Mary Norton, Miyazaki, and Arrietty

The Questions I have about Animated Versions

It is no longer so simple: First there were Silent animations originating (not just their storyboards) with paper.  Then, second, there were gels used for the animated parts (in the case of Pinocchio, especially in the toyshop, the quantity was very labor-intensive), and in Disney’s Snow White, the stylistic difference between her or her prince and the dwarves’ world was very obvious, even to a six-year-old child (who later saw that the woods also were in another style).  As I grew older, I noticed that Pinocchio and Fantasia and Bambi were much more unified.  The world of Pinocchio was pretty purely in an illustrator’s style, meaning that a unity of the settings and the figures was kept in mind, and in Bambi the woods and the animals both alike were humanized, as illustrators usually did.  In Fantasia (for example, in the Pastorale Symphony, since each of its episodes has its own manner) both the Grecian mythological characters and their landscape were in much the same sort of classicizing moderne as was used for Balanchine’s Apollo Musagetes of Stravinsky.  In other words, to sum up briefly, Snow White stands alone as somewhat primitive but triumphant (Pinocchio proclaims the presence of Europeans who had signed on with Disney after Nazism drove them from their homes).  And so, throughout the pre-digital age.  It is quite obvious that all of these (I don’t remember Dumbo very well: I saw it once more than 65 years ago) bear witness to the tight control of Disney over the products.  Even after his death, and (in my opinion) especially in The Lion King, the unified vision prevails, a sort of Hollywood Pan-African.  The African elements of design and expression are greatly modified, but they have been carefully researched. 

Now, I am not an authority on this history of animation, but the foregoing comes from the children of one of my former students having shared with me the Miyazaki feature-length films of the Ghibli Studios.   I just adored Kiki’s Delivery Service, and I still do.  It seems to me Miyazaki’s own Pinocchio, technically and artistically.  I accepted less articulated body joints, since I wouldn’t have seen them in Japanese scroll illustrations, either.  But Kiki’s head has many angles and aspects, her mouth many positions and expressions, her dress many ways of billowing, according to the action and the weather, etc., and so have the other characters.  Besides, the way that the action moves is unique and appropriate for each, even in the story.  I am certain that Miyazaki himself was responsible for and cared about all such properties.

I have seen a couple of other Miyazaki films but only once apiece.  But I got the dvd of Arrietty, because I had been inspired to buy and to read Mary Norton (1903–1992).  Her stories are set in Bedfordshire, just north of London, where in fact she spent her childhood (you can check Wikipedia for the data).  These books of hers, from the Bed Knob through the six Borrowers, are perfectly delightful; no wonder they have remained in print and repeatedly been made into films both for cinema and for TV, both in the USA and in the UK.  How had I missed them, when, both child and adult, I had read and loved, for example, E. Nesbit’s Railway Children?  I mean, children’s books are NOT wasted on children, but it is a dull adult (IMO) that does not go back to them and relish the writing as well as the characterizations.  The answer is plain: Mary Norton wrote The Magic Bed Knob only during the War and started the Borrowers thereafter, publishing the first in 1952.  By then I was at the university, consuming Greek and Latin, reading Woolf and Joyce and Proust, too, and learning to be, if possible, an adult.  Add that I had no money beyond rent and food (buying fabric remnants to make clothes) and neither I nor anyone I knew had a television—and there was no PBS yet, anyway.  This wasn’t being a hippie.  This was working one’s way through the university.  One was young and healthy, one borrowed nothing, one had too little to owe anything (and there were no credit cards, either).  Yes, of course, by the time when I had passed the exams to proceed to the doctorate, I had an assistantship.  But then I went to Greece, to the American School of Classical Studies, for two years.  Then wrote my dissertation.  Then went to the University of Oregon, my first position.

It seems obvious that Mary Norton was raising her four children before she wrote these books.  That she used not only her childhood in Bedfordshire but her own mother’s (and aunts’ and her grandmother’s) childhood stories and so transmitted all of it to her children and to all of ours.  That is why the House is no later than Edwardian, the country life of Bedfordshire, likewise, still is late Victorian to Edwardian.  That is why stories of Little People can still be commonplace.  I’m afraid that also is why, in the Bed Knob, her Pacific islanders are not only cannibals (I have read Anglican missionary families’ accounts of some real cannibals, but NOT with big stew pots as in old movies), but, since she relates children’s notions of the south seas, her cannibal chieftain is, to be blunt, a Golliwog, and very black: they got Africans and Asians all mixed up.  Disney made a movie of the Bed Knob, and I wonder what was done about the cannibals…  Well, you could get Golliwog dolls even when I was little (I was not allowed to have one, though I found them very appealing).  It is the same world as The Secret Garden, a universe of Empire, in which children are shipped around the world as necessary.

Now, what happens when a modern Japanese studio takes on such stories?  In my opinion, they just don’t make sense.  Arrietty, unlike Kiki, just doesn’t make sense.  I think that anyone who reads the Borrowers first will have the same opinion.

But there’s something more: as one reviewer said, the backgrounds are perfectly lovely.  Yes, but even more than in Snow White, they are jarringly at odds, stylistically, with the figures and the action.  And the Miyazaki protagonists have his brand of faces and anatomy but far less expressive and individualized than in Kiki.  Less so than any of those post-War princesses of Disney studios.  In YouTube I found some pencil-drawn storyboards by Miyazaki himself for Arrietty. These are quite wonderful.  They have all the life and spirit that the figures in the film lack; they are as delightful as Kiki.  Someone says in a Wiki article than Miyazaki has been intending to retire.  Well, he may be tired, though he’s only 70.  But notice the list of dozens who worked on the film!

Notice that I have not talked about Toy Story kind of animation, let alone that used for Peter and the Wolf and for Hansel and Gretel.  I like those very much indeed, but they are something else again, just as Lotte Reiniger, which was conceived as Fine Arts anyway, and is most elegant, is not really comparable, either.

The Boy on the Dolphin

Corinth, AE 21 6.24grams.  Marcus Aurelius (161–180 AD).

A coin with Melikertes
Reconstituted as a Roman Colony, Corinth once again administered the very ancient Games at Isthmia. That is why (if for no other reason) it issued coins showing the boy Melikertes, Ino's child by Athamas, rescued and brought to shore by a dolphin.  Trees are hard to specify on coins the size of an American nickel, 5¢, but there is good reason to call it a pine, apart from its being bristly (and pines today do grow along the shore of the Gulf of Corinth).  The CLI preserved on this specimen stands for Colonia Laus Iulia (COR being obliterated on this one).  Other specimens also adequately preserve Marcus Aurelius's name, but his portrait would be recognizable to cognoscenti anyway.
For his wonderful book, Münzen und antike Mythologie: Reise in ein fernes Land (Obernforf am Neckar, 2011.  ISBN 978-3-00-03-4813-6), pp. 47-48, Hans-Joachim Hoeft illustrates a better preserved specimen, and summarizes the myths (for, from different sources, we find perhaps a different tradition calling Melikertes Palaimon and designating Ino as Leucothea, surely implying a cult).  Between the universal attraction of the dolphin-rescue motif and the idea of Leucothea (and the limited sources), the stories have given rise to imaginative interpretations, fiction (Robert Graves's The White Goddess still read, evidently, being in print), and even a movie with the title of this Post: the blue Aegean and its touristic culture being irresistible to film makers (1967, with Sophia Loren).

So this is one of the subjects that persons not deeply committed to numismatics do desire, and, though in several issues it is not inherently rare at Corinth, I did not intend (or hope to find) to get one, not least because I had to be sure that it was not a smuggled coin.  Since they tend to have been "conserved" excessively (one listed in the RPC files at the Ashmolean specified as falsified in the effort to make it salable), I could not obtain even a near-perfect specimen, either conscientiously or financially.  And it had to come from a seller whom I could trust absolutely to sell only what is 'provenanced'.  This one, with its scouring and painting behind the portrait and in front of the dolphin (which may betray bronze disease) and its mangled legends, would not be acceptable to most collectors.  To illustrate the myth, however, it suffices, so I am happy to share it here.  Its best home is with an art historian who loves portraits and knows mythology and couldn't care less for bragging rights or resale value, especially seeing that the Marcus Aurelius with slightly parted lips is very sympathetic, though his laurel wreath is largely destroyed, and his eye must be imagined.

When we read myths with names like Melikertes (though even M. L. West, in The East Face of Helicon, Oxford, 1997 [pb rpt 2003] agrees that, despite the identical series of consonants, we cannot assert that 'Melikertes' is the same as Phoenician 'Melqart', and with variants, including that name Leucothea, whom the reader is assumed to know of) it is very likely that we are dealing with a very ancient one.  In such a case, the sequence of wives and different children for Athamas has nothing to do with sexual psychology, though it obliges later authors to rationalize it (I think of that classic of my childhood, Helen's Babies, 1876, by John Habberton, in which the little boys adapt and rationalize the Bible stories whose characters and milieu are beyond the ken of three- and six-year-olds—there is a Silent movie with Clara Bow in which the little boys are played by little girls, and the Bible stories in baby talk are omitted).  Like many other pre-Drama elements of the Theban Cycle, this story is, I should think, from the Late Bronze Age, if not even earlier.

In any case, for Corinthians of the Roman Imperial period, Melikertes is the hero in whose honor the Isthmian games were held, and the pine tree alludes to the crowns of feuilles de pin (see the libretto of Offenbach's La Belle Helène, which shows that Halévy remembered the authors he had read in school, probably Plutarch (Symposiacs, Book V, Question III, which is more fun to read than most of Plutarch's Lives), though the sources as a whole are uncertain whether Isthmia had pine crowns first (as Oscar Broneer argued) or celery, which Nemea certainly had later.  To me the coin makes plain that the Corinthians believed that the dolphin delivered Melikertes (dead or alive) at the Isthmus and laid him at the foot of the Pine Tree.

If you can't read any German, I recommend going to H. J. Rose, Handbook of Greek Mythology, 4th ed., 1950, though it is so superior to any of the others that even its PB editions, even its Kindle (!), is expensive after all these years.  You can even safely use Wikipedia; just not what is other than Wikipedia itself.  If, however, you desire to read Robert Graves, I'd recommend reading his fiction as such; he was a wonderful storyteller, but his two-volume Greek Myths (an old Pelican PB) is much worse than useless as a work of reference.  The University of Chicago references that Hoeft supplies, too, are excellent, of course, since Isthmia is their excavation and a good one.  And you can find H. J. Rose in almost any library, also, perhaps, in used-book stores. Or just take what the coin says implicitly: it is ancient, it is Corinth, it shows the dolphin version of the Melikertes story, and it shows the pine tree, too.  Everyone knew about the differing crowns of the Greek games.  St. Paul mentions them in 1 Corinthians 9: 25, but he is not interested in what they were made of or what they looked like; he cites them for their perishability.

The promised Review of "Call the Midwife"

Now I have seen all six episodes of "Call the Midwife".  In fact, I have seen most of them more than once.
I think that what distinguishes it is its fidelity both to the memoir on which it is based and to the manners and mores, in the greatest detail, of the late 1950s in England.  I mean that it is true right down to dye lots to Marks & Spencer; at least, it gives that impression.  It is even true to the cinematography of that period.  Cross cutting is not done for its own sake, for example.  Hair styles are true to family albums rather than to magazine illustrations.  Speech, as in the memoir, is unaffected.  The whole series never descends to being a sort of pseudo-documentary.  We never see, for example (as if by chance), a newspaper headline that dates a scene and thus invites the viewer to bring in all the platitudes taught in school.  And yet, it really is so long ago by now!
I was afraid that, given the affectionate and reminiscent character of Jennifer Worth's memoir itself, and her having died before the series was fully realized, the series might become too sentimental.  In my opinion, somehow it stayed on keel.  It does not sentimentalize or sanitize.  It never mocks or tries to justify anything other than the characters of the nurses and the sisters themselves.  I would add that to the best of my knowledge the resident secular nurses would see just about that much of the life in Religion.
Well, I have no new illustration to post at the head of this, but I wanted to say that whatever others may think of this TV series, I like it very much indeed, and the actors and directors, I think, are really excellent.  Please, don't think that I'm glorifying slums!  Nor does the memoir.  The keynote is acceptance, not of conditions but of life itself.

One ought to vote!

Note from one they call wishy-washy

Sestertius (nice big brass) of Antoninus Pius / Pax Augusti

By this time, who can endure any more political talk?  But I am still possessed by my generation's compunctions.

One ought to vote.  I have usually lived in states too small to matter in the electoral college and with easily guessed results, except when I first voted and learned that the SF Bay Area is usually outnumbered by Greater L.A.  Even so, one ought to vote.  And so I shall go to my polling place on Tuesday.  The mayor, at least, needs voting for.

Readers of my blog have wondered about my beliefs.

In a nutshell: Don't ask your fellow citizens to share your own beliefs, and, above all, don't try to force them legally: to do so is bad for the country.  

In other words, in Stoic and Christian (just to name two) terms: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

So now you know.

The Eve of All Souls

HAPPY HALLOWEEN

I was out taking snapshots as I took a walk this afternoon, and in some blocks the holiday that seems to have become America's favorite, but more a playful Hungry Souls than the Eve of All Souls in the Christian calendar, is very richly represented.  Our 1920s neighborhood is as much young as old in its population, and it is those who came of age since the 1960s that seem to enjoy it most poignantly, as everything happily memorable from childhood.  Childhood is regained.  This lifesize ghost betrays someone trained in the arts, too.
Other blocks are sober, but the one that I enjoyed today was rejoicing in Halloween, so I wish you all a happy one.

(These are from the images taken 30 Oct 2012 in the album https://picasaweb.google.com/102498681030579488308/TOPICNeighborhood25YearsLaterAndDigital)

Graphic Design gratis

Recycled Garbage

October 17, 2012.  This is a straight photo of something noticed by chance.

If you click on the image to zoom it, its raison d'être will be more apparent.  Though it couldn't have been taken of anything else, anywhere else, or even ten minutes earlier or later, what it was taken of doesn't matter to the image.  It is my humble offering to the Graphics of Phôs, a sort of graphic imagery that only a camera, whether pinhole or film or digital, can make, created by educating the visual capabilities and associative tendencies of the human brain.  The camera doesn't create anything, any more than a lithographic stone or prepared canvas or pigments and oil and varnish do.  As for the hands-on part of visual imagery, that now comes with what one does with post-processing rather than with fingers in the developing pan and so on.

Back to the images that Bill Brandt took with the camera that he found, probably originally designed for espionage or some such hole-in-the-wall purpose: its lens could record, for example, a whole room full of nudes interacting such as to cause a real scandal on YouTube.  Brandt used it for extreme but quite 'innocent' studies of nudes (primarily nudes; not exclusively).  These are the Brandt images that are best represented on the internet, to which I refer you.  When I call his nude studies 'innocent', I don't mean that they aren't appreciative of the female body (far from it) but that they are not meretricious or even pornographic (in the primary meanings of those two words).

On the other hand, Brandt's nudes are richly suggestive: we bring our own minds to that task.  So, to me, my little light study is suggestive.  When you look at it zoomed to full screen, and your monitor isn't TOO bad, its little edges and translucencies and curious patches of red color and texture not unlike that of pre-modern underlinens, might make you think of passages of Bouchers or Fragnonards.  Of course, that depends on your having had the privilege of meditating on some of their best paintings, whether in New York or Paris or London, just to name three.  And those red patches, considering the tendencies of current television drama, may suggest violence or one of the disturbing sides of Nature, just as some of the curves and contrasts of Brandt's nudes can evoke ghosts of sexual anxiety as well as romantic daydreams.

I would emphasize, too, that as the light event caught my eye, sending me for the little camera (always kept handy for this reason), I didn't see what I'd get, only the graphic potential of the light event.  In fact, once I was using the camera I had to walk around to look north, into the room, to get the above, since the contrast was too strong, I realized already, looking west—and I could do without a record of that screen door this time.  I wasn't even trying to conceive of frames for pictures.  I just used the monitor and the zooming function to search and suggest.  I mean, to repeat, it is the image that is (literally) graphic, rather than the record of somewhat bohemian housekeeping.

If you are curious, you can find the four images from two exposures at the head of the current Picasa album: current Picasa album.  They are annotated, and you can get the metadata by clicking at right for full info.

Ordinary People

Some TV series and the Photographs of Bill Brandt and Robert Doisneau

Bill Brandt, London, 1939: The Lambeth Walk

Does English television produce series specially with US in mind?  Long ago Coronation Street, though available in parts of the United States, was (we thought) made for themselves and the Commonwealth.  After all, we didn't suppose that our I Remember Mama, set on one of the San Francisco streets that preserve row houses on a steep hill, was of much interest overseas.  Later, however, when I ran into episodes of Dallas all over Europe (and, speaking for Canada, of DeGrassi Junior High in Greek villages, where the local pre-teens were agog over it), I saw that high-end soap operas of our own had supplanted dark movies about Chicago gangsters and sunbathed ones of Roy Rogers in providing exportable Americana.
What is the point of more Upstairs, Downstairs or of Downton Abbey?  Neither one of them has the authenticity of Brideshead Revisited.  Evelyn Waugh could be offensive, of course, and kidded himself awfully.  I didn't say, either,  that Brideshead was inoffensive to everyone or in the whole to anyone, but it did have a consistent point of view, a strong one (Authority: is Julian Fellowes an auctor in the same sense?).  So had South Riding, though its authorial character got a bit muddled.  And, oh, the joy of Mapp and Lucia!
Since Jennifer Worth was just nine months younger than me; since my mother never tired of telling me, whenever I was troublesome, how awful my breech birth had been; since I was just a month younger than the Dionne quintuplets and from the public library had read up on rural multiple births long before my mother gave me the book, Being Born (recommended by Parents magazine), but I have never even been pregnant myself; since riding into Liverpool Street in London from Cambridge repeatedly in 1959 gave me a daily bird's-eye view of the East End just before its tenements were replaced (and I wondered at its resemblance to some of our own, whose replacements often became uninhabitable in their turn), it is quite certain that I shall watch the full six parts of Call the Midwife.  The first episode was really pretty good, but the book affords many booby traps for the BBC today.  It got the nuns right, to my great surprise, but it must be careful not to go over the top.  Anglican religious orders is something I actually know something about, and, like Jennifer Worth, I shall always be discreet: there are things you can talk about and things you just won't, if you really know them.  This is not to say that you idealize or sentimentalize.
I'll write a follow-up when I've seen all six episodes.
I always like to put an image at the top of a post.  The BBC has a nice page of Matthew's 1912 images, but Jennifer Worth spells out what happened in ruins from bombing of the docks, what with squatters in the 1950s' housing shortage and new ethnic groups introducing additional complications, and Matthew's Spitalfields zone was Jewish and, well, not quite so bad as some others.  Fortunately, one of Bill Brandt's images, from just before the Blitz, has been so widely reproduced that I have ventured to use it.  It is remarkable how long it took after the end of the War for children's clothes and games to change very much, and the popular song, "The Lambeth Walk" was a cockney-dialect ditty, besides.  It is a rare photographer who works without some Program (such as the USA's FSA project) that has an axe to grind: it was what they were paid for.  Even Brandt turned to his famously surreal distortions—not surreal in meaning but one of the greatest ventures in liberating photography from documentation.  Of course, all the greatest documentarians (think of Cartier-Bresson) have strong formal virtues, too, which make their images the most memorable, but finding such photography (more than primarily journalistic) of ordinary people in the 1950s is surprisingly difficult, even if questions of copyright were not a problem.
Great photographs of the ordinary life of ordinary people's ordinary settings, taken out of the photographer's personal attrait, before the Age of the Beatles but after the War, are remarkably rare.  Robert Doisneau, who returned repeatedly to the banlieue that he came from is my favorite.  He is one of the names that I discovered in The Family of Man, by the way, and there is a beautiful biographical retrospective volume for him by Peter Hamilton (Abbelville Press, 1995), when he had just died.  Copyright here is a problem, but you can find good images on line, and some of the best are from the 1950s.  Doisneau, like Edward Steichen, worked in every kind of photography.  For England, Bill Brandt, for me, is unsurpassable.  Thames & Hudson published a fine retrospective volume for Brandt in 1999.