Ice Age: Continental Drift and the Animal Family

The newest installment of the Ice Age animated film franchise, Ice Age: Continental Drift, focuses on both extended and nuclear definitions of family, but it also extends the family structure beyond blood relatives to different animal species. In this Ice Age installment, Manny, a Woolly Mammoth; Diego, a Smilodon or Saber-Toothed Cat, and Sid , a Ground Sloth, are cast adrift on an iceberg after the earth opens up, separating landmasses into the seven continents. 

Their journey back home to Manny’s wife Ellie  and daughter Peaches  provides laughs and conflicts with both natural forces and anthropomorphized animal pirates, but it more importantly serves to redefine family, a definition Diego explains when asked about the difference between a pack and a family. In a family, he explains, “We have each other’s backs.” To illustrate this definition, the film explores a variety of family dynamics using effective and sometimes spectacular 3-D animation. The film first highlights conflicts between Manny and his teenaged daughter Peaches in their traditional nuclear family.

More importantly, however, the film also amplifies the importance of Manny’s extended family and their relationships. Manny, Diego, and Sid grow even closer during their struggles to return to their home. But they also serve as a positive counterpart to the pirate pack they outmaneuver. The contrast between the pirates and the Manny-led extended family ultimately lead to an addition to their group and a partner for Diego when Shira, a female Smilodon, chooses their strong connections over the dysfunctional pirate crew that willingly abandons her.  

Sid’s Sloth family also plays a role in the film, again providing a stark contrast to the interdependent family unit Manny has built with his multi-species clan. Whereas Sid’s Sloth family abandons him, leaving him to care for an aging Granny, his Manny clan “has his back.” Sid also contributes to the family group when he builds an alliance with the Hyrax herd, which helps steal the pirates’ ship. To her credit, Granny becomes less of a burden when her pet whale helps them return home and escape the pirates. 

These different illustrations of the ideal family build toward the film’s climax, when Manny reunites with Peaches and Ellie, recreating  the multi-species herd. Although Ice Age: Continental Drift certainly has many weaknesses, it successfully redefines the structure and purpose of family. Ice Age: Continental Drift offers a distinct visual world that is flat and evenly colored, but it also promotes an ideal vision of family that extends beyond species, literally expanding familial boundaries beyond its own.

 

Jacob Lawrence: Toussaint L'Ouverture Series: Krannert Art Museum

If you are in the Champaign-Urbana, Illinois area, I recommend you stop by the Krannert Art Museum and take a close look at a great exhibit: Jacob Lawrence: Toussant L’Ouverture Series. The exhibit will run through April 28, 2013 and showcases all forty-one of the panels chronicling L’Ouverture’s epic struggle ot emancipate Haiti from the tyranny o fhte Spanish and French in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. Jacob Lawrence was only twenty-one years old when he completed the monumental series in 1938, setting the standard for Lawrence's lifelong dedication to the visual description of African American life and history within a narrative context and pays tribute to the hero of the Haitian revolution who in the late 18th century defeated Napoleon and drove him from Haiti.

Born in 1917 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Jacob Lawrence was raised in Harlem where he not only witnessed the poverty and prejudice that most African-Americans faced in the early 20th century, but also the remarkable cultural, intellectual and political development known as the Harlem Renaissance. Lawrence reached maturity in the 1930s, at a time when Harlem was among the world's most dynamic centers of aesthetic and social innovation. As orators shouted their messages from nearly every street corner in Harlem, W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke were challenging and redefining the very identity of the African-American people; Langston Hughes was introducing the black experience to modernist poetry; Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway retooled jazz and African-American blues for the big band and the orchestra; and such artists as Aaron Douglas, Charles Alston, Archibald Motley, Loïs Mailou Jones, Romare Bearden and William H. Johnson introduced an expressive force to modern painting few had ever witnessed. It was against the backdrop of this vibrant milieu that the 20-year-old Jacob Lawrence made a dramatic debut with his Toussaint L'Ouverture Series.

For the series, Lawrence painted forty-one small tempera-on-white-paper works that chronologically documented the history of the Haitian revolution from Columbus's discovery of the island on December 6, 1492, through Toussaint's victory over the French with the signing of the Declaration of Independence on January 1, 1804. Instead of traditional titles, Lawrence utilized descriptive quotations to function as a verbal description and to accentuate the narrative theme of the series. For instance, General Toussaint L'Ouverture, number twenty in the series, is labeled "statesman and military genius, esteemed by the Spaniards, feared by the English, dreaded by the French, hated by the planters, and revered by the blacks."

Pairing these descriptive quotations with the painted panels moves beyond a storyboard, resembling something closer to a graphic novel. When viewed in the two rooms of the Krannert, however, the graphic novel effect transforms into a visual experience that draws on cinematic techniques. Panels become cels, with the viewer tracking and panning like a camera to view the visual narrative, complete with descriptive intertitles.  This narrative “film” is both an historical and personal triumph well worth seeing.

The Toussaint L’Ouverture series (1937–38) is on loan from the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University and is an important focus for the University of Illinois’ commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King and celebration of the Sesquicentennial Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation (1862).

Ecology, Place, and Home in Dark City: Is It Our Nature to Live in the Dark?

Ecology, Place, and Home in Dark City: Is It Our Nature to Live in the Dark?

Alex Proyas’s Dark City (1998), opens in darkness, in a space lit only by stars and patches of blue that represent the blue world Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) claims the “Strangers” invaded to save their race. This long shot of outer space cranes downward from that blue patch of light to an artificially-lit night-time noir cityscape crowded with cars from the 1940s and 1950s and lit by a cinema neon sign announcing film titles that serve a prescient role: The Evil and Bo_k of Dreams [sic]. Movement from the hollow emptiness of space, a pristine natural cosmos, to a cacophonous city devoid of nonhuman nature startles us both visually and aurally with its clashes—both of space and of genres. Between the pristine and the decadent constructed spaces, outer space of science fiction meets the noir of the dark city, and the organic galaxies traced in white and blue natural lighting meet a luminescent shadowed urban world devoid of nature other than that created and inhabited by the Strangers.

In what looks like an homage to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the opening to Proyas’s film, like many openings to science fiction and noir films, introduces us to its settings and chief themes through visual effects and, as a parallel to Metropolis’s epigram and inter-titles, a voice-over, this time through the narration of Dr. Schreber. But it also highlights the most important element in the film, its representation of ecology, literally “the study of homes.” The shift from a traditional science fiction setting to one indicative of a carefully laid-out 1940s or 1950s noir world coincides with a swing from the pristine to the decayed and, in a parallel binary, from a natural to a constructed environment. The film seems to agree with Alexander Wilson’s assertion (with a few changes) that “the culture of nature—the ways we think, teach, talk about, and construct the natural world—is as important as the world itself” (11). To paraphrase, the culture of the world of Dark City, the way this noir world is thought about, talked about, and constructed becomes more important than the world, if it is a world, itself.

Like Dana Phillips’ article, “Is Nature Necessary?” Dark City offers a space where whether nature is necessary can be explored, especially in relation to the idea of ecology as the study of homes, a place where nature and culture interconnect rather than conflict with one another. The film allows us to examine at least three constructed settings—ecosystems—as possible homes for humans (and, perhaps, alien) survival, but the film demonstrates that only one of these three provides any promise for humans, as natural beings, to thrive—the constructed setting in which “nature is necessary.”

The film, Dark City, is about a dying race of aliens, the Strangers, coming to a blue planet, presumably Earth, and capturing some humans in order to examine what makes them able to survive as individuals. The Strangers share a collective mind that is in terminal decay. To study these captured humans, the Strangers construct a 1940s-style city and, in a way, construct their humans by implanting different memories into their brains. To see how these humans react in different situations and with different memories, the Strangers change both the city and its inhabitants’ memories each night at midnight, with the help of Dr. Schreber—a human forced to serve them—all while the humans are hypnotized into sleep by the Strangers.

Because these Strangers have an aversion to light, however, the city and its inhabitants never experience day. Within this context, one of the humans, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), evolves into a super-human, who can resist the Strangers’ will, stay awake and even change the shape of his surroundings in Dark City, just like the Strangers. When John Murdoch first resists the Strangers’ will and stays awake, he also resists the implantation of memories, so without memories, Murdoch must search for an identity. While Murdoch searches, however, the Strangers attempt to capture him and use him as their sole source of life. In the end, Murdoch claims his name, “saves” Dark City and its human inhabitants, and defeats the Strangers because they make a series of mistakes. Ultimately Mr. Book (Ian Richardson), the Strangers’ leader, fails to notice that Dr. Schreber has switched syringes and implants memories other than the collective memories of the Strangers into Murdoch’s mind. This seemingly “simple” story, though, occurs in a mixture of settings that serve as more than mere backdrop—especially the noir city that seems to pop out of the cosmos and the Shell Beach setting John Murdoch creates to replace the dark unnatural world of the Strangers.   But Dark City shifts our focus from the aliens (the characters) and the film’s narrative to its setting—all because the Strangers’ study occurs in a 1940s noir city rather than a site contemporary to the film’s date of production.

Science fiction plays a role in this realm, as well, since the Strangers act like the parasites depicted in films like The Hidden and control humans through the technology of their machines and their memory-filled syringes, but the underworld still looks like a horror film, perhaps as a way to highlight the Strangers’ alien presence. Yet both the noir and horror settings prove to be ecological nightmares for the Strangers seeking rejuvenation through their human studies. Shifts from outer space to the constructed spaces of the city and the underworld controlling it demonstrate that these Strangers are dying, and this death state is emphasized by the Strangers’ choice to inhabit only male human corpses, seemingly avoiding female bodies with life-giving reproductive capabilities.

Nature in a Lifeless Constructed Space

The shift in the film from the natural but inscrutable emptiness of outer space to the constructed space of the dark city and its underworld underlines perhaps the most important role conflicting settings play in the film—a marker of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. In alliance with this natural world, Shell Beach and the sea it lines serve as symbols of the life-sustaining power of water and, ultimately, of irrational nature, the only successful ecosystem presented in Dark City. The noir cityscape fails both the aliens and the captured humans. The underworld and its machinery fails the Strangers, since they cannot control the one life force that might save them with their technology—John Murdoch. Only Shell Beach brings hope to the captured humans as a source for their own survival as a species with free will and agency.