viz. - science fiction

Lilo & Stitch: The Danger of Beautiful Stories

Scott Garbacz — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 14:00:00 +0000

Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

If Frozen (as my previous blog argues) gleefully revises Disney’s traditional iconography, Lilo and Stitch does something far more interesting. Both are, in their ways, re-telling of fairy tales, but Lilo and Stitch proves far weirder, as well as far more intelligent, than its visually-immaculate descendent. We have already discussed Lilo and Stitch once at the Viz blog, praising it for its ability to subvert the “prince charming” narrative. Yet Lilo and Stitch is certainly worth at least one more look. The film is, in fact, both far more critical, and far more thoughtful, than Frozen is. Indeed, the film (despite its rough spots) is sophisticated and thoughtful in a lot of ways that Frozen never dreams of being, and may have something quite important to say about the way we engage with popular children’s stories.

The scene at the heart of the film—and I am aware this may be a contentious statement—involves neither of the female leads, but rather Stitch, Lilo’s hyperactive, destructive, pet alien “dog.” Near the climax of the film, when Stitch is finally coming to be accepted by his nontraditional adoptive family, he uncharacteristically runs away. Taking Lilo’s beautiful picture-book of The Ugly Duckling, he vanishes into the woods; there, in the rain (of course), he expresses a sorrow previously alien to his nature. “I’m lost,” he cries, before the scene fades to black.

Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

The scene would be puzzling, and seems to break with the film’s otherwise-reasonable plotting. Stitch has a lot of deficiencies, to put it mildly, but a lack of directional sense is not one of them. Nor is he particularly prone to deploy creative metaphors, or to express heartfelt narratives of any sort. Helpfully, however, the film gives us a key image to let us understand Stitch’s plight. Moments before, the camera showed us the page Stitch was reading; an image of the Ugly Duckling, alone, wishing for his family to be reunited with him. Stitch, in fact, emulates the Ugly Duckling’s pose as he mimics the story’s dialog, while the virtual camera floats to the proper height to cement the visual similarity.

Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

The moment has a cruel brilliance to it. Stitch misses the point of the narrative even as he re-enacts its climactic scene. Already, he had found his kind—Lilo loved him unconditionally from the first, and even her older sister Nani was forced to accept that he counts as ohana, part of a family where “nobody gets left behind and forgotten.” In any other Disney movie, Stitch would have come to a saccharine realization that the story of “The Ugly Duckling” is about his relationship with Lilo and Nani, and would have come to a happy ending then and there. Instead, he is unable to see the two orphaned sisters, who yell at each other and inhabit a house full of unmade dishes and filth-covered stoves, as part of the same world as an elegant swan and her children. So he waits, in the woods, repeating the phrase “I’m lost” while hoping that such mimicry will automatically generate the happy ending that the fairy-tale promised. A fairy tale that many people see as beautiful and true becomes, for Stitch, an elegant lie that keeps him from embracing his true family.

Indeed, in the film’s portrait of Kaua’i, a magnificient island whose tourist industry never seems to generate enough money to provide security, beautiful and polished stories can only be the enemy of practical wisdom. Lilo’s friends, for instance, each are equipped with Barbies, all modeled after their own complexion yet impossibly thin, tall, and elegant.

Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

Lilo, however, is bored with simple stories. Her doll is an adorable, muppet-like monster named Scrump whose life is soon to come to a gory end. “Her head’s too big,” Lilo says, “so I pretend a bug laid eggs in her ears, and she’s upset because she only has a few days to—.” Delivered in her cheerful, indomitable voice, the line doesn’t feel particularly morbid but rather testifies to Lilo’s vibrant inner life, filled with life-and-death struggles whose fantastic SF elements insulate them from the concerns of her fragile daily existence. Her friends, on the other hand, are bored, if not grossed out, by Lilo's ability to love a doll that isn't manufactured to demonstrate an artificial perfection. They leave the scene before she can even finish the sentence.

Poor Scrump. Everyone's afraid of him! Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

If that early scene wasn't enough to emphasize Lilo's distaste for conventional narratives, another comic scene (recorded, but sadly never animated) drives home the point. Hearing one too many rich, grotesque, continental-American tourist repeat the same boring question ("where is the beach?") Lilo launches her own poetic revenge. Using her local connections, she makes sure that a siren is going to be tested, then convinces the tourists that the test actually heralds a tsunami that moves "faster than the speed of sound." Lacking any sense of curiosity or independent thought, the Lemming-like tourists flee in a panicked herd. The local CPS officer doesn't share their morbid glee, but Lilo lets him in on a secret. "If you lived here," she says, "you'd understand." Lilo's love for the morbid and bizarre has, it turns out, some specific roots: a bitter frustration of dealing with insensitive outsiders who refuse to recognize the humanity of the natives.

Older sister Nani seems too busy for stories; she’s constantly scrambling to get a job and prove to the local Child Protective Services officer that she can function as a decent mother. Even so, she shares with Lilo an ability to inhabit a world of dark fantasy and a distaste for conventional narratives. When she’s fired from her waitress job, her first reaction is to call it a “stupid fakey Luau.” Her second is to tell Lilo that “The master’s a vampire, and he wants me to join his leigon of the undead.”

The obsession that Lilo and Nani have for rough-hewn narratives also applies to rough-hewn people. Lilo and Stitch probably features more diversity than any Disney movie not starring animals, and Lilo, at least, loves it. She collects photos of people—all obese, all living rich and fulfilling lives. Looking up at these people whose body types prohibit their participation in any other Disney movie, she draws only one conclusion. “They’re beautiful,” she says. Such courageous vision is probably the reason she can tell her own horrific story without flinching; looking at a photo taken before her parents died, she speaks simply and plainly. “That’s us, before. It was rainy, and they went for a drive.” Then she turns her attention back to Stitch. “What happened to yours? I hear you cry at night. Do you dream about them? I know that’s why you wreck things, and push me.”

"They're Beautiful!" Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

I have a harder time loving the movie as a whole than I do its characters, themes, and often shockingly-precise dialog. Stitch brings with him a lot of space-opera insanity that would be joyous in another movie, but here seems an unwelcome violation of the film’s otherwise gentle and thoughtful tone. I’m not sure how the audience is supposed to feel, for instance, when Snitch takes a chainsaw to Lilo and Nani’s house. It’s wacky fun at the time, but then we have to face a distraught Nani, who races home in anguish just as she’d finally found a decent job, and has to watch in despair as her sister is carted off by the sorrowful CPS officer.

Despite its rough edges, Lilo and Stitch pulled in nearly $150 million at the domestic box office, not quite the blockbuster numbers of Frozen, but a decent profit for a film with a budget of only $80 million. Sadly, while the success of Lilo and Stitch may speak well of the average American moviegoer, only Pixar has come close to producing the same sort of thoughtful, emotionally-complex storytelling, and they have had much more success with boys than girls as protagonists. Lilo and Stitch remains, then, as a unique, flawed masterpiece—and above all a warning about the stories we tell, the images we show, and the damage done when people are sold a pristine image of life whose glamor they will never be able to equal.

If Our Greatest Toy Maker Had Lived Ten More Years..

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 02:22:51 +0000

Image Credits: Newscom and Jim Henson Tribute Forum

Novelist Bruce Sterling, who gave a very hip keynote address on designer Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) at this year’s Flair Symposium "Visions of the Future," concluded his remarks with a challenge: Which of us has the courage to imagine the future like Bel Geddes did? Larger than life, impracticable, earnest, utopian, democratic, dazzling: can we still dream like that?

In this post, I give it a go with a foray into the sci-fi genre of Alternate History: What if Jim Henson (1936-1990) had lived a further ten years and had gotten involved in the Silicon Valley scene? How might computing have developed differently?

Henson was the master toy-maker of his generation, and it seems to me the last of his kind. He made things not code; his creations were not merely imagistic but tangible. By mid-career, with Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and Yoda from Stars Wars under his belt, he stretched the limits of his puppetry with Dark Crystal (1982), about which he said:

But with The Dark Crystal, instead of puppetry we're trying to go toward a sense of realism - toward a reality of creatures that are actually alive and we're mixing up puppetry and all kinds of other techniques. It's into the same bag as E.T. and Yoda, wherein you're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing, but you're trying to do the thing itself.

Image Credit: darkcrystalwikia.com

Aughra, pictured above, testifies to Henson's new puppetry, as do many of his later creations, such as those in Labyrinth (1986), The Storyteller (1988), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) and Dinosaurs (1991).

Image Credit: Mirage Studio, Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and New Line Cinema 1990

Regrettably, as everybody knows, the movies went with computer generated imagery instead of Hensonian advanced puppetry. The scene of the official passing of the torch from animatronics and material models to CGI is Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993). In that film, real-life models are interspersed with computer modeling in a more promising fashion than has been subsequently achieved. The following "Making of Jurrasic Park" is instructive (the pertinent bit starts at 6:30):

Given Henson's influence in television and cinema, it is hard to see how it would not have extended to Silicon Valley had he lived just a little longer. What I'm suggesting is that, instead of cybertronics and iPads and smartphones, perhaps, if Henson had lived, our computing technology would have been embodied and embedded in entirely different ways. Perhaps playfulness and physical configurability would have been valued over information retrieval and display. The present inclination for some time now has been to engraft technology onto our bodies.

Image Credit: Forbes

But if Henson had lived, I wonder whether our technology would be less egotistical, not to say monomaniacal. So obsessed we are with assessing our environments, ferreting out ever last bit of information, recording every image, every sound. If Henson had lived, maybe we would be looking at one another more directly instead of glancing up occasionally from our iPhones. Maybe our technology would be more fun, would be made more for fun and not for work. Each toy would be unique and textured, not smooth, homogenous and glossy. Wouldn’t you rather have Fiery than Siri?

Image Credit: http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Kevin_Clash

Introducing the brand new Sir Bounderton Stratchingberry: Twist it twice to bring up maps, double it once for text. Bounce and bring up your phone contacts. To answer, throw Sir Bounderton around your neck and bend the Snoozlebroger to your ear! Be warned: Sir Stratchingberry is fond of jumping rope and will occasionally break out in an operatic "It's Not Easy Bein' Green"!

Real World Metropolis, Future City on Film: The Image of Vancouver in Battlestar Galactica

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Pat Suwalski

To continue my discussion of real cities represented as futurescapes on film, this week I’ll be talking about the much-loved sci-fi TV series Battlestar Galactica. The series, a “reboot” of the less critically-acclaimed series of the same name from 1978, was filmed and aired from 2003 to 2009. Instead of solely relying on special effects to create a future city called Caprica in the show, the series’ creator, Ronald D. Moore, decided to use a real-life glittering city on a bay. In Battlestar Galactica, Vancouver is the future. And the future is now.

What’s the image of Vancouver in Moore’s series? It is all glass surfaces, shimmering waves, soaring skyscrapers, geometric shapes, verdant shrubs. Light shines, unencumbered by opaque surfaces. Buildings blossom and are surrounded by trees threatening blooms. Everything is stripped clean of any identifying markings. A few CGI flourishes are added. This is the future city par excellence—unknown, yet slightly familiar.

Image Credit: "Daybreak Part 1" Screenshot

And that’s the way that future cities (of the real world variety) are supposed to work. They are simultaneously somewhere and nowhere. A recognizable Vancouver of today wouldn’t be a convincing future city—we’d be able to pick out landmarks and our disbelief would no longer be suspended. Does the fact that Moore used Vancouver as his setting for the future mean that Vancouver is devoid of landmarks? That it’s an amalgam of all cities?

Writer Douglas Coupland has waxed poetic about Vancouver in his book, City of Glass, and he’s not so sure that Vancouver is landmarkless. For Coupland, although Vancouver is Chinatown and Wreck Beach, it also is “Backlot North,” a cheap alternative for filming a variety of urban scenes no matter where they are supposed to be set. Vancouver has been Berkeley, Auckland, New York City, and now, Caprica City.

Imaginary/Filmed Vancouver Map Credit: Douglas Coupland

So, what does this malleability do for the image of Vancouver? After urban planner Kevin Lynch published his seminal book, The Image of the City, in 1960, “imageability” became a buzzword in planning circles all over the US. Every planner wondered what a city could do to create a unique image for its residents and for its outside audiences. David Harvey, a contemporary Marxist geographer, sees the end result of “imageability” as the production of cities for consumption (which eventually runs the risk of planners producing cookie-cutter cities that lose all uniqueness). Instead of losing all landmarks, with Moore’s use of Vancouver in Battlestar Galactica, Vancouver’s residents can see the image of their city more clearly.

Image Credit: Frak That

The image of Vancouver is remade as urban chroniclers traipse about the city looking for landmarks they saw in Moore’s version of the future. An entire website—Battlestar Locations—is dedicated to documenting Vancouver sites used when filming the series. The creators of the site, Anne and Mo, admit that they are “a couple of fans who like to travel and get together. Searching out locations has given [them] the chance to do both.” They often post side-by-side comparisons of the TV version of Vancouver with their own images of the same site. The images of Anne or Mo reenacting scenes while exploring their fine city are what “imageability” should be about—use. Yes, Vancouver is the “everycity” (Coupland, again) on film, but to its residents, it’s a magical place where the future comes to life.

Image Credit: Battlestar Locations