Animated Narratives - Week 2 [The Witch and the Child]

This week’s mindmap examines the art of subversion.

Animations are perceived, even to this day, catered towards kids due naïve worldviews originated from happily ever after tropes of studios like Disney and Pixar animations. I would argue however, that Japan’s golden age of animation was founded upon subversion of this presupposition. Works such as Katsuhiro Ôtomo 1988 Akira, Satoshi Kon’s 1997 Perfect Blue and Miyasaki’s 1984 Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind introduced mature worldview on complex class systems, dystopian societies, war and crime. Style also becomes an important element of subversion as 1960s stylistic cartoon of Mickey mouse, Astroboy and Simba the lion (later plagiarised and adapted into Lion King) was matured to realism at the turn of the decade. Playing with expectation of animation and style, it is possible to create meaningful subversion.

A point of reference for this particular week delves into Grimms’ Fairy tales & Slavic tales where mature scenarios befall on children and folk who enact on mature topics such as greed, power and religion. But through examination, these tales also provide characters with complex agendas and lasting consequences from the treacherous environments they inhabit.

These references helped evolve the mindmap from simple causal relationships and effortless resolution from the left section of the page, to increasingly complex characters, response and commentary on the right. In particular, the question why and how enabled a deeper sense of worldbuilding. For example, why did the child get lost in the first place? And why would they be picking mushroom in the woods that harboured a witch? Could this be a simple case of child neglect, or was it intentional? This also helped me realise that subversion can be revealed slowly; a mystery that unveils itself as the story progresses. It also uses the universal tropes of loving parents, naive child, the big bad witch and flips it to create something unimaginable but is very much real in the world – parents who starve their child to death, 10-year-old twins who murdered family and innocent civilians branded as witches to be burned at the stake. The world is clearly complex.