The Incredible Mr. Limpet reinforces interdependent relationships between live action and animation, since in the film an animated fish, Henry Limpet (Don Knotts) helps the live action United States Navy destroy Nazi U-Boats during WWII. Limpet, however, becomes a fish when he falls in the Coney Island Bay because he values fish and their lifestyle more than the human life he leads with his wife Bessie (Carole Cook) and best friend and rival George Stickel (Jack Weston). The film, then, both valorizes “peaceful” aquatic life and reinforces the need for an interdependent relationship between human and nonhuman nature.
As an adaptation of a Theodore Pratt novel of the same name, “One of the strangest films ever made that didn’t involve David Lynch” (Null) opens with a Navy message of approval. The film is framed by a scene in the film’s present that demonstrates Henry Limpet’s continuing value as a connection between human and nonhuman nature. Navy sailors march to an office that says “Top Secret.” Something was locked in a file back in 1945, and it was hoped they would not need to open it. But porpoises have brain cavities greater than man’s and they think “he’s” teaching them.
The reason behind the top secret designation is revealed when the Navy officers open a file that begins in September 1941. “That’s when it first started,” the officer, Adm. P.P. Spewter (Larry Keating) explains, “I never knew him before,” and the film flashes back to 1941 where a still-human Henry is working as a bookkeeper in Brooklyn at the Atlantic and Gulf Line Shipping Office. His eyesight prevented him from joining the Navy, but his connection with water and fish is clear, since he has a fish bowl on his desk and fish in the water cooler to take home with him in a jar with holes in the lid because, Henry exclaims, “Fish are so bright and cheerful. So beautiful.” He even has a popular guide to science window blind at home that describes different eras, including the Devonian era. “Our ancestors were fish,” Henry says. He even sees fish as the salvation for this violent planet: “Hope in the war of Europe comes from thinking of fish turning into men, so they might turn out even better.”
Limpet wishes he were a fish, but his wife, Bessie, and friend and rival for his wife’s love, George, want him to give them up, get rid of his fish tank and go to Coney Island instead of a lecture on the mating habits of shellfish. Yet on their way to Coney Island, Limpet’s service to the Navy as a source of an interconnected relationship between human and nonhuman nature is foreshadowed when a newspaper headline on the train reads, “Nazi subs infest waters.” And, when they arrive, Limpet sits on the boardwalk and talks to the fish below, explaining that he has read the Theory of Reverse Evolution by Radcliff and hopes he can devolve just as Radcliff explained it: “More than anything I wish I could be one of you right now. I wish, I wish, I was a fish,” he says, and jumps in.
Now the underwater scene is animated, and before our eyes, Limpet changes into an animated fish with glasses, connecting live action and animation, as well as human and nonhuman nature. He fits this aquatic role more than he ever fit in as a human. Bessie keeps saying, “He doesn’t know how to swim.” But he does, even swimming up to George who just sees a fish. “Bessie. What’s going to happen to poor Bessie, George?” Limpet asks, but George doesn’t hear him. “I saw a fish wearing his glasses,” George tells Bessie and takes Bessie home.
The animation from here on effectively ties Limpet’s character to the sea, and human characters to cities and ships. The film fluidly integrates animation in the primarily live-action film with the help of animators from Disney. According to Ben Simon, “the animation director is none other than Bill Tytla, who created and executed the magnificent Night On Bald Mountain sequence for Fantasia. Simon explains that “other directorial tasks [were] undertaken by famed Warner Brothers director Robert McKimson.” He also asserts that “an uncredited Art Babbit (who brought Fantasia’s Chinese Mushrooms to life, and is mostly responsible for the evolution of Goofy’s character) was an animation contributor to the film.” Other Disney artists contributed to the animation sequences.
The film moves beyond bifurcating animation and live-action, however, and demonstrates contrasts between human and nonhuman nature when Limpet literally swims away from the human world. As a way to highlight his difference from humans as an animated fish, the further Limpet swims, the more assimilated he becomes. Even colors become more brilliant, for Limpet, and he discovers he has a powerful roar or “thrumb” that becomes an effective secret weapon against the Nazis. By scouting U-Boats and thrumbing to highlight their location, Limpet tells the Navy when to drop charges and destroy the subs.
In The Incredible Mr. Limpet, Limpet helps make a better world by reversing evolution, a valorization of the more peaceful life of fish. But that reversal allows him to move human and nonhuman nature closer toward an effective interdependent relationship in which Limpit’s thrumb can help win a war and his knowledge can educate porpoises to serve the Navy, possibilities only imaginable in animated portions of a fictional film but illustrations of an effective way to bridge the gap between human culture and the natural world, a bridge that may draw on organismic approaches to ecology.
No comments:
Post a Comment