is better; all I'm saying is that the game was much more memorable for me when the risk of accidentally killing your patient was much higher, increasing both my fear and my enjoyment.

In hindsight, it's a good thing I never went into medicine.

Game 2: Battleship

Aww, look how cute they are, annihilating each other's military fleets.

Battleship was fun, and still is.  I played with Ray, and we were neck and neck for most of the game, with me barely scraping a victory. Battleship was always one of my favorite games to play (next to Clue) because there was strategy involved rather than physical skill, and I was always better with strategy than I was with my physical prowess.  That's also why I liked chess.  Strategy can be learned and improved through study and practice (like most things, I realize, but I preferred studying to working out) and I always liked playing games where my odds of winning were higher (this will prove hypocritical when you read my next entry; maybe I only like games that I win. Huh).  What impressed me this time was how much of Battleship involves learning to read your opponent.  The rules are simple: you place your ships, you call out random coordinates, they tell you if you missed, hit, or sank a ship.  But I realized that seeing your opponent's reactions when you call coordinates is just as important as the coordinates you call.  After the game was over, Ray showed me how many of my guesses were really close to her ships.  I realized that most of the time when I called coordinates close to her ships, she would hesitate longer before responding.  If I had paid more attention to her in the game, I might have seen her accidentally giving away this information with her responses and body language.  Instead, I focused on a grid strategy that I half recalled from my childhood, attempting to shrink the field into more manageable squares.  In focusing solely on strategy, I forgot about other important factors in the gameplay.  These are important skills for a kid to learn.  When they play with others, they learn to read body language, tone of voice, and other nonverbal social cues.  They learn what is appropriate and what is not.  By interacting with others through playing games, kids learn skills that they can apply in social situations at school, church, on dates, etc.  So even though it seems frivolous, it's still vital that kids play games with each other so that they can learn to understand nonverbal communication and further develop into adults.

Game 3:Mario Kart

I couldn't think of a caption, but it felt wrong not to give it one. So here ya go.

While playing Mario Kart on the Wii, I was reminded of why I didn't like playing competitive video games as a child (or for that matter, sports in general).  I was never very good at operating the Wiimote, so I did very poorly in every race.  Every time I lost, I was mocked, insulted, and put down. Just the usual kid stuff, really.  It reminded me of why I hated playing these kinds of video games. I never (or rarely) won Smash Bros as a kid, or Halo, or Call of Duty, or anything similar.  I remember one particular day when my cousin and I played Halo, and I didn't win a single match, no matter what the weapons or setting were.  Part of the reason for this is that I didn't grow up with an Xbox or Playstation, so I never practiced and got better. I also didn't care for 1st person shooters as a kid.  But I think the main reason I didn't like playing these games was because almost without exception, I would be mocked every time I lost.  Every. Single. Time.  That's a slight exaggeration, but I'm not kidding when I say that I lost a lot and that I got mocked for losing a lot.  It wasn't enough for the winning player/team to win the game; it was more important for them to make sure the other side felt bad about losing.  Now, a lot of this commentary may seem bitter, and it's probably biased by my past experience and nostalgic lens, but I'm glad I had these experiences.  They influenced the way that I see the world now.  I still like to play games, and I still love to win, but it's not that big of a deal when I lose.  Why does it matter if one person is better than another in some dumb game?  And in a larger sense, in life.  Everyone is going to be talented in some areas and not others, and I personally think it's more important to praise the talent rather than to mock those without.  But I think it was also an important lesson to learn as a child.  Most of the world functions on ranking and judging people, trying to ascertain who is the best and who deserves the best.  There's job competition and romantic competition, and competition in almost every aspect of life, and there's no better way to learn this lesson as a kid than by playing games with other kids. Kids need to learn how to lose, how to win, and how to react to others who win and lose.

So in conclusion, kids play games to learn more about each other, more about themselves, and how to develop skills that they'll need in everyday life.  Plus, games are just fun, and one should never underestimate the importance of fun.





Final random note: my favorite toy to play with as a kid was string. Just regular shoelaces.

No, seriously.

I could play with those bad boys for hours.  This probably had more to do with my Tourette's syndrome than anything else (hard to explain; the string just felt right), but I would twitch that string around in my fingers and come up with all kinds of stories. So play is different for everyone.