Having watched both Superman vs The Elite
Arguably, both have children (and those who are a “child at heart”, I suppose) as their target audience. Anymore, these stories are told in such a way that you can have a conversation afterward and ask “so… what’s the moral to the story?”
We’ll get into spoilers for both films after the cut (In the meantime, I can tell you that both movies are absolutely amazing and well worth your time so see them!)
First off is the Superman movie. It begins with a little discussion of how, yeah, Superman kinda is kinda lame. Superman licensed out his likeness, you see, to a cartoon studio that makes the 1970’s Hanna-Barbera guys look like Pixar. Cheesy animation, cheesy bank robbery storyline, cheesy dialog including Superman catching the bad guys with a dogcatcher net and saying “Crime Doesn’t Pay!”
Now, there’s an interesting conundrum when Atomic Skull goes on a rampage (a rampage that includes killing some people), inevitably gets caught by Superman and put in Stryker’s Island… where he inevitably gets free again. This time, however, Atomic Skull gets stopped mid-rampage (which, yes, includes more deaths) by the Elite, a group of four I Can’t Believe They’re Not Rob Leifield Characters who go on to point out that if Atomic Skull gets locked up again, he’ll get out again and he’ll kill again… and so they’re going to kill the Atomic Skull. Wham. Dead third-tier bad-guy.
The moral arguments make themselves, of course. I’m sure I don’t need to recreate them here. Well, as the new Elite superheroes are making their splash, Superman sees all of the headlines, watches all of the talk shows, and even overhears children playing… “you can kill me but I can’t kill you? Superman sucks.”
(Note: Fish was over and he said to me early in the movie: “Holy crap. They’ve made Superman interesting.”)
Well, after this comes to a head, there’s a fight between Superman and the Elite where Superman re-affirms the importance of not taking the law into one’s own hands and, especially, the importance of believing that there are better ways to deal with problems than with mindless, murderous violence. Superman points out that he wants to set an example. He wants to be one. The fight at the end is pretty good action (kinda having its cake and eating it too, but, hey, it’s Superman) in its own right but the reason to watch the movie is to watch it with your kids and explain that Superman doesn’t kill because he is Good.
We can get all of nuances, the compromises, and the hypocrisies hammered out with them when they’re older. Heck, they’ll figure them out without us, I’m sure. Before then, however, it’s good to have a straightforward affirmation like the one Superman is capable of giving… even if it is a little bit cheesy.
While the Superman story was a didactic story for children (and there’s nothing wrong with a little didacticism when the message is a nice straightforward one like “not killing people may be square, but it’s the right thing to do anyway”), the little story of Spirited Away has far more in common with many of the stories from a dog-eared copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that surely felt old when it was read to my grandparents when they were children. It felt like… oh, The White Snake.
Now, of course, it was nothing (at all) like that story plotwise or themewise or even when it came to the moral (well… maybe a *LITTLE*). It just felt like one of those stories because it felt like an old story.
Now, as I watched it, I found myself wondering exactly how many cultural cues I was missing that would be caught by people who were raised within Japanese society. There was even a point at which I had to pause the dvd and yell at Steve “you just *KNOW* that this relates to something that all Japanese parents tell their children about why it’s important to close doors all the way!”
Without getting into too many spoilers (because, seriously, just trying to explain the basic plot of the story will spoil stuff), I’ll just say that the story is very close to the fables in which a child finds out that her parents have been tricked and imprisoned by faeries, and then has to match her wits and guile (or lack thereof) against the fae. Through the story she has to make friends, pass tests, exceed expectations, and pay whatever debts need to be paid in order to free her parents… while this broad outline may make you feel like this is a story you’ve heard before, I’d say that the fact that it’s told with Japanese cultural assumptions and underlying mythology makes the story fresh… of course, maybe there’s nothing that is flying over my head, in the same way that, oh, Monsters Inc. can be understood by most folks so long as they know “this is one of the cultures where children fear monsters coming out of their closets”.
The moral, I suppose, could be summed up as “hey, kiddo… you’re stronger than you think you are.”
Another fable worth telling children… but, given the context, it didn’t feel didactic. Well, no more than the quality Grimm tales.
Have you seen one or both of these? What did you think?
My son and I watched Spirited Away after we’d seen Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke, and My Neighbor Totoro, so I was prepared for common Miyazakiisms:
* He loves Japan and its traditions. All the weird creatures we see are, I’m pretty sure, things out of Japanese legends and folktales, so they’re not as weird to his intended audience. It’s as if an American film had white-sheeted ghosts and red-skinned, horned devils with pitchforks.
* He loves nature. People who foul it make him really angry. This is important here, thought it doesn’t dominate this film as it does with his other best film, Princess Mononoke.
* He admires the traditional virtues. You’re right that Sen has to exceed expectations, but first she has to meet them: do the job she’s assigned, while being polite, helpful, respectful, and responsible.
I liked it a lot, and think it would work for all but the youngest children. It’s a quite different film from Princess Mononoke, which is frequently very, very angry, and which I wouldn’t recommend for pre-teens.
In doing research, I found out that “The Radish Spirit” (hey, one of my favorites!) didn’t have a name/title at all in the original.
Is this because everybody would have known, just by looking, that that guy was a radish spirit? Or is that something that they threw in there for western audiences because they knew that not knowing a spirit’s name/title is something that would have driven western audiences absolutely crazy (if a character is important enough to move the plot forward, the character gets a name!)?
It also makes me wonder to what degree monotheism forces changes in the interactions of faerie (and other bit players) tales compared to cultures where the fae (or other bit players) have a lot more breathing room.
oni and other creatures are gods or demigods — gods of place, more than of “aspect of reality”…
That sounds pretty analogous to “fae” to me…
After Kiki’s Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo… Spirited Away was a bit of a surprise. Hannah loved the first three and vetoed Spirited Away very early into it as, “Too Scary”.
That said, I thought Spirited Away was very interesting in the way that Kiki’s was delightful and Ponyo was charming and Totoro was cute.
Superman vs The Elite was one of the stories that Superman was meant for. Was meant to be the lead for, I mean. There aren’t many of those.
Even prior to seeing this, I’ve actually thought long and hard about the conflicts between the old-timey heroes and The Authority. Now that they’re in the same universe (a total mistake, but anyway) maybe it’s being explored. I thought that Kingdom Come missed the real dilemma: the increasing isolation between the heroes and those that they are meant to protect.
You start with superheroes that have secret identities and live among us (Clark Kent). You move from there to Celebrity Superheroes who don’t have secret identities (Wally West) or keep their names a secret but spend most of their time around other heroes (Kyle Rayner), to Superheroes that live on a satellite and whose actual identities are neither known or unknown because they are so unimportant.
The conflict between this and Superman is pretty significant.
I remember back when Superman renounced his citizenship. The entire argument was wrong, in my view. Those that hated the storyline thought that this was another sign of comics being unpatriotic. The other side mocked this. This missed the point. The point is that a Superman that is a citizen of nowhere is accountable to nobody. That’s a scary concept.
It’s really easy to argue against the death penalty in our universe. You can appeal to failures on the part of the state when it comes to fingering the right guy, you can appeal to failures on the part of the prosecution when it comes to fair play, you can appeal to failures on the part of the defense when it comes to collusion, you can appeal to historical racism, you can appeal to all sorts of arguments that could easily get a lot of people to at least admit that there are good reasons that allow a person to oppose the death penalty in good faith.
The Atomic Skull turning people into ash on National Television is not a situation covered by these arguments, then him breaking out and doing it again (ON NATIONAL TELEVISION) covers a whole mess of the counter-arguments that we didn’t even touch on.
If anything, the actions of the Atomic Skull should get people who are opposed to the death penalty to admit that, yes, folks in the DCU have a lot of good reasons to support the death penalty for certain metahumans (but, I’m sure, they’ll point out those arguments don’t apply to *THIS* universe! at which point we can tell them “no politics”).
Having Superman stand up and say “no killing” in the DCU is a very principled affirmation indeed.
Superman renouncing his citizenship was a story that could have been very interesting (I mean: does Clark Kent vote? Maybe not. He’s a reporter from another era, after all…) but it felt like Joe Q over at Marvel killing Captain America because the Republicans won an election.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puella_Magi_Madoka_Magica
For slightly older children. But, very very good. A retelling of a classical japanese myth.