The Ultimate Penny Kid Appreciation Post (aka My Bloodlines Go A Long Way)

 

The summer of 2025 was made infinitely more palatable for the presence of a snot-nosed little gremlin who helped unleash a nightmare at 600 feet and firmly won my heart in the process. And all he did was throw a coin at an inopportune moment, race down a flight of stairs, knocking aside a grown man on the way, and finally get flattened by a falling piano. Such is the morbid lot of a character in a Final Destination premonition. That's my boy Alfred the Penny Kid. Lived in splendour, died in chaos. 

What stayed with me most about Final Destination Bloodlines were the characters. Sure, like everyone else who goes to see a Final Destination installment I was primarily there for the gruesomely creative kills, but the characters are what made the experience. Having a bunch of figures we can feel genuinely invested in before their inevitable reduction to human passata is what elevates macabre pleasure into super macabre pleasure. We had some grisly kicks and we made (then lost) a few friends on the way. Of the central cast, I know that everybody loves Richard Harmon's Erik (it seems like they pulled out every last stop to make him the fan favourite), and Owen Patrick Joyner's Bobby (a jock who's a soft-hearted turtle daddy is an appealing combination), but the player who particularly stood out to me was Rya Kihlstedt as Darlene (to the extent that I'm actually kind of regretting how I bad mouthed Home Alone 3 at the end of my review of Bushwhacked last year). Nonetheless, for as much fun as it was following Stefani's family and their fight to stay a part of this mortal coil while on the big D's hit list, for me their story never quite scaled the same glorious heights as the movie's prologue, in which we bore witness to the messy downfall of one of the most hubristic buildings known to Man. The Skyview's disintegration was quite the lurid spectacle, as grand and as ghastly an opening disaster as this franchise has ever executed, but once again it was the characters who really stuck with you. Yes, even the minor ones who were just there to be fodder for the crumbling rubble. They too were such a colourful and distinctive bunch - not least the older and bolder of the two children unfortunate enough to be caught up in the misadventure. This kid, portrayed by Noah Bromley, had extremely minimal screentime all told, but as far as I'm concerned he's the Bloodlines MVP. We do know the character's real name (Alfred Milano), for reasons I'll get into later on, but the film's closing credits have him filed under the affectionate moniker "Sky View Penny Kid". "Penny Kid" is how directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky also refer to him in the Blu-Ray commentary, so that's the name I'll be predominantly using here. (Also, if you haven't seen Final Destination Bloodlines, know that there will be spoilers.)

I love the Penny Kid (to death), and I dug every scant second he spent on screen. But I get the impression that I'm something of an anomaly in that regard, and it vexes me so. In the aftermath of Bloodlines' release, I was a little taken back by how much animosity I saw for this child on certain online venues. I mean, I understand it to a point. Not everyone's going to feel so warmly-disposed toward a character who played such a vital role in a chain reaction that doomed numerous people. It was an accident, but one born of churlish disregard. Compared to the other child (Jayden Oniah) who shows up in the Skyview and sits there innocently toying with a model train (innocently, but unwittingly foreshadowing how this whole story will eventually end), Penny Kid is really not in the business of endearing himself to onlookers with any winsome wholesomeness. Rather, he represents the darker side of childhood, the amorality mixed with the uninhibited idle energy and the resentment of adult authority. He doesn't set out to cause serious harm, but he's decidedly not an innocent. He immediately feels out of place amid all those unwary adults gathered at the venue, no matter how dressed up to the nines he is. Prologue protagonist Iris (Brec Bassinger), by far the most perceptive visitor at the Skyview, seems unnerved by him the instant she lays eyes on him - although it might not be the Penny Kid per se that unsettles her so much as the weapon of mass destruction he wields and insists on taking all the way to the top of the tower. In either case, there is a certain delectable irony in having the most insidious person on the scene the one we would ordinarily be inclined to perceive as the most harmless, as this franchise already understands. You might recall how, in Final Destination 2, Kimberly Corman was taunted by a child in an adjacent car who bashed two toy vehicles together with an eerie smile on his face that seemed to knowingly anticipate the impending pile-up. But Penny is the most joyously extreme example to date. (Here there is an additional significance to having our chilling omen of what's ahead be a child, which becomes more apparent by the end of the film.)

Penny Kid is not a character designed to procure sympathy. But he gets it from me anyway.

So what exactly is the kid's role in the prologue? He's present at the grand opening of the Skyview (a swanky observation tower/restaurant clearly modelled on the Seattle Space Needle) in 1968, and is first seen attempting to steal coins from the fountain at the bottom. A security guard catches him in the act and advises him that his sticky fingers will bring bad luck; Penny apologises, but keeps the change he's already pocketed. Shortly after, he boards the elevator and ascends to the top of the tower, alongside Iris and her partner Paul, played by Max Lloyd-Jones. (It should be noted that the elevator sequence is the only point in the prologue where Penny Kid is accompanied by his parents, a detail it's strangely easy to miss; at every other time we see him, he's been left unsupervised.) Iris, whose anxieties have been increasing the further she ventures into the building, is particularly ill at ease inside the elevator, which is visibly over capacity. Her reservations are not allayed by the commentary given by the elevator operator (Travis Turner), who cheerfully describes how construction of the Skyview was rushed to have it ready five months ahead of schedule (Iris: "Is that a good thing?"). Penny Kid picks up on Iris's fearfulness and teases her by jumping on the elevator floor. He's later seen on the observation deck where Paul proposes to Iris, pulling out the coins he collected earlier and releasing them down the side of the tower. As he prepares to throw the last of his coins, a penny, he's accosted by yet another security guard, who warns him that a penny thrown from a tower could turn into a lethal weapon. Penny Kid gives an ostensibly polite and compliant response, but calls the guard a "fat ass" under his breath and throws the coin anyway when his back is turned; Iris sees this and clearly has her misgivings, but turns a blind eye and follows her new fiance to the dancefloor for what they assume will be a night of celebration. Alas, the shoddily-constructed tower just wasn't made to withstand so many partygoers jumping up and down to Isley Brothers tunes, and eventually gives way. As for the dreaded penny, instead of falling to the ground and potentially getting embedded in someone's skull, it gets sucked into the building's ventilation system, eventually colliding with a pipe and causing a gas leak. One thing leads to another, a panicked guest gets set on fire from contact with a kitchen pan in the ensuing commotion, they get too close to the gas leak, then kaboom. Now the building's on fire, on top of everything else. As the guests make a mad dash for the stairway, Penny Kid climbs down from the observation deck and asserts his right to go first by means of the Birkenhead drill. Unfortunately, the stairs prove just as shoddy as everything else in the building, for as the stampede of feet starts to trample down them, they also give way, causing everyone upon them to fall to their deaths...all except the Penny Kid, who has the advantage of being both lighter than everyone else and at the front of the procession. He keeps going, and is eventually able to get out of the tower unharmed. Whereupon he's crushed by a piano falling from the flaming wreckage above and turned into, well, human passata. Atop that very piano was the penny he'd thrown earlier; its gruesome work accomplished, it slides back down into the fountain and resumes its place within the waters.

Of course, that's only the premonition, and it doesn't come to be outside of the head of visionary Iris, who proves a worthy adversary for Death. With her foresight and resourcefulness she's able to avert the disaster completely, first by getting hold of that infernal penny, then by covering the open flames in the kitchen area and finally by warning everyone that the building is disintegrating beneath their feet. They heed her words and are all able to go home safely that night. But if you've seen any of the prior installments, you already know how it goes. Death returns for Round 2, and works its way through its earmarked victims in the order in which they were originally intended to die. The twist in the case of Bloodlines is that we're not following the immediate survivors of the opening premonition, but the descendents of Iris and Paul. The former so excelled at saving lives that Death was faced with an unusually protracted list that took decades to work through, giving numerous survivors time to reproduce before their number came up. As per Death's procedures, any further descendents of unintended survivors are automatically added to the list, as they should never have existed in the first place. (This confused some viewers, who recalled that in Final Destination 2 it was put forth that the birthing of new life could have the opposite effect and invalidate a list entirely, but this was never actually confirmed.)

An anecdote I've seen repeated a lot from different commentators discussing Bloodlines is that the audience in their theatre cheered when Penny Kid met his demise beneath the piano. The thought of an entire auditorium of people cheering the pulverising of a child, even an unruly one, strikes me as a little harsh, but I get it. It was designed to be an uproarious moment (Stein and Lipovsky observe on the commentary that this is the moment that's gotten the "biggest reaction" in the screenings they've attended), in that it plays like something out of a live action cartoon. You can't quite believe your eyes the first time you see it - it's nasty, it's gleeful and of course it took serious balls (keep in mind that Tim Carpenter from Final Destination 2 was reportedly written as a much younger character, but aged up because nobody at the time wanted to involve kids in these splatter fests. I guess we as a society have moved on since then). It obviously works as a karmic death, since Penny is effectively done in by the very coin that he threw, which takes a prolonged time to work its way down, setting the piano into motion and finally crashing to the bottom just as he's leaving the building. I'm not going to shame you if you found his death funny, because on some level, I did too. I have, however, read a lot of reactions to Penny Kid that make me bristle. The most distasteful are along the lines of people claiming that they would punch Noah Bromley if they saw him walking down the street. I know it's just internet bravado speaking and most people probably wouldn't, but there's something very unsavoury about threatening to do physical harm to an actor because you don't like something their character did that becomes a thousand times worse when the actor in question is a child. Then there are those who'll suggest that he's the ancestor of some other detested character like Hunt or Carter. Not tsundere Carter from the original film. The bad, racist Carter from The Final Destination. How...dare you? (Also objectively false.) I've gotta say that I am perturbed by the number of people who are willing to lump him in with the likes of Carter, Isaac, Frankie, etc, as if being an obnoxious child is really on the same level as being a racist or a sex offender. Some folks will even go a step further and claim that he's the villain of the entire franchise, at which point I can practically feel the fissure spreading across my brain.

Hence why I feel obligated to make a post in which I outline why I love Penny Kid, what makes him such a fun and fascinating character, and why I think that much of the animosity he receives is just plain overblown. If I don't stick up for this littlest of guys, then I'm sensing nobody will.

The notion that Penny Kid is somehow the villain of the franchise seems to stem from two misconceptions - a) that Penny Kid is responsible for the entire Skyview disaster and b) that the other disasters in the preceding films are all connected to what went on at the Skyview. Neither is correct. Penny Kid didn't cause the entire disaster, as anyone who watched Bloodlines ought to know. The floor was already cracking before the chain reaction with the coin got underway. Because the tower itself was total shit, despite its beguilingly elegant appearance, and all the rushed construction and endless cut corners meant that it was unable to withstand anything too out of hand or unexpected. Penny Kid might have represented that element of wild unpredictability getting into the system, but he didn't corrupt said system so much as expose the terrible flaws that were already there. One way or another, that building was going down, and the hubris and irresponsibility of the officials behind it were ultimately more to blame than the disobedience of a child. He's also not responsible for the occurrences in the preceding films, with Lipovsky confirming that the Skyview disaster was not intended as an "origin story" for any of the other scenarios in the Final Destination series (it clears up much of the mystery surrounding a certain recurring character, but that's it). I'm also not sure why people are so convinced that Iris's '68 premonition and her subsequent cheating of Death would necessarily have been the first time that anything like this had ever happened in all of human history. Does it have anything to do with the trailer, which invited us to "Witness the birth of Death"? All marketing bluster. I recall that, prior to the film's release, there was speculation that all of the visionaries from the previous entries would be descendants or relatives of Iris, and that the ability to experience premonitions was genetic, but that turned out to be bogus. We still don't know where the premonitions come from.

Another point I'll make in Penny's defence is that there was, in my eyes, a grown adult in the disaster who behaved so much more odiously than him. The Maître d' (Bernard Cuffling) shoved Iris like a thug and doomed everyone inside the elevator. Whatever you might think of Penny, he has an intrinsic excuse in that he's only a child, but what's this guy's explanation? Yet he seems to have gotten off scot-free, at least in terms of online vitriol (in the film itself he gets messily bisected by the falling elevator). Don't call that justice.

It's important to establish that, while I've described him above as a chilling omen, Penny Kid is not The Omen. He isn't like Damien the Devil's spawn.^[1] There is nothing evil or supernaturally bad about him. Nor is he a scheming sociopath along the lines of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone or The Good Son (you can take your pick). What he DOES remind me of, in the best possible way, are the bratty children from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. You know how partial I am to those bad nuts. Like them, he's a caricature of childhood vices, exaggerated for effect but based on the honest observation that children aren't always doe-eyed cherubs who behave as adults desire. Often they are chaotic and lacking in boundaries. We've noted that Penny Kid seems eerily out of place at the adult party, but there's a way of looking at it that might even make him, if not quite sympathetic, then at least comprehensible. My guess is that he likely didn't want to be at the Skyview that evening. The celebration wasn't a family event, and it didn't exactly seem like a fun place for a child to hang out. The only other child present was a few years younger than him and tucked away at the back, so probably wouldn't be viable company. Penny was bored and frustrated, and decided to amuse himself by throwing coins from the tower. That that he's so isolated from others his age and forced awkwardly into an adult milieu marks him out as someone whose innocence has been corrupted too soon, something best exemplified in his use of adult language to combat the grown-ups he butts head with. Which also happens to be Penny's funniest trait - for me, his most uproarious moment came not in being crushed by a piano, but in his shocked reaction to Iris when last we see him, as she physically intervenes by prising the penny from his grasp, and he cries out, "WHAT the FUCK is WRONG with YOU?", with the quirkiest intonation. That line, and that delivery, is a great part of why the character holds such a special place in my heart. Stein and Lipovsky loved it too. I was delighted when they stopped their commentary just to listen to it, before confirming that the line in question was improvised by Bromley. That kid did a fabulous job in the role, and I'll look forward to seeing if he pops up anywhere else.

Penny is a wonderful throwback to the likes of Augustus, Veruca, Violet and Mike, right down to the fact that his childish rebelliousness ultimately brings to him to a sticky end. The bad nuts don't actually die in Charlie and The Chocolate Factory (except maybe in the stage musical), but they do receive gruesome comeuppances that, in most cases, entail some grotesque form of damage being dealt to their bodies, a concept Bloodlines takes to its extreme, in having Penny's body be wrecked beyond recognition. His story is a cautionary one that works on the same brutally visceral level as Roald Dahl's novel, in being all about consequences and the misfortune you'll potentially bring on yourself by venturing beyond your limits and not adhering to adult authority. Dahl's novel followed a fairytale logic, in which a wayward child might be transformed into a blueberry and dejuiced back to their original state (but for the detail of remaining blue). Bloodlines follows quite a different logic, that of the urban legend. The warning Penny is given by the second security guard, that he could kill someone by throwing a penny, is an old wives' tale. Throwing a penny from a tower is still an inconsiderate thing to do, because if it hit someone it would certainly hurt them, but the part about it plunging directly into their skull has no basis in fact. It's just something people tell us will happen, and might even have happened to an acquaintance of one of their own acquaintances, and which we too pass on, in spite of our healthy scepticism, because the narrative of such a small and childish act reaping such terrible consequences is too irresistible not to. Bloodlines takes the idea to demented new heights, so not only does Penny Kid beget his own demise by throwing the penny, it causes a whole lot of additional, gleefully improbable damage on its downward trajectory, sending an already nightmarish situation hurtling out of the frying pan and (literally) into the fire. His story is a lesson in the pitfalls of pushing back against authority; despite having assimilated too much of that adult culture for his own good, Penny really seems to dislike his elders. At best, he feigns politeness with the security guards, but insults one of them behind his back. He shoots a standoffish glance at Iris as she enters the elevator and teases her soon after. The saddest observation to be made about him is that he doesn't seem to have a particularly strong bond with his parents. Not only is he seen alone in most of his appearances, during the attempted evacuation he does not try to reunite with them. (It's also true that he ran off after the stairs gave way, grinning with elation at his own seeming good fortune, but was there anything he actually could have done to have assisted those on the other side of the gap?)

The spectre of the urban legend haunts Bloodlines in a broader sense still. Perhaps inevitably in a series that's all about mundane situations going horribly wrong, the various mishaps depicted feel suggestive of this brand of folklore, the kind that speaks to the anxieties of the modern world, offering unsettling reminders of our mortality and innumerable vulnerabilities, even when surrounded by technologies and creature comforts, and functioning as warnings against deviant behaviours and misplaced trust alike. The sequence where Iris and Paul are invited to join the overloaded elevator, on the operator's foolhardy insistence that there is still sufficient room, has eerie, seemingly deliberate echoes of another old legend, as recounted by Bennett Cerf in the 1944 publication Famous Ghost Stories, where a woman interprets a dream as a warning not to enter an elevator that subsequently breaks and falls. There are countless urban legends concerning food and beverage contamination - the glass shard in the lemonade ice is not a variation I'm sure I've heard, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's out there. Finally, there's the film's epilogue, in which yet another hoary myth is evoked involving the childish misuse of pennies - in this case, the possibility that a coin placed on a railway track could cause a train to derail - in an obvious echo of Penny Kid's earlier misadventure.

Before we touch on that, though, we should shed light on the fate of Penny Kid. We know that his being crushed by a falling piano didn't actually come to pass, thanks to Iris's interventions, but after the flashback sequence, by which the older Iris (Gabrielle Rose) recounts how she confiscated his penny, he isn't seen again. I'll admit that this was contrary to my expectations when I first watched Bloodlines; then, I could have sworn that they were setting the youngster up to be of greater significance later down the line. Given that he'd died so late in the premonition, for a while there I had fully anticipated seeing Penny re-emerge within the present as an adult. When it was established that Death was currently up to Iris, my heart sank because I knew that, as per the rules of this franchise, he'd already have to be dead. Since I had so much investment in the character, I was curious to know how he'd met his demise for real and what kind of life he had led in his borrowed time. Fortunately, the answer to that is included within the finer details of the film, as an Easter egg for those eagle-eyed enough to spot it. Among the documents that Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) inherits from Iris is a timeline made up of newspaper clippings detailing all of the fates of the Skyview survivors and their descendants. If you study it closely, you can make out the various headlines and stories, and it's pretty fucking obvious which one is supposed to be Penny Kid. He's this guy, Alfred Milano.

 

When the above image started circulating online, there was some preliminary debate about which post-it note alluded to him - whether he was Alfred Milano or Kirby Dylan, and if he had a daughter named Francesca or no descendants at all. Since then, it's been accepted that the way the post-its align with the wider timeline would appear to identify him as Alfred. In addition, Francesca's associated clipping indicates that she was killed in a gas leak, which ties in with how her father's actions were once fated to inadvertently trigger such a calamity. My boy Penny, though? It seems that he was run over by a piano-moving truck whilst trying to make off with someone's wallet. If there's a crumb of comfort to be extracted from this, it's in the likelihood that he would have died a mercifully quick death, as he did in Iris's vision. I'd imagine it would have been a lot like Terry's in the original Final Destination. And he died doing what he loved - gallivanting with ill-gotten change.

Was I disappointed that he never changed his ways and progressed from being a pouty brat to a petty criminal? Maybe...for about ten seconds. The truth is that it all makes perfect sense. He was never going to change because of the sheer futility of doing so. Iris might have thwarted Death's plans at the Skyview, but the people within remained bound by the fate already chosen for them, and however much borrowed time Iris (and their procreating urges) had secured them, there's a level on which they all remained permanently mired in that moment from 1968. The question of how much control we have over our own destinies is a particularly intrinsic one to Final Destination, where characters are traditionally called to match their supposed free will against forces much greater than themselves, and it's a point that Bloodlines emphasises through the recurring motif of circles. As Stein and Lipovsky facetiously put it on the commentary, "Circles kill". The Skyview is absolutely plagued by the little round devils. There is, yes, the penny, but the building itself also assumes a circular shape when viewed from above. The prophetic Johnny Cash tune heard playing on the radio as Paul and Iris approach the tower laments not simply of falling into fire but into a burning RING of fire. There's the ring Paul offers to Iris when he proposes to her, a classic symbol of eternity. And of course Iris's own name, alluding to the circles in her eyes, which foresee the impending destruction before it happens. Circles kill because they symbolise the inevitability of fate, for whatever move you make will eventually take you right back to where you started (something Stefani discovers in the film's epilogue, when she finds herself reliving various details from Iris's prologue experience). It is the bottom line on why I can't really hold any of what happened at the Skyview against Penny Kid - Death had decided that this particular group of mortals' time had come, and one way or another it was going to make it happen. The penny IS fate (ie: Death), and it knew exactly where it needed to be. There was no transcending the path already ordained, however prolonged. In Penny Kid's case, he never overcame his magpie tendency to pilfer shiny change, and continually found himself pushing up against authority, which shifted from meddling elders to law enforcement (the discernable details in his associated article would indicate he was a repeat offender). His desperation to avoid the police is what caused him make a fatal error and blunder into the path of that truck. And, once again, he died under a piano, even if it wasn't the piano per se that killed him. Lived in splendour, died in chaos.

Admittedly, not everything about it adds up. The timeline indicates that he perished some time in the early 1980s, but considering that he died so late in the premonition I would have expected him to have stuck it out at least a decade or so longer. (I'll concede that while he was the third-to-last character we saw die onscreen, ahead of Iris and JB, he wasn't necessary the third-to-last to die overall - there were a bunch of falling people who may have yet to hit the ground at the precise moment the piano squashed him.) A bigger problem is the visual inconsistency regarding his age. We don't know exactly how old Penny Kid was back in 1968, but he clearly can't have been much over 10, meaning that if he'd died in the early 80s, he'd have been in his mid-20s at the time. Yet that age doesn't align with the pictured individual, who looks a lot closer to his mid/late 30s - which is roughly the age bracket I'd have anticipated Penny Kid making it to before Death got round to him, based on the premonition. A great deal of care and attention evidently went into the construction of that timeline, and I look forward to combing through with greater scrutiny in the future and uncovering further macabre treasures, but there might have been the odd bit of oversight here and there. If he did die in his 20s, then the really tragic implication is that Francesca must have been a particularly young age when she lost her father, and her own life shortly after. We have only speculation to go on where she's concerned, but it's noteworthy that she had her father's family name, implying that he was either married to her mother or in a stable relationship with her. The point is, he found someone who liked him, so there. Although it's too bad that her involvement with him ultimately landed her with two very traumatic losses.

 

By the time we get onto Stefani's story, Penny Kid and his bloodline may be long extinguished, but there's a sense in which he still lives on. He has a counterpart in the present. Enter the Penny Lady (Ethel Pitchford). She's first seen during the hospital sequence, where she briefly interacts with Erik, before reappearing and playing a more significant role just as the picture is tying up. After confiscating the penny from Penny Kid, Iris had kept it for all these years, taped up in her morbid scrapbook where it could cause no harm; it's transferred to Stefani's possession, but "escapes" outside the hospital, whereupon Penny Lady finds it and picks it up. The penny has unfinished business, and Penny Lady has arrived to help complete what Penny Kid helped to start. She and Penny Kid are, in many deceptive respects, polar opposites. Significantly, one is a child while the other is a senior, indicating the beginning and the end of the line. One is male and one is female. One's a rapscallion, the other seems utterly guileless. But they are nevertheless soulmates - two sides of the same coin, if you will. They share that same magpie attraction to shiny pennies, and they bookend the narrative in where that attraction ultimately leads them. Of note, if Penny Kid had lived, he would be in his 60s by now, and I'm guessing that's the age bracket she's in. (Here's a crazy idea, but could she even be Penny Kid's aforementioned widow? Probably not, but I'm toying with making it my headcanon until proven otherwise.) And, in both cases, the character's involvement evokes a classic piece of modern folklore pertaining to pennies. Unlike her younger counterpart, Penny Lady doesn't purposely discard the coin upon the railway tracks; rather, she absent-mindedly releases it while engaged in the most wholesome act of of purchasing cookies from a children's bake sale. It finds its way down to the tracks (the same tracks seen in the film's opening shot), as it was always wont to do, and derails a train, spelling disaster for Iris's remaining bloodline. In practice, Penny Lady's sweet-tempered obliviousness proves as lethal as Penny Kid's churlish deviancy; in the landscape of urban myth, both are equally inviting of misfortune. Their mutual mistake was in assuming that they had mastery of the penny, by holding it in their hands, when in actuality they were merely pawns in the hands of Fate.

There is a slight twist, however, in that, unlike her young counterpart, Penny Lady does not get caught up in the disaster she helps unleash. There's been some debate among fans as to whether anyone besides Stefani or Charlie (Teo Briones) was killed by the runaway train (while we see houses get demolished, we can't say for certain that anyone was in them at the time), but as the train derails, it goes in the opposite direction to where Penny Lady was lurking, so we've no reason to believe that she was affected. When Erik had encountered her earlier in the hospital, he was sizing her up (presumably none too seriously) as a potential murder victim whose remaining lifespan could be stolen, on the advice of Bludworth (Tony Todd - RIP), and asked her if she had much time left. "I think so..." she'd replied, visibly rattled by the question (as you would be). Though she plays into the hands of fate, Penny Lady noticeably does not tempt it for herself. Her presence might signify the end of this particular (blood)line, but as we've established, fate's preferred form is not a line, but a circle. There is no definitive end to its game; it will keep renewing itself over and over. Life will go on following the elimination of Iris's descendants, and so long as life goes on, the machinations of death and fate must persist. There is one further name to be crossed off the list in the form of Bludworth (although that will have to be resolved off-screen, for obvious reasons), but after him there will be plenty more macabre scenarios to be realised. The same chaotic cycle of lives being brought into the world only to be helplessly snuffed out will continue, and there's not a whole lot to be done about it, other than what Bludworth finally suggested, which is to make the most of whatever comes in between. It's a point the film accentuates by showing the penny still in motion as the closing credits play, rolling alongside items from Iris's collage, with it still to be determined (at least from our perspective) where it will land next on its deadly journey. (Penny Kid's clipping is featured in this closing montage, although not as one of the stories seen in close-up.)

In a manner of speaking, Penny Kid lives. I mean, sort of. He himself is obviously dead, but his spiritual successor lives on, and that's good enough for me.

[1]  Not that I don't have my share of sympathy for Damien too, but we'll save that discussion for another day.

Round Springfield (aka Make My Pain The Same As Yours)

The recent passing of Simpsons composer Alf Clausen got me wanting to cover an episode in which music plays a significant part. The most obvious candidate was already taken - and besides, I did ideally want it to be an episode in which music is celebrated as something expressive and transcendent, not one in which we simply have a good giggle about how camp and silly musical storytelling is. So "Round Springfield" (2F32) of Season 6 seemed like the best possible option, with bonus points for the fact that it is a story about bidding farewell to a musical legend who maybe didn't get the full recognition he deserved within his lifetime. Debuting on April 30th 1995, this was a historic episode, marking the first occasion on which one of the show's established characters was killed off. It was not the first episode to deal with the subject of death and bereavement - "Old Money" of Season 2 can claim that honor, although the theme of grief was far less pivotal in that episode, with the narrative focus being primarily on Abe's estrangement from Homer. Here, the issue is all the more stark and hard-hitting for being presented from the perspective of one of the show's younger and more ingenuous characters. Lisa left contemplating matters of life, death and resilience when a chance reunion with her mentor, the enigmatic blues musician Bleeding Gums Murphy (guest voice of Ron Taylor), is cut tragically short by an unspecified terminal illness she did not see coming. 

I confess that I know very little about how "Round Springfield" was marketed in the run-up to its airing. I personally did not get to see the episode until roughly a year after its Sky 1 premiere, and with the internet still being this weird and slightly alien-sounding rumble on the horizon, I had no means of accessing spoilers online. Later instances in which the show pulled this same macabre move tended to be preceded by promotional blitzs designed to drum up suspense about the identity of the condemned character (Maude Flanders and Rabbi Krustofsky spring to mind, although neither example worked out anywhere near as well as the King of The Hill "Propane Boom" cliffhanger). I would hazard a guess that this did NOT happen here, if only because the "Who Shot Mr Burns?" two-parter was right around the corner, and why would they risk stealing that publicity stunt's thunder? I do not know if viewers were made aware in advance that a character was going to die, let alone if there was any mystery regarding who it might be. Perhaps the title offered a clue to those hip to the 1986 picture Round Midnight, which follows the final days of a drug-addicted saxophonist (played by jazz legend Dexter Gordan) and his friendship with the fan he encounters after travelling to Paris. All I can say is that, having entered into the episode blind, I can attest that it really is the best way to first experience it, with your perspective actually aligned with Lisa's. There are clues, certainly, that something more troublesome might be unfolding (not least in that Lisa finds Bleeding laid out in a hospital bed) but we are at first inclined to share in her naivety, being too caught up in the joyfulness of the reunion, and the robustness of the characters' rapport. Alarm bells might start to ring should we pick up on the fact that the one thing the characters are emphatically not discussing is the nature of Bleeding's condition, as if it's something that neither party can bring themselves to acknowledge. But Bleeding certainly never presents as a man who is at death's door (to the point that it requires some suspension of disbelief that he'd still be able to belt out such a vigorous jamming session on his saxophone in what transpires to be his last meeting with Lisa). He seems much too alive, still so full of passion for his craft and with warmth and wisdom for Lisa. So when tragedy strikes, it comes with a devastating abruptness that feels all-too real. The line between this world and the next is such a fragile one, something this episode captures so bitterly. One moment he's giving Lisa some pointers and encouragement before she plays in her school recital, the next she's rushing back to tell him how well her performance went, only to discover that he's no longer there.

What fascinates me about "Round Springfield" is that it's an episode that allows itself time to be sad, in a way that was honestly quite unusual for this point in the series. There's comic levity in the subplot, which involves Bart suffering at the hands of yet another shoddy Krusty product (a jagged metal hoop that's inexplicably included as a freebie in his brand of cereal), and in whatever Homer is up to on the sidelines (of note, there's a running gag where a hot dog vendor seems to seek him out in the most inappropriate of places), but the loss of Bleeding and its impact on Lisa are treated with genuine reverence. There are points where it honestly seems reminiscent of the more melancholic tone endemic to the first three seasons of the show; it has a certain moodiness of atmosphere, and an eye for emphasising the loneliness and finer disappointments of the characters' lives in a way that was so central to early installments like "Life on The Fast Lane", "Colonel Homer" and Bleeding Gums' debut episode "Moaning Lisa". I tend to think of this model of Simpsons storytelling as having bowed out with "A Streetcar Named Marge" at the start of Season 4, but with the reappearance of Mr Murphy it momentarily lives again. And this would be the big twist - I'm forever blaming this shift in tone on then-showrunners Al Jean and Mike Reiss and their preference for sillier, rapid-fire humor over character-driven storytelling, yet they were the minds behind this episode. The script itself was written by Joshua Sternin and Jennifer Ventimilia, but the plot was Jean and Reiss's brainchild, and they receive a story credit. Credits for story alone were unusual on The Simpsons, and it's explained on the DVD commentary that Jean and Reiss requested it on this are occasion because they'd envisioned the episode being a big winner on the awards front and wanted their names attached. (It was all in vain; the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program that year was scooped up by another Lisa-orientated episode, "Lisa's Wedding", which offered something even more novel than the death of a jazz musician - a hair-raising peek into the distant dystopian future of 2010). By Jean and Reiss's standards, "Round Springfield" is a remarkably grounded narrative. Even the lighter touches, such as the hot dog vendor, seem deliberately smaller and more restrained than much of what we'd seen them do throughout Season 4. That is, until we get the ending. With the closing sequence, the episode is suddenly immersed in the signature off-the-wall humor that was all over Jean and Reiss's own series The Critic (a perception bolstered in how it is essentially an extended parody of a popular moment from a contemporary movie). That ending is the key factor that disqualifies it from playing like a total throwback to those earlier seasons. And it is such a deeply bizarre way to conclude this story. I don't even mean that as a criticism. It's weird in ways that are grand, fun and very moving. But if you stop to think about it, what is even going on in that ending? Because surely Bleeding didn't really...well, we'll get to it.

"Round Springfield" is, admittedly, another example of an episode where the optics maybe aren't so great when viewed from a particular angle. I mean, think about this for a moment. They made the bold decision to kill off a (semi) recurring cast member, and they chose one of their few African American characters. In other words, the black guy died first. That had never been done before, right? Adding fuel to the fire is that, when Bleeding Gums Murphy was introduced in "Moaning Lisa", he was a textbook example of the Magical Negro, being a somewhat mysterious black character whose sole function within the story was to make Lisa feel more confident about her place in the world. Now, to an extent, all supporting characters are bound by the law of Simpsons-centrism - the Simpsons ARE the centre of this confounding little universe, and everything the rest of Springfield gets up to must in some way relate back to them and be in service of them. But it's felt particularly strongly with the Elliotts, a group of characters who effectively serve as the family's guardian angels. I went over my reasoning in more detail in my review of "Moaning Lisa", but to recap, "Elliotts" was a term I came up for a foursome of characters from the show's early years (named for the cartoon dragon from Disney's Pete's Dragon), whom I'd clumped into a collective as a sort of counterpoint to the Home-Wreckers - in addition to Bleeding Gums, the others are Karl (from "Simpson and Delilah"), Bergstrom (from "Lisa's Substitute") and Kompowsky (from "Stark Raving Dad"). What they have in common is an uncannily benevolent, otherworldly aura and that they are all, significantly, outsiders to the Simpsons' White Anglo-Saxon Protestant heteronormative domesticity. Bleeding's a Magical Negro, Karl's a Magical Queer, Bergstrom's a Magical Jew, Kompowsky's a...hmm, is the Magical Psychiatric Patient a thing? It could be. The point is that each of the Elliotts represents a marginalised figure within the Springfield community. Their outsider status might have given them a strength and a perspective on life that would otherwise be unknown to the Simpsons, but all that matters is that they're able to share those pearls of wisdom with one or more of the family and go merrily on their way, satisfied that their work is done. They can help to prop up the central dynamic, but they have no business in sticking around to be a part of it. Of the four, Bergstrom is the only one who could be feasibly described as having anything even resembling an agenda of his own (in that he doesn't lose sight of the fact that his time with Lisa is only a short-term job assignment and he'll soon have bigger fish to fry in the projects of Capital City). For clarity, I like the Elliotts and think they're all great and beautifully realised characters, but there's little downplaying that this dubious convention informs a huge part who they are and how the narrative regards them.

Bleeding Gums retains the honor of being the only Elliott to ever be brought back to any significant capacity, even three decades on from the episode's debut, although this wasn't for a lack of interest on the writers' part. (Returns for Karl and Kompowsky were on the cards but fell through. I am not, though, aware of there being any serious motions for a Bergstrom sequel; I suspect that Dustin Hoffman - sorry, Sam Etic - regarded it as a one-and-done gig.) His reappearance in "Round Springfield" might have been an opportunity to expand on his character and have him grow a little outside of his role as a mentor figure to Lisa - but nope, if anything they only doubled down on his Magical Negro credentials, sacrificing him so that Lisa could undergo character growth of her own, before finally depicting him as a literal spirit in the sky, jamming with his newly-enlightened protege to a Carole King tune (like I say, we'll get to that goofy ending in due course). 

None of this was done maliciously, of course. But what is just as telling is how Bleeding Gums was singled out as the kind of perfectly expendable character who could be jettisoned for the feels (and the awards bait). The Season 7 clip show "The Simpsons' 138th Episode Spectacular", would infamously mock him (alongside Dr Marvin Monroe) for never having been a popular character, and therefore not one that viewers were presumably expected to care about, although the truth with Bleeding really lands somewhere closer to the middle. On the DVD commentary, Jean does indeed state that they obviously weren't going to kill off a character like Mr Burns whom they'd be wanting to use again, but he also recounts that Bleeding was chosen because he was a character whom people felt warmly toward, in no small way thanks to Taylor's performance. He offered the best of both worlds, in not being integral enough to the core universe that it would be an especially startling development to retire him to the jazz club in the sky, but being sympathetic enough that it would still hurt viewers to see him go. If Reiss had had his way, then the show would have taken a very different path and killed off Marge's mother (a move that Julie Kavner might actually have been fully on board with, as I understand she hated doing Jackie Bouvier's voice), but he concedes that Bleeding turned out to be a better choice. Perhaps bumping off someone within the family, however seldom seen, was deemed too radical. Or maybe it came down to the fact that Bleeding is a fundamentally gentle soul, which Jackie is not. He expresses no outward bitterness or regret for the life that he's led (other than his $1,500 a day Faberge egg habit, which is the closest we get to a heroin allusion), and his legacy is complicated only in the sense that his inherent goodness went under most people's radars. He's a wholly angelic being we're intended to shed a tear for but also conversely write off as a character of no genuine consequence. Outside of what he meant to Lisa, that is.

The Lisa factor is another big reason, I'm sure, why Bleeding was ultimately the one placed on the chopping block. She is such a compelling character around which to craft emotional stories, possessing a wisdom well beyond her years but still having all the vulnerabilities of a child. The loss of a friend like Bleeding would hit her tremendously, even with life already having dealt her so many blows with its cruel impermanences. As Kompowsky's episode made clear, she was very deeply affected by the death of the original Snowball (and her hamster named Snuffy, though he comes up less often). There are also those losses she'd suffered that didn't entail mortality, with her being all but forced to surrender her beloved pony Princess and the man she'd looked up to as a substitute father figure abandoning her for a job in Capital City. In both instances, Lisa's distinctly child-like naivety regarding the impending heartbreak was such a powerful factor. She was so thrilled to have Princess that it seemingly never occurred to her just how difficult and impractical it was for her family to afford such a high maintenance animal. She was so besotted with Bergstrom that she lost sight of the fact that he was never going to be there on a long-term basis. Here, she's so overjoyed to have Bleeding back in her life that she doesn't question what he might be doing in the Springfield Hospital, and it seems that Bleeding doesn't have the heart to outright tell her. Was he himself aware that he wasn't going to make it? Yes, and I think there is a specific moment in the episode where we can pinpoint him making what seems like a conscious farewell to Lisa. It's a scene that hits so hard on repeat viewings, when we know what's coming. As Lisa prepares to go off to her recital, Bleeding hands her his saxophone and tells her to take it with her for luck. While Lisa is honored, she does not grasp the full significance of this gesture, presumably thinking that he's just lending it to her for the recital. With hindsight, it seems obvious that Bleeding gave it to her because he knew he wouldn't be needing it. In addition, by giving her his saxophone he is in effect passing the torch to her to go out and perform great music in his stead. There's a more macabre foreshadowing in his telling Lisa that she's going to "knock 'em dead" (by which he likely to alludes to Lisa's potential to go far in life, not just at this particular recital), followed by an ominous cough, the only symptom of ill-health he's seen to exhibit. Finally, as she leaves his side, there's a lingering emphasis on him waving to her, as if he knows this will be their last goodbye.

What always made the relationship between Lisa and Bleeding so affecting is in how they were ostensibly so mismatched, yet connected so readily as social misfits with a mutual appreciation for jazz and the importance of creative expression. When Lisa first encountered Bleeding back in Season 1, he gave her the much-needed assurance that she was not alone in the world, at a time when she felt that no one understood her. (Perhaps fearing that newer viewers wouldn't know who Bleeding was, the episode incorporates a small clip from "Moaning Lisa", leading to a jarring clash of art styles; I suppose it's not so strange when we consider that for several years the series still felt the need to keep reminding us who Sideshow Bob was every time he showed up.) In "Round Springfield" we see how Lisa is eventually able to return the favour, in demonstrating to Bleeding that his life and music had value, at a time when he seemed destined to die alone and all forgotten. ("You've had some career...although the moral seems to be that a lifetime of jazz leads you sad and lonely." "Well, before you came to visit I would have agreed with you.") Before Lisa, nobody had come to visit Bleeding at the hospital; when she asks about his family, he tells her he doesn't really have one. (In what can only be a deliberate callback to a joke in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", it's heavily hinted that Bleeding and Dr Hibbert are brothers who lost contact a long time ago, although neither party seems to connect the dots. This also means that Bleeding had a second brother he possibly didn't even know about.) The grim reality doesn't fully set in until after his death, when Lisa attends his funeral and discovers that she's the only mourner there; nobody else in town knew who Bleeding was or cares that he's gone. It's a realisation that transforms Lisa's grief into red-hot grit and takes her on her first step toward healing, with the knowledge that responsibility for keeping her friend's memory alive rests solely on her.

Before then, we get a series of short scenes that feel reminiscent of "Moaning Lisa", with the family all showing awareness of Lisa's suffering and doing their bit to try and help, even if they don't necessarily have the kinds of answers she's seeking. Homer looks as though he might have a sensible response, in reminding Lisa of how she coped when Snowball died, but ends up reaching the most inappropriate possible conclusion from that train of thought: "All we have to do is go down to the pound and get a new jazzman." Maggie attempts to soothe Lisa's aching soul the only way she knows how, by offering Lisa her pacifier (it doesn't help Lisa, but the tactic later proves effective on Homer, who is rattled by his own failure to say the right thing). Bart shares with her his belief in reincarnation - specifically, that when you die you can come back in a form of your own choosing. He's intent on being a butterfly in his next life, because as he sees it he'll be able to commit acts of arson and be totally above suspicion. (Something I find particularly disturbing about Bart's butterfly fantasy is the fact that everyone else in it - Skinner, Wiggum, Lou and Eddie - are all the same age they are in the present, so is Bart banking on dying imminently?). Deciding that she needs to consult someone with a little more experience and wisdom, Lisa turns to Abe, who seems to think he's in a Final Destination scenario, with Death conspiring against him at every turning. (Really, the guises in which he sees Death manifesting aren't that far off. Maggie? Well, she'd make an attempt on Burns' life soon enough. Snowball II? As Homer alluded to above, she's a walking reminder of the grisly fate that befell the original Snowball. The bird bath? Odd are that something drowned in there at some time or other.) Marge, who nearly sent Lisa down a terribly destructive path in "Moaning Lisa", here gets to be the voice of reason, assuring her daughter that the sadness she feels is normal and making the practical suggestion that she might honor Bleeding's memory by asking the local jazz station to do a tribute to him. Lisa immediately runs into a roadblock - K-Jazz is happy to fulfil her request, but they don't have Bleeding's sole album, Sax on The Beach, in their library, and copies are hard to come by. As luck would have it, Comic Book Guy has one for sale in his store, but it comes with a hefty $250 price tag, which is increased to $500 when Comic Book Guy learns that the artist in question is dead. Knowing she could never afford it, Lisa sinks back into despair, only for help to arrive from the aspiring lepidopteran arsonist, whose recent traumatic experience with that piece of jagged metal has brought him a cash settlement of precisely $500.

 

Bart's subplot, which involves him falling ill after unwittingly ingesting the cereal prize from Hell and requiring emergency surgery, is (in spite of its gruesome premise) predominantly there to bring comic balance to a more sombre than usual A-story. It is, though, no arbitrary joke-fest, with the resolutions to these respective stories dovetailing in a way that is meaningful and rewarding. As fate would have it, Bart's swallowing of the metal hoop occurs on a morning before a history test that he's ill-prepared for; when he starts to complain of intense pains in his stomach, Marge and Homer, wary that he's pulled this exact shit to get out of a test before, pack him off to school, although Lisa voices the opinion that his illness might be genuine this time. This in itself feels like a nice callback to the events of "Bart Gets an F", where Lisa was the only character who knew that Bart was faking his amoria phlebitis; it speaks volumes to their sibling connection that she's consistently able to tell the difference. When Bart finally receives a settlement from Krusty (lawyer Lionel Hutz has actually scammed him out of a much more substantial sum, but $500 seems like a huge amount to the trusting eyes of impressible youth), he's all prepared to blow it on the most frivolous purchase imaginable - a limited edition pog (remember those?) with Steve Allen's face on - but his conscience prevails and he instead buys Lisa the elusive album (the sequence detailing Bart's dilemma, which repeatedly shifts between three different leitmotifs, is in itself such a wonderful testament to Clausen's composing talents). He explains to Lisa that he felt he owed it to her for being the only person to take his side when he got sick. It's a lovely gesture that upholds my personal view of Bart and Lisa having the strongest bond out of all of the Simpsons, but it has deeper significance still, as a final affirmation to Lisa that, even with her soulmate sadly departed, she does not have to worry about being alone in the world. No matter what, she can always count on her family to come through for her.

At last the time has come to dig into that bizarro finale. Even with that copy of Sax on The Beach safely within her mits, Lisa's tribute seems doomed to fall at the second hurdle, that being K-jazz's ridiculously weak broadcast range; even when standing immediately outside the station with a portable radio, she is unable to pick up their transmission of Bleeding's music. That is until a thunder cloud appears in the sky, and a bolt of lightning strikes the K-Jazz antenna, making it so powerful that the broadcast is heard and enjoyed all over Springfield. The Deus ex Thunder Cloud subsequently assumes the form of none other than Bleeding himself, assuring Lisa that her actions made him happy. This much is a parody of the sequence from Disney's The Lion King in which the deceased Mufasa appears amid the night sky and urges the emotionally lost Simba to remember who he really is - a point made salient in having the ghost of Mufasa appear right next to Bleeding, with a message for Simba...or does he mean Kimba? (On the DVD commentary, Jean and Reiss fret that this is a jab that nobody would have gotten after the 90s, but they'd no need to fear - as long as there are animation buffs in this world, that line will always be hilarious and relevant.) They are then joined by the ghost of Darth Vader, making his shocking declaration of kinship with Luke, and then finally...James Earl Jones, giving an announcement on behalf of CNN? This elaborate and totally nonsensical gag is nothing less than a loving tribute to the vocal talents of Jones, who voiced Mufasa and Darth Vader and recorded announcements for CNN. (Jones was imitated here by Harry Shearer, although he had previously guest starred in the Halloween episodes "Treehouse of Horror" and more recently "Treehouse of Horror V". Somewhere out there there's also a parallel universe in which he got to voice Sideshow Bob.) It's a sequence that would seem perfectly suited to the looser, cinema-fixated reality of The Critic, but if feels just a whisker out of place in The Simpsons, no? Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of Bleeding, Mufasa, Darth Vader and James Earl Jones all being besties in the afterlife (Jones himself was very much alive when "Round Springfield" initially aired, but now in 2025 his placement alongside these deceased characters seems less absurd). But what exactly are we to make of this sequence within the context of this otherwise relatively grounded story about grappling with bereavement? Surely Mufasa, Darth and then-still-with-us Jones didn't literally manifest in the clouds above Lisa? Surely not even Bleeding was really there, jamming with Lisa to a "Jazzman" reprise? I recall that Groening made a big thing about that catfish who winked at the camera in "The War of The Simpsons", but that all seems very sensible and subdued compared to the borderline fever dream unfolding here.

"Round Springfield" leaves us with a head-scratcher - have the skies above Springfield really become host to this odd assortment of spectres (most of them culled from popular culture), or is the entire sequence nothing more than a weird and protracted bit of symbolism? Arguably, there was precedent for it in "Old Money", which included a scene in which the ghost of Bea Simmons appears to Abe on a roller-coaster, though its strangeness was of a somewhat lower-key variety and was easy enough to rationalise as representing some kind of internal monologue on the part of Abe. It should also be noted that the Disney moment it's parodying is up for a similar kind of interpretation - Rafiki makes a remark about the weather, leaving some ambiguity as to whether Mufusa's manifestation really occurred, but I suspect that most adult viewers would be inclined to read it as symbolising the soul-searching Simba undertakes in trying to understand what Rafiki means by "He lives in you." It's possible that this too is taking place inside of Lisa's head, but it goes so far with some of its concepts and gags that I fear this would make Lisa look just a little unhinged.

It is, though, a magnificent ending - triumphant, redemptive, uplifting and poignant. Perhaps it doesn't matter how well it meshes with the series' reality or what sense we make of it, so long as we gather that Lisa has reached the light at the end of the grieving tunnel and realised that she retains her connection to Bleeding Gums and everything that he taught her. I would argue that the intention here is nothing more complicated than to leave us on a spectacular emotional high following such a downbeat experience - it's the episode's markedly eccentric way of letting us know that everything is going to be okay. It helps that Lisa and Bleeding's recurring performance of "Jazzman" is allowed to be a thing of beauty in itself, tussling only with the "Oh Streetcar!" material from "A Streetcar Named Marge" for my favourite musical sequence of all the series (bless the person who compiled the Songs in The Key of Springfield album for putting those tracks right next to each other, so I could listen to them over and over in easy succession). Perhaps it ought to lose the edge for not being an original song, but that seriously doesn't matter. They imbued it with a heart and an aching all of its own. I love Carole King's original 1974 rendition too, but thanks to The Simpsons I will forever interpret it as being about Lisa's yearning to become one with her idol, both before and after his passing.

Cheers to Yeardley Smith, to Ron Taylor and not least to Alf Clausen for making this episode such a transcendent voyage. Jeers to Disney, for a whole multitude of reasons, but on this day for the downright galling manner in which, while watching this episode on Disney+, they always seemed to want to take out midway through the credits and directly into "The Springfield Connection", rather than encouraging me to enjoy the whole dazzling performance of "Jazzman" as the Simpsons gods intended. If Disney had their way, nobody would stick around for the punchline that rounds off the story: "Oh come on, Lisa, I've got a date with Billie Holiday!" Bleeding's parting words, and they couldn't give a mouse's hickey if you hear them. The sacrilege astounds. 

Let's solve a Frasier mystery - what is going on at the end of The Placeholder?

 

A long time ago, back when this blog wasn't even a year and a half old, I made a post about a Frasier end credits sequence (from the Season 5 episode "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do") that left me totally flummoxed, and which I declared then and there to be the series' weirdest. Looking back nearly nine years on, the whole piece now seems a little naive - in part, because I was still in the vulgar habit of double spacing between sentences in 2016, but more so because there is another Frasier end credits sequence that I've since decided would be a stronger candidate for the series' most baffling. Eddie barking incessantly at an hors d'oeuvre stand shaped like a moorish idol is an awfully random way to round off an episode focussed on Martin ending a long-term relationship, sure, but it doesn't add anything in the way of mystifying plot detail. It's a weird choice because the stand's presence is so incidental within the story proper that most viewers probably didn't even notice it was there on their initial viewing, but what's going on in the sequence itself is really straightforward enough. Eddie is barking at the fish-shaped stand because it spooks him. Why it would spook him so is unclear, as it's hardly the most outlandish prop ever featured in the series, but then as Groucho Marx so humorously observed, inside a dog it's too dark to read, and that goes double for a neurotic dog like Eddie. We could tack on some added significance, as I attempted in 2016 - if we assume that the stand in question belonged to Sherry, then we could interpret that final showdown as a visual metaphor for the ultimate incompatibility between herself and Martin (since Eddie, Martin's dog, regards it as out of place in his domain). I suspect, though, that this is likely a case of a "filler" ending. The writers wanted that final contemplative moment with Frasier and Martin at the bar to be where we left them for this particular installment, and there weren't any B-stories with Niles, Daphne or Roz they could have exploited. End credits sequences are often where we see glimpses of things happening on the periphery of the story, and I'd speculate that the idea here was to show us something of the party Sherry and Martin were preparing for earlier. In lieu of anything too elaborate, they simply had Eddie barking in its aftermath at the fish, now stripped of its hors d'oeuvres. It's a curious choice, but it succinctly communicates that the party is over, in more ways than one. 

So let's move over to our newly-declared champ of confusing codas, the sequence seen following "The Placeholder" of Season 11, the last season of Frasier, ever. (I am still in deep denial about the 2023 revival, because I will not accept Freddy Crane as either Jack Cutmore-Scott OR Martin 2.0, any more than I will accept him as Luke Tarsitano. Sorry, but we are fiercely for Trevor Einhorn in this house.) Debuting on October 14th 2003, this episode sees Roz attempting to pressure Frasier into dating an acquaintance of hers, an obnoxious insurance claims adjustor named Ann Hodges (Julia Sweeney). Frasier is loathed to date anyone for the sake of it, insisting that he's quite happy biding his time until Ms Right comes along, but Roz opines that he might regard Ann as a placeholder, so to keep flexing his dating muscles for when Ms Right finally does rear her head. Frasier later decides that he is in fact lonely and desperate enough to take Ann up on the offer, but immediately regrets it on realising quite how challenging it will be to keep his teeth gritted through each protracted second of her company. Things are further complicated when Kenny shows up with his visiting cousin (Krista Allen), whose name so happens to be Liz Wright (hardy har har), and who would clearly be a much better match for Frasier. Cue the awkward sitcom hi jinks, with Frasier attempting to blow off Ann and take a place at Liz's table. He inevitably ends up making a dire impression on both women, and while Liz makes an indignant exit, an opportunity forever squandered, Ann insists that he meet with her again tomorrow morning for coffee as compensation for their botched date.

The end credits sequence depicts the aftermath of Frasier's disastrous dinner; left alone at the restaurant, Frasier is approached by a man who takes a seat at his table and immediately starts sharing some photographs he has on hand. Frasier, who is perturbed by this development, gets out of the situation by faking a telephone call informing him of urgent business elsewhere, and leaves the man alone with his photos. Who was this man? What did the photographs he shares with Frasier have to do with anything we'd just seen? And what about the combination was so repellent to Frasier that he had to immediately high tail it out of there? There is nothing in the preceding twenty minutes to make it overtly obvious what is going on.

I'll admit that the credits sequence for "The Placeholder" was never one that stuck with me (not in the enigmatic way that the image of Eddie barking at that fish did), until I became aware of how many threads there were inquiring about it on the Frasier subreddit, and with no particularly conclusive answers being offered. The KACL 780 episode transcript was just as hazy, identifying the intruder as a man in a sports jacket who's attempting to push his photos on Frasier, but not linking it directly to anything else from the script other than Frasier's use of "the cell phone trick". We had seen Frasier pretend to receive a phone call with urgent news at two prior points during his date with Ann, so this part of the sequence is at least decipherable. The mystery lies with the man and the significance of his photos. I was intrigued enough to rewatch "The Placeholder" several times over, treating the whole arrangement as a puzzle that could be solved if I scrutinised the pieces long and hard enough.

I don't think it's unfair to say that "The Placeholder" is a fairly by-the-numbers installment of Frasier. Aside from introducing Ann, who would return in a more openly antagonistic role a few months down the line in "The Ann Who Came To Dinner" (I noted in my previous piece that Sherry is a divisive character among Frasier viewers, but oh boy does Ann make Sherry at her worst seem truly innocuous), the most notable thing about it is a sequence in which Frasier interacts extensively with a cat named Mr Bottomsley, whom Frasier is pet-sitting while his owner is out of town. The feline actor playing Bottomsley is such a delight - his reaction on being teased by Frasier about the prospect of a hot bath is simply priceless - and he and Frasier have such delectable chemistry that you really wish it hadn't taken this long for his latent cat person to come out (but then Frasier apparently had allergies back in 1996 when he met Kate Costa's cat). The rest of the episode is devoted to hitting largely familiar notes. For now, Ann herself plays like a cruder version of Poppy, an aggressively garrulous character we'd spent a couple of episodes with in Season 7, Frasier screwing up a date is certainly nothing we've never seen before, and the first act incorporates a sequence that heavily recalls the Season 4 finale "Odd Man Out", with Frasier once again having to contend with the stigma of being the only unattached adult in a restaurant. There's also a subplot with Martin agreeing to interrogate Niles and Daphne's Czech housekeeper Mrs. Gablyczyck (Lauri Johnson), whom they suspect of stealing; it's an agreeable enough diversion from the Frasier A-story, but is introduced fairly late into the runtime, what with Martin, Niles and Daphne also playing principal parts in that preliminary restaurant scene.

Even Frasier's tactic of staging a telephone call, purportedly from Niles after suffering a back injury, comes with built-in deja vu. We've seen variations on it in other episodes. In "Merry Christmas, Mrs Moskowitz" of Season 6, Frasier and Faye had each arranged for third parties to call them during their introductory meeting, to give them a quick out if their prospects weren't looking so rosy. "Cranes Unplugged" of Season 8 has a subplot with Niles and Daphne attempting to set Roz up with a man who is strongly implied to have resorted to this very trick after a single glance at Roz. This is a classic Frasier standby. So what does our mystery man do to warrant it on this most peculiar of occasions?

The first thing to note is that the man doesn't emerge from completely nowhere. If you pay attention to the extras in the backdrop during the date with Ann, you'll see that he's seated at the table behind Frasier. He isn't seen doing a whole lot other than toying with a wine glass and interacting with a waiter, but there is a shot where Frasier moves past his table that establishes that he's there by himself. He doesn't appear to take any interest in what's going on over at Frasier's end until Ann starts making a scene. And then when the credits are rolling he makes his own move. It would be helpful if we'd gotten a closer glimpse of what's actually in the pictures he shares with Frasier, but in my opinion they look like ordinary family photos (if you squint, I swear I see a child standing beside someone in a rabbit costume). This isn't a case of an overly zealous KACL fan wanting Frasier to sign his glossies, nor does it look like he's trying to set Frasier up with someone he knows. Whatever he's attempting to talk about with Frasier, he comes across as being somewhat down in the mouth about it (notice the dejected head shake as he takes his seat). A couple of possibilities spring to mind - the man might be trying to locate a missing person (in which case Frasier is acting like a bit of an arse in fervently not wanting to help him) or he's a lonely guy reaching out to another solitary restaurant patron by trying to strike up a conversation about his kids (in which case we're potentially meant to fill in the blanks that he's divorced and the kids are likely living with their mother). Frasier isn't in the mood for this; he was enjoying his consolation prize, in the form the souffle Kenny had ordered, and which Ann had previously declared was to die for, and this stranger is little more than an unwelcome intrusion in this moment of peace. Overwhelmed by the neediness of this man, he pulls out his phone and pretends that something's just come up, even if means having to abandon his souffle.

If that all still seems rather random, I do have a theory about how it might be more closely linked to the happenings in the episode, more specifically the sequence where Frasier is alone with Mr Bottomsley. During the initial restaurant scene, we learn that Frasier is very excited about his recent antiques purchase, a late Regency fruitwood mirror - a thread that transpires to have been implemented in service of a sight gag where Frasier, feeling the chill, has wrapped himself up in an afghan and, cradling the cat in his arms, goes to inspect his new mirror, only to recoil in horror at what he finds staring back at him. The realisation that he might be transforming into a crazy cat lady (ie: his aunt Shirley) is what spooks him into accepting the date with Ann. No literal mirrors figure in the final uncomfortable restaurant interaction, but we see Frasier being spooked by yet another frightful reflection of his own desperation. This time, the caricature it assumes is not that of a crazy cat lady, but another stereotyped figure of social impoverishment, the downtrodden divorced father. It's enough to scare him away, not simply to escape a dull conversation with an overbearing stranger, but because he fears that this is the kind of culture into which he'll be assimilated if he gets too accustomed to dining alone. (Not that dining by one's lonesome is any near as stigmatic as either this episode or "Odd Man Out" would suggest.)

If only Frasier had had the willpower to stick to his guns when he told Roz in the episode's opening that he was quite happy living the single life. The saddest thing about this whole situation is really not that Frasier missed out on an auspicious relationship with Ms Wright, but that he ultimately wasn't willing to settle for a quiet evening in his apartment with the company of Mr B and his hearty bowl of nine-vegetable winter soup. I don't know about you, but it all sounds positively idyllic to me. The only intrusion he had to put up with was a fleeting appearance from Eddie, who was easily sent scurrying. There's a reason why the scene with Mr B stands out to me as the highlight of "The Placeholder" - sandwiched in between the cavalcade of human awkwardness and the non-stop pressure to conform to the standard of doing everything in duos, the tranquility of cat-sitting is a long, cool drink of water, a respite in which Frasier is able to enjoy night of privacy on entirely his own terms. What it absolutely is NOT is a sign of Frasier hitting rock bottom on the personal well-being scale. He was doing perfectly fine until the judgements of the outside world crept in, via the memories of how he had once (presumably) judged his aunt Shirley. Because we all know that there's nothing wrong with favouring the companionship of an animal friend over a dubious avalanche of social stresses. Later in the episode, Martin mentions how he'd confided in Eddie his concerns that Frasier needed to get a life, and while this is clearly intended as a hypocritical echo of Frasier's prior interactions with the cat (with the laugh track responding accordingly), all that Martin does here is confirm that talking to a pet is no big deal. At this stage Martin was also involved with Ronee, so surely the implication isn't that he's also lonely and desperate?

Odds are that Aunt Shirley didn't have to deal with the kind of grotesque social blow-ups that Frasier endured at the hands of Ann, any more than she did bizarre interludes where strangers approached her and attempted inexplicably to talk her through their family snapshots, and I suspect she was all the merrier for it. 

Bundles of Joyce: Epic (aka Blue and Green Should Never Be Seen?)

I find it fascinating how in vogue the works of American children's author William Joyce were among animation bigwigs as the 2000s were going into the 2010s. In a period of roughly six years, we received no less than three feature adaptations of Joyce's books, each from a different Hollywood animation studio. Disney got in first on this trend, with the 2007 offering Meet The Robinsons, a loose re-working of Joyce's picture book A Day with Wilbur Robinson. In late 2012, DreamWorks' animation released Rise of The Guardians, taken from Joyce's book series The Guardians of Childhood, only for Blue Sky to round out this unofficial trilogy a few months later with Epic, their take on The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs. Joyce, who was also a prominent figure within the animation industry, having worked as a designer for Pixar's early features and a producer for Blue Sky's Robots (2005), had a finger in all three pies, serving as an executive producer for the Disney and DreamWorks entries and a screenwriter and production designer for Epic. A little project I've decided to set myself for 2025 is to provide a full retrospective of all three films, considering not only how they handle the themes and spirit of Joyce's works, but also the personal stamp that each studio managed to bring to the production. I'll admit to having a soft spot for this unsung triad; they basically all came and went, leaving nary a dent in zeitgeist, but stand out to me now as underrated examples of their respective studio's output, each very worthy of revisiting.

We'll be starting this retrospective with Epic - which was, chronologically, the last of the three to see the light of day, but this is a case where I'm allowing the seasons to dictate my ordering. Epic feels the most appropriate to be exploring during the transitional period between spring and summer, when the greenery is lush and the outside world is fully in bloom (the film is, specifically, set at the summer solstice, but I'm sure I can be forgiven for getting in a few weeks ahead). Meet The Robinsons, with its emphasis on overcoming regret and anticipating what the future will hold, seems better suited for the wistful days of a waning summer. The Rise of The Guardians technically takes place at Easter, but it so wants to be a Christmas movie and, as far as popular perception is concerned, it is a Christmas movie, so it can wait until the year is nearly through.

Besides, I have been wanting to get it off my chest for some time just how much I miss Blue Sky, now that they've been consigned to the Hollywood history books. They were not my favourite animation studio. I suspect they were the favourite of very few people, possessing neither the prestige of Pixar, the subversiveness of DreamWorks or Illumination's canniness in conceiving the most prolifically, nefariously merchandisable of characters. They were there, and they were relatively consistent, churning out Ice Age films on a regular basis, and projects that were generally pleasant, if unremarkable. It was easy to take them for granted. And yet when their closure was announced in April 2021, I and a lot of other animation fans felt very melancholic about the news. Just knowing that we'd lost a major voice in Hollywood animation felt like such a massive blow. I wouldn't say that I went as far as mourning the (ostensible) extinction of the Ice Age franchise, which had whittled down whatever patience I had remaining by its fourth installment, but I couldn't help but wonder about all of the other stories the studio might have told, and what new talent and direction could eventually have emerged that we would now never get to see in this timeline. In truth, the writing had already been on the wall for Blue Sky, as soon as their overlords at 20th Century Fox were acquired by Disney. The official explanation for the closure was that COVID-19 had made the studio's operations unsustainable, but even in late 2017, when the acquisition process was in its early stages, I remember there being a lot of speculation as to whether Disney would have sufficient interest in keeping Blue Sky going. They weren't exactly starving for animated output, and Blue Sky had spent much of the late 2010s struggling to find a money maker as reliable as the Ice Age franchise (which itself was beginning to show signs of diminishing financial returns with the fifth installment). Some might look on the development as the Circle of Life at its most unrelentingly brutal, as according to one of the testimonies in Dan Lund's 2005 documentary Dream On, Silly Dreamer, it was the overnight success of Blue Sky and the first Ice Age in 2002 that convinced the heads of Walt Disney Feature Animation to pull the plug on traditional animation. Blue Sky were, at one time, considered a threat by Disney. They played their part in redefining the course of Hollywood animation, only for Disney to ultimately claw its way back to the top, get itself into a position of authority over their former adversaries and to neutralise them without mercy.  As things stand, Annapurna Animation, which was founded by Blue Sky executives Robert L. Baird and Andrew Millstein in 2022, looks set to become their successor, their first release being Nimona (2023), a production previously scrapped under Disney's rule. Perhaps not surprisingly, the demise of Blue Sky wasn't enough to keep those pesky Ice Age critters from resurfacing - a spin-off film, The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, dropped on Disney+ in 2022 (sans most of the original voice cast) and Ice Age 6 has since been confirmed, but that's all Disney's bugbear now.

Let's go back to May of 2013, when all that drama was still a number of years away, and Epic was the freshest entry into Blue Sky's canon. The film had been in gestation since as far back as 2006 and at one point had apparently come very close to moving over to Pixar (now that would have been an interesting turn of events, especially given Pixar's otherwise total avoidance of doing adaptations, unless you want to count A Bug's Life as an adaptation of the fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant). It pulled in decent enough numbers at the box office, but nothing that was likely to convince the studio to abandon Ice Age in favour of a Leaf Man franchise, and reviews fell largely within the lukewarm range. I confess that I wasn't overly enthusiastic about it at the time. But there is something about it that intrigues me, and over the years has slowly worked its way into my affections. In fact, these days I might even go so far as to call it the standout of Blue Sky's output. That might be a contentious opinion, since I reckon a lot of people would argue that The Peanuts Movie (2015) is where they peaked. And yes, The Peanuts Movie is a very sweet and warm and loving tribute to the brainkids of Charles M. Schulz, but here's the thing - if I want to spend time with Charlie Brown and friends, I'm still far more likely to watch the traditionally animated television specials. It's a nice film, but by its nature kind of a redundant one. Whereas Epic is one of those films with a curious, even ludicrous hold on my fascinations. It's no masterpiece, but its numerous glaring imperfections make it all the more enthralling to me. My obsession with Epic is one with trying to parse the tensions between a messy final product and an underlying maturity that feels like it was desperately trying to find its way out into the open.

Children's picture books don't always make the most auspicious starting point for feature storytelling. Consider Hollywood's chequered history of bringing the works of Dr Seuss to the big screen (Blue Sky's own attempt, Horton Hears A Who, is broadly considered one of the better examples, if not exactly a classic). The recurring challenge tends to be that picture books usually don't have sufficient plot to fill up feature length, so you have to add a lot of extra detail and narrative fussiness to stories that were designed to be told with brevity. On the other hand, picture books often make for enchanting examples of visual storytelling, and it stands to reason that a filmmaking creative might be inspired to want to recreate a bit of that graphic verve on a cinematic canvas. The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs is also a much more plot-driven picture book than A Day With Wilbur Robinson, so in theory Blue Sky should have had the advantage over Disney here. Let's dig in and see how they fared.

What is The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs about?

Published in 1996, The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs tells the story of an elderly woman who loves her garden and recalls it being a place where magical things occurred in her childhood, although her memories are hazy as to the finer details. One day the woman falls ill, and her favourite item within the garden, a rosebush, begins to decline along with her. The grief of the woman's grandchildren is paralleled with that of the bugs who live in the garden and fear for the bush's future. A small metal toy that has lain lost in the garden for many years advises them to summon a legendary band of creatures known as the Leaf Men; to do so, they must ascend to the top of the tallest tree just as the full moon touches its topmost branch. A guild of doodlebugs (woodlice) makes the daring climb, and is opposed en route by the malicious Spider Queen and her ant minions, but manage to summon the Leaf Men, who defeat the Spider Queen. They then restore the rosebush to health and carry the Long-Lost Toy to the bedridden woman, along with one of the flowers from the bush. The woman is suddenly hit with a flood of memories, recalling that the toy and the rosebush were gifts from each of her parents as tokens of how they would always love and protect her. The woman recovers from her illness, and shares with her grandchildren the stories her parents told her in her childhood about the Leaf Men who lived in the garden and watched over it. Her grandson asks if the stories are true; the woman responds: "Things may come and things may go. But never forget - the garden is a miraculous place, and anything can happen on a beautiful moonlit night." The final illustration shows the bugs standing around a framed photograph of the woman as a small child, planting the rosebush with her parents. The book is dedicated to the memory of Joyce's friend John, described as his "brave, best pal".

 

How much of this is in Epic?

Not a lot. At this point I should highlight that the source story is specifically credited in Epic as the inspiration for the Leafmen characters ("Leafmen" being the stylisation the film prefers), which in itself is very telling. They are the only participants from Joyce's pages to have recognisably survived the transition to Hollywood blockbuster. Gone are the woman and her grandchildren, the doodlebugs, the Spider Queen, the ant goblins and the Long-Lost Toy.

Instead, the plot of Blue Sky's film focusses on the teenaged MK (voice of Amanda Seyfried), who following the death of her mother has returned to the home of her estranged father, Professor Radcliffe Bomba (Jason Sudeikis), an eccentric scientist attempting to prove the existence of a race of tiny humanoids in the local forest. MK takes one look at his research, decides that he's a lunatic and she should scarper, only to get shrunken down and caught up in the ongoing conflict between the very real Leafmen, promoters of life and growth within the forest, led by the hard-headed Ronin (Colin Farrell), and the sinister forces of decomposition, the Boggans, led by the smarmy Mandrake (Christop Waltz). The forest's ruler, floral being Queen Tara (Beyoncé Knowles), has just selected the pod set to bloom into her equally benevolent successor - but should the pod fall into Mandrake's hands, it will become corrupted, and the seed of the forest's inevitable destruction.

Director Chris Wedge called Joyce's original story "wonderful" but also "quaint", and cited Star Wars as the narrative the film more closely resembled. Between this film and Pixar's Lightyear, I am starting to think that it's maybe not such a great sign when an animated feature (or any type of feature) claims that it's specifically out to replicate the scale and feeling of Star Wars. Star Wars was one of those real lightning-in-a-bottle successes that Hollywood has been trying to emulate since the film's release in 1977, and learned many times over that it can't be done on demand. Still, in Epic's case, there is a certain poetic charm in the comparison. Star Wars was all about looking out to the galaxies beyond and wondering what kinds of vast, sweeping stories they could accommodate. Epic is about looking inward, at our own world, and wondering what kinds of similarly vast, sweeping stories might be happening on a microscopic level beneath our feet. There is plenty of magic, it argues, in the blades of grass growing beside our own doorstep, a view that is not out of step with the final assertion of Joyce's book. The Star Wars influence broadly manifests in the re-envisioning of the premise as a larger-scale struggle between forces of good and evil, but is at its most salient during a bird-racing sequence that seems consciously designed as a homage to the infamous pod race in The Phantom Menace (1999). Otherwise, comparisons feel more apt with Bill Kroyer's traditionally animated film FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992), another tale of a shrunken human accommodated by a race of tiny magical beings within a threatened forest.

Of the three Joyce feature adaptations, Epic is also notable for having the title that's furthest removed from its source material. The film's working title had been Leaf Men, and the decision to change it to Epic was apparently forced on the production by Fox's marketing department, to Wedge's chagrin (I do not blame him; Epic is a silly title). I can only assume that this was done in response to Disney's early-2010s love affair with vague, one-word titles designed to be snappy and to conceal any whiff of fairy tale quaintness (see Tangled, Brave, Frozen and the cancelled Gigantic).

 Where does Epic falter?

The translation from book to feature was an evidently uneasy one - there are five credited writers (including Joyce himself), a sign that it underwent multiple rewrites - with a finished production that feels like it's pulling in a myriad of directions. I can feel Blue Sky really wanting to grow and mature as a studio through this project. Wacky buddy comedies with talking animals were their bread and butter for most of their lifespan, so I did appreciate the attempt to craft a story with a noticeably more serious sense of adventure and mythology. Old habits die hard, however, and Epic isn't the radical break from the studio's formula that it might have been. The anthropomorphic minibeasts, though a part of Joyce's original story, muddle the world-building and mostly lower the tone (the non-anthropomorphic creatures, by contrast, are brought to life with flair and majesty, particularly a mouse that's able to be both adorable and wickedly threatening in the same sequence). The comic relief molluscs, Mub and Grub (Aziz Ansari, Chris O'Dowd), are very typical Blue Sky characters, heavily reminiscent of the possum duo from the Ice Age series, and so functionally useless as to suggest that they were worked in very late into the drafting process. The worst offender by far is an amphibian bookie voiced by Pitbull, whose screen presence proves mercifully minor. Every last detail about this character - his dialogue, his demeanor, his design, his wardrobe - marks him out as egregiously out of place within this world, and better suited to one of those "hip" and "modern" Beatrix Potter "adaptations" that weren't so far on the horizon.

Something else that I suspect was compromised between drafts are the environmental themes that go hand-in-hand with this type of setting, and feel frequently as though they're on the tip of the movie's tongue, only for it to pull back and play things entirely safe. The environmental themes in FernGully: The Last Rainforest are often criticised for being too broad and on the nose, but at the very least that film was entirely confident in what it intended to say via those themes. It's a cautionary story about humankind's sense of disconnect from the natural world, something that's challenged through the absorption of a man into a hidden world and his coming to see the consequences of his actions from a new perspective. As an eco-narrative, Epic seems hesitant to say anything much bolder than that the forest is good, and maybe mysterious. It's not that its environmental themes are more subtle than those of FernGully - more that they've been watered down to the point where they're barely present and, at times, barely coherent. We're told early on that, at its purest, the conflict between the Leafman and the Boggans constitutes a "balance", implying that both sides are playing a vital role in maintaining the forest, and that they might do well to look past their enmity and see their interactions as a form of as cooperation. This makes sense when we consider that decay is part of the process through which life is perpetuated. But it's belied through the depiction of one side as inherently good (identified as such in the opening narration) and the other as innately evil. The Star Wars model of a light side and a dark side seems curiously misapplied to the natural order.

But, enough carping. I've already established that Epic is no masterpiece, but I do think that it also has a lot going for it. The reason why it's slowly grown on me, particularly in the years since Blue Sky's closure, is that it is the picture that best exemplifies why I was so saddened to see them go. They were a studio that had the potential to grow into something much greater. They never quite got there, but you can see the glimmers of ambition and adroitness in this production. It's an incredibly good-looking film (there is a slight stiffness to some of the humanoid characters, but my god is that foliage to die for) and it takes itself and its world seriously whenever those molluscs and the (Pit)bullfrog aren't the focus. And for as little DNA from Joyce's book appears to survive in the final product, the hearts of the respective stories really aren't in such disparate places. There are themes from The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs that Epic carries over and recontextualises very ably into its revised setting.

 

What is The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs REALLY about?

Nestled in Joyce's quaint story of brave bugs and arboreal soldiers is an implicit message about death, loss and renewal. The woman's parents are presumably long-departed, but we see how they have continued to be an active part of her life through her relationship with her garden, the items that were tokens of her parents' devotion and the memories they created together. The Long-Lost Toy (aka the Metal Man), a gift from her father, represents a connection to childhood innocence that was not gone for good but lying dormant all this time, waiting to be rediscovered. The rosebush that was planted by her mother gives life and comfort but requires nurturing in return (much like Mother Nature) - when the woman falls ill and is unable to care for it, the bush shrivels, threatening the creatures that depend on it. The triumph of the doodlebugs and the Leaf Men over the Spider Queen is the triumph of hope and resilience against the forces of despair. The fate of the garden is linked to the fate of the woman, but at the end of the story we see her pass the baton to the incoming generation by telling her grandchildren of her parents' legacy, through the gifts they left behind and their stories of the Leaf Men who continue to watch over the garden. The inevitability of death is evoked in the woman's reflection that "Things may come and things may go," but the garden is upheld as a constant in which wonderful things may continue to happen. This ongoing cycle of parental (and grandparental) reassurance is intertwined with the broader cycle of life, with the natural world becoming a site in which youthful imagination and wonder may remain forever active. It is a connection to the past that sustains the present while holding the seeds for the future, and much like the memories of our departed loved ones, requires that we cherish and tend to it for it to remain fresh and vibrant.

 

And how much of this is in Epic?

At heart, Epic is not fundamentally a story about tiny people who live in the forest and battle pint-sized decay-spreading demons. All of that action adventure stuff is really window dressing to a story about a father and daughter re-establishing communication after years of silence and coming to terms with their mutual grief for the absent mother. It's the scenes in Bomba's abode, focusing on the interactions between the our two human participants, that I specifically find the most earnestly intriguing. Bomba is the film's strongest character, not least because his character design is the most distinctively Joyce-esque.

The initial interplay between MK and Bomba establishes that communication between both parties is totally defunct. MK does not take Bomba up on his offer of discussing her bereavement, insisting that she is working through it on her own terms. And Bomba in turn does not pay due attention to MK when she attempts to raise the possibility that she might do better to live independently. When the shrunken MK later returns to the house and attempts, in vain, to gain her father's attention, very little has effectively changed, with Bomba still failing to grasp what is right under his nose because his sights are focussed in the wrong direction. Bomba has dedicated years to a fruitless hunt for the legendary Leafmen, peering at the world by way of the assorted surveillance cameras and monitors he has installed around the area, revealing to him only leaves and hummingbirds (we discover that the Leafmen are well aware of this "stomper" on their trail, and have been purposely misdirecting him this whole time). There transpires to have been a hidden agenda to this seemingly psychotic preoccupation - Bomba later admits to MK that he became increasingly subsumed in his study of the Leafmen because he'd hoped that if he proved their existence it would bring her mother back to him (an end goal that was ultimately more delusional than his belief in the Leafmen). This obsession with a past that's already slipped him by has merely impeded his ability to take advantage of what is there for him in the present, allowing his relationship with his daughter to grow distant and stagnant in a way that's contrary to his desire to salvage the family he's thoroughly alienated. At one point, MK calls him out for being so fixated on taking advantage of every given opportunity to scout out the Leafmen that he misses an opportunity to be there for her as a father.

A prevalent theme of loss runs all throughout Epic, with most of the main characters grappling with some form of personal bereavement (this theme becomes all the more palpable with the knowledge that MK, or Mary Katherine, was named after Joyce's own daughter, who sadly passed away in 2010). Nod (Josh Hutcherson), the brash young leafman with eyes for MK, was taken under the wing of Ronin after the death of his biological father. Ronin suffers his own loss when Queen Tara, his long-running love interest, is fatally wounded protecting the pod (like MK, however, he chooses to keep his emotions bottled). Even the evil Boggans are not immune to feelings of grief. Adding a little dimension to Mandrake's villainy is that he is himself in mourning for his son and general Dagda (Blake Anderson), who is killed in an early confrontation with the Leafmen. Part of his motivation for seizing control of the pod is that he sees it as a way of regaining the heir that was taken from him. A very paternal figure, his quest becomes a darker echo of Bomba's objective of obtaining proof of the Leafmen in order to regain his lost life; both are scenarios in which destruction will invariably follow.

What MK and Bomba have in common is that both are alone in the world. Bomba has spent the last decade or so being shunned professionally and familially for devoting all of his time and energy to his crackpot research project, while MK has just lost her caregiver and emotional bedrock and been consigned to a man who is effectively a stranger to her. They spend the narrative in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a beautiful but remote wilderness that emphasises their sense of separation from anything beyond themselves, not least one another. There is, notably, only one other human character seen in the entire 102 minute runtime, that being the taxi driver (Judah Friedlander) who drops MK off at her new abode and promptly high tails it out of there. Bomba is absorbed in the Leafmen's domain in a figurative sense, lost in his aspirations of finding vindication and recovery within. MK's literal absorption, meanwhile, becomes a metaphor for her having to navigate through a big and overwhelming world in which she is seemingly all on her own, unable to make herself heard and at constant risk of being devoured whole. She finds solidarity in the Leafmen, who introduce her to their philosophy of "Many leaves, one tree", by which all things are connected and each individual becomes valuable in relation to a bigger picture. This is challenged by Mandrake, who proposes that the tree is ultimately indifferent to the fate of the individual leaf, pointing out that, "In the end, every leaf falls and dies alone". Mandrake gives a menacing voice to MK's feelings of parental abandonment, while the Leafmen, whose final display of unity is enough to decisively thwart the king of decay, become proxies for familial devotion, reaffirming the same sense of enduring parental security as they did in Joyce's book. The symbolism of nature as a force that nurtures and sustains us all is also discernible.

The rosebush and the Metal Man do not feature in the film, but there is a character who serves as a kind of equivalent to both, in the form of Ozzy, the three-legged, one-eyed pug who was the Bomba family's pet during their time of unity, and was left with the professor when MK and her mother moved out. Quite how long MK has spent apart from her father is not established, but it's clearly longer than the average pug's lifespan - on arriving at her father's home, MK is vocally surprised to be greeted by Ozzy and to discover that her childhood pet is still alive. The dog is a connection to a more innocent past, and an indication that her bond with her father is not as dead in the water as she assumes; Ozzy's battered physique reflects the damage inflicted on their relationship by their time apart, but his amazing vitality offers reassurance that their underlying love has ultimately endured. A photograph showing the young MK with her parents and Ozzy as a puppy features a couple of times in the story, echoing the photograph illustration seen at the end of Joyce's book. Ozzy's movements and actions often anticipate Bomba's, indicating that he functions as an extension of her father; he becomes an inadvertent threat to the shrunken MK right before Bomba unwittingly creates trouble for her, and he later saves MK from a Boggan, prefacing Bomba's coming to her aid at a crucial moment in the climax.

By the end of the film, MK and Bomba have succeeded in overcoming the hurdles that have prevented them from efficiently communicating. MK finds a way to let her father in on her location, by repositioning a thumb tack on his map of the forest, while Bomba is able to use the technology he's honed during his pursuit of the Leafmen to make MK intelligible to his ears. By the time MK has been restored to her proper size, she and her father are now firmly on the same page. The wilderness that once reflected their mutual isolation becomes a source of open affinity, with MK able to freely resume her dialogue with Nod via the surveillance monitors, mirroring the open communication she now enjoys with her father. Whether Bomba can get the wider scientific community on board with his latest findings now that he has his daughter to back him up is irrelevant - what matters is that the study of the Leafmen, a once contentious topic that kept them at odds, is now a means for them to grow and learn together. We leave with them racing out enthusiastically into the woods, eager to enhance their bond with their diminutive friends.

One criticism I do have of how Epic handles the theme of loss, compared to its source material, is that the deceased mother is never fleshed out in a way that causes her to feel like anything other than a plot device. We don't learn anything about her other than the most obvious details needed to kick the conflict into gear - ie: that she was close to MK and disapproved of her husband's research. The parents in The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs were never seen in the flesh, but had a distinct presence via the components of the garden and the memories the woman had created therein; you felt as though you knew so much about their relationship and they ways in which they were still being felt just by glancing at that poignant illustration of the Metal Man and the rose in her hand. Epic would have benefited from giving us at least a little more flavour of who MK's mother was, perhaps through an item of her own that she'd left behind at the house. But as a story about mending broken bridges and finding your way back into a kinship thought long-lost, it really is quite lovely. That we may perceive in it an expression of Joyce's own desire to reconnect with the real Mary Katherine makes it all the more poignant, and genuine.

In addition, I really do love that entire sequence with the predatory mouse. It so neatly exploits the fact that, when you view a mouse or rat's head from the underside, it does kind of resemble a shark.