It's My girlfriend Niamh's brother Emmet's birthday today, and I have done a small drawing for her to slip into his birthday card. It's a Metal Jelly in a rather celebratory mood.
Project Aloe
In other news I am getting pretty in depth into my second major project: Aloe. I don't want to diverge too many details just yet, but my plan is for it to be an animated film. You know that feeling of being utterly lost? Did you ever get lost as a child? Not knowing where to turn, in a place completely alien to you? This is about being lost like that. Some of you will remember me talking about an endless, virgin white desert, dominated only by the colossal Aloe Vera plants that dot the duned landscape. It's another world, another plane. But it isn't the only one. It's sort of a hub. An alternate dimension which bleeds into other realms, each inhabited by bizarre and often terrifying entities.
I'm pretty excited about it. I had the Aloe desert idea for a while but just in the last few days I've found that most precious of assets: a direction. Think about the feeling evoked by stories like Alice in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia, Pan's Labyrinth and the classic Labyrinth itself. It's an odd sort of feeling and I'm not sure you'll know what I mean. a feeling of being lost and helpless. Remember in the Simpsons when Homer found himself trapped in the 3d world? that was deeply unsettling and sort of in the same vein as what I'm getting at now. Similarly, the first few episodes of Digimon had that strange, lost in an alien world sort of unsettling feeling. But no film, book, game or music has ever let me experience this in such a vivid and powerful way as Spirited Away. If you haven't watched it, I urge you to do so. I'm planning on re-watching it soon to help inspire me for project Aloe. It has a depth of emotional field unmatched by anything else I've experienced in this theme. And it's that weird lost feeling I want to evoke in Aloe.
Age and Being Lost
Most of these stories deal with children, lost in fantastically strange and often harrowing worlds with no easy way to return to their own world. I am more interested in the effect this would have on an adult.
I am young enough to think about my childhood with very real, intense memories. It is close enough behind that I cling to it as it fades away. Because it is so close behind and fresh in my memory, and I am so fresh into my adult life, I feel the two interact in a way that older people might fail to. I am therefore at a very interesting age. So would the Aloe character be like me, on the verge of full fledged adulthood, yet struggling to come to terms with childhood's end? Or would he be a man more weathered to the ways of the world, only to plummet back down to his childhood when he is detached from everything he holds as normal? The fear, the confusion, the panic, longing for home and normality. These are the feelings one might experience in what we'll refer to as the "lost" situation. A man finding himself in the lost situation might be in an entirely different situation from a child in the lost situation. This might be due to two factors:
Bravado: The man appears unphased by the lost situation. methodically seeks a way out without breaking down.
Regression: Such an odd, lonely situation as the lost situation might bring about childhood memories or emotions, the man may regress to a childlike state and suffer crushing fear the likes of which he thought he had left behind for good when he became a teenager.
It's certainly food for thought, and I'll be sure to keep you posted on it.
