Of Children and Layered Reality
I started writing this post pretty much right after I saw Wall-E on opening weekend. It is now my favorite Pixar feature-length movie for several reasons. But I’m still having some trouble to come up with a narrative to describe what I want to say in response to seeing it.
We all know that Denno Coil is about today, more so than the future. In some ways it is a cautionary tale for children and parents, about getting lost within virtual reality and both the benefits and trappings an augmented reality brings to the next generation.
Augmented reality is a reality today. Just looking at what the various iPhone applications are out there, it brings me some degree of confidence that soon enough kids will play hide and seek with GPS, play catch with accelerometers, and tell ghostly stories with its reflective screen.
Just like the last generation of kids, I suppose.
But like Wall-E, Denno Coil’s story is a layered thing. I say layered rather than multi-faceted because one thing has to build on another. It’s not so much there aren’t aspects of Wall-E that are tangential (such as the romantic side plot), but there are both themes and settings within the show that commonly come in bundles. Nations run by corporations? A pollution-ravaged Earth? Mankind’s exodus into space? Intelligent robots doing our bidding? Rogue AI? Search for leafy vegetation? and All it needs is more sex, technobabble and a katana-wielding kayak maker. Or a GECK.
Denno Coil’s layering is probably just as ingenuous, but it’s not subtle. It paints a near-real-life picture with AR, but at the end it’s about a bunch of kids doing the Tom Sawyer thing about some urban legend. Parents are probably still better off spanking them and spending the time to figure out what is going on, rather than just letting them be kids. It’s quite Japanese in a way.
Where the two are different is in the order of things. For most people, Wall-E is a cute story about robots in love, about loneliness, about standing up for your inheritance, and the usual heroics. But its science fiction trapping paints a impressive and cautionary imagery about the world today–pollution, the addiction to luxury, and growing isolation of individuals with his or her heritage, neighbors, and the environment. Yea, the irony is there how it’s telling this to a bunch of theater goers and eventual couch potatoes.
Denno Coil, on the other hand, draws the viewer in with its imaginative altered reality. The murder(?) mystery element and its impressive setting are major draws. But the show is mostly about human relationships, about adolescence, and what happens if you do something dangerous on your own without heeding any warning. There’s the heroics and a very brave dog (Densuke FTW) but what of the actual human beings who suffered the very real consequences? That stuff is what is going on in the back drop of Denno Coil–a real person laying in a hospital room, in an unending coma.
What’s more disturbing? The happily glossed over, post-apocalyptic Earth? Or the fact that little girls can lose their lives to … internet predictors? I guess neither really is unless you pick them out like that.
I think the layering presentation is particularly good because it gives the audience a wide variety of takes. Making good children’s entertainment that adults can enjoy is hard; the layering allows people to combine ideas and filter the experience using the audience’s level of experience and sophistication.
This layering is characterized by the integration of common themes across layers, however. Without it we would just have a bunch of not-so-related ideas. I think Wall-E works because they do well integrating that whole theme about loneliness. In Denno Coil, a similar thing goes on with loneliness and that whole Japanese character stereotype with personal responsibility and no manYoko is an island.
It’s fair to say these two shows are examples of powerful storytelling styles and they use the form wisely in family entertainment. But what happens when these forms are powerless? We’ll find out hopefully in the sequel post of this two-part series. It should also answer how I stumble upon a way to focus on a narrative about Wall-E.
