Lisa's Rival (aka And Believe Me, This Is Not A Dream!)

"Lisa's Rival" (1F17) is a strange episode. I don't think it receives due credit for just how strange it really is - presumably because it boasts what is, ostensibly at least, one of the more down-to-earth A-stories of Season 6. A new pupil joins Lisa's class and transpires to have an uncanny amount in common with the precocious Simpsons middle child - she also plays the saxophone and possesses an intellect well beyond her years. On the surface, it seems as though Lisa might finally have found a kindred spirit, but things are ever more complicated than that. The new girl, Allison Taylor (guest voice of Winona Ryder, of Mermaids fame), is talented and advanced in ways that seem to persistently undermine Lisa's own distinctions, not least in that she's better at netting adult recognition for her abilities - one of the greatest daggers to Lisa's heart comes in learning that Allison is actually a year younger than her, and was moved up from the 1st Grade because she found it unchallenging. The worst thing about it all, though? Allison is a lovely person, and 100% sincere about wanting to be friends with Lisa. Which makes it so much harder for Lisa to come to terms with the fact that she basically hates Allison's guts. The episode is very much a character study, in exploring how Lisa copes with emotions that, intellectually, she figures she should be above, and the story is accordingly modest in scope, climaxing with a sequence set around an entirely arbitrary school diorama contest, in which the real stakes have more to do with whether or not Lisa's conscience will prevail over her petty desire to see Allison fail just this once. There's no shortage of cartoonish wackiness, but it exists largely on the sidelines, with a subplot about Homer attempting to cut it as a door-to-door sugar salesman and a running gag where Milhouse is hunted by the FBI. In a season that also sees Homer becoming the prophesied leader of a masonic society, Springfield nearly being crushed by a comet, and a trip to an amusement park where the animatronics attempt to eviscerate the guests, the world in "Lisa's Rival" feels remarkably sedate.

Make no mistake, though, "Lisa's Rival" goes to stranger territory than all those episodes, but it's strange in subtler, more understated ways that hinge upon there being a disturbance in the very fabric of the show's reality. On surface, life carries on seemingly much as normal, yet clearly the world as we know is being shaken to its very foundations. I'd put it within the same category of Simpsons adventure as the previous season's "The Last Temptation of Homer", in that its plot revolves around the Simpsons universe appearing to have rewritten the very rules by which it operates. Allison feels as though she were cut from the same cloth as Mindy Simmons, with both gals proving impossibly deadly adversaries for their episode's respective protagonists - Mindy in repeatedly undermining the fundamentality of Homer's union with Marge, and Allison in demonstrating to Lisa that her allotted role as overachieving outlier isn't as set in stone as she's had the privilege of thinking for the past five seasons. In both cases, Homer and Lisa are forced into a position in which everything they've taken for granted about themselves and the world suddenly seems to hang queasily in the balance. And when things are decidedly off in Camp Simpson, the universe as a whole seems significantly less balanced. 

The cataclysmic nature of the crisis is slyly hinted in the episode's beginning, which kicks off with a sequence based around Lisa disturbing each of her family (Maggie included) in succession with her saxophone-blowing, until finally she decides to take her practising outside to the backyard; this culminates with a throwaway gag where her playing is overheard by Ned Flanders and his sons, who mistake it for Gabriel's trumpet and joyously exclaim that Judgement Day is upon them. The Flanders clan might well be onto something there, because the following day does indeed transform into one of reckoning for Lisa - in her case, she appears to have woken up with the wrath of the universe raining down on her head for no other reason than the cosmos is bored and desires a new plaything. This much is reflected in Miss Hoover's weary reaction to the prospect of yet another day with Lisa being the only student in her classroom to display any degree of appetite for learning; far from something to be cherished or encouraged, Lisa's singularity in that regard is simply a reinforcement of that never-ending cycle of monotony. Allison's interjection is welcomed by Hoover because it signals a break from this inertia. At this point, we have no reason to believe that Allison is in any way superior to Lisa - as far as we know, she would have correctly answered Hoover's question on Columbus, had the universe followed its conventional course. The real disturbance comes in Hoover's open display of favouritism toward Allison, with Lisa being bothered by the fact that she has never made Hoover "Yowee". The universe as a whole seems to vastly prefer Allison, in spite of the fact that she isn't doing things massively different to Lisa, and with Hoover's reaction it's tempting to see the entire arrangement as a gigantic conspiracy against Lisa, something that's frankly no harder to swallow than the likelihood of a girl with such an uncanny amount of common ground entering her life in the first place. However you slice it, Lisa has become the victim of a particularly cruel cosmic joke.

All of which doesn't preclude it from also being a really good school-yard drama, where Lisa gets to deal with some of the messiest of human impulses and, finally, to assess what's actually important to her. Viewing the situation through entirely rational lens, her reaction to Allison might seem somewhat petty - after all, Allison being a little better than her as an academic and a saxophonist doesn't suddenly negate the fact that she's still incredibly advanced for her age (and for a Springfieldian, period). And yet, who among us is going to claim that if we were in Lisa's shoes, we wouldn't have grappled with the exact same dilemma? Lisa's life might be one of undervalued solitude, but at least she has her stellar grades and musical flair to reassure her that, no matter how miserable things might get, she is, in fact, doing well. Yeardley Smith, the voice of Lisa, admits in the episode's DVD commentary that she was quite upset upon reading the synopsis, because she knew this was a situation that Lisa would really struggle with: "It was bad enough that her father doesn't understand her and that she doesn't have any friends, but now suddenly she has this kid who's younger than her and better at everything. And I thought, this is going to crush her soul...I was a bit worried about her."

First, though, let's tackle that whole subplot about Homer and the sugar pile...I will admit upfront that I have somewhat mixed feelings about it. It absolutely didn't surprise me to learn that this episode was written by Mike Scully because, despite the deceptively placid nature of the Lisa A-story, the Homer subplot is a pretty telling indicator of the direction the show would eventually be taking during his tenure as showrunner. It's ridiculous and random as hell, features Homer at his most abrasive and in-your-face (at this point, anyway) and is, let's face it, kind of shallow and really kind of dumb. Having said that, there is something undeniably endearing about the simplicity of it all - Homer pilfers a whole load of spilled sugar from a roadside accident, and really is so stoked to have a mountain of ill-gotten Texas tea-sweetener stashed away in his backyard that he loses his marbles with delirium. There's a brief allusion that, just for a moment, threatens to transform the sugar into some kind of cocaine metaphor (Homer quotes Tony Montana from Scarface), but the episode doesn't hammer too far on this point, content simply to explore whatever rich possibilities arise from Homer getting excited over a big pile of sugar. This produces a handful of classic moments - like everyone else, I can't help but laugh at Homer's misconception that the plant's, "Don't come in on Monday", means he's getting a four day weekend. But at the same time, Homer is so giddy and obsessive in his sugar craze that it borders on being intermittently frightening. His inexplicable "What's to be done with this Homer Simpson?" spiel is another fan favourite moment, although for me it feels uncomfortably reminiscent of that sequence from "Secrets of a Successful Marriage" (boo, hiss) of Season 5, when Marge requests that Homer stop sharing personal secrets about her, and he responds by bleating out an incoherent deluge of non-sequiturs that are all taken from lines from random movies. It bothers me less here, as Homer isn't being quite so jaw-droppingly insensitive to Marge specifically; nevertheless, it's between these two sequences that I think you can pinpoint Homer's descent from relatable underdog to out-and-out Looney Tune. This Homer, larger than life and prone to spewing random movie quotes, could be hilarious and he could be infuriating, depending on what situation he was in, but in neither case does he reason or respond to anything like an actual human being. (Speaking of non-sequiturs, this may be the episode where dispensing them became Ralph Wiggum's defining characteristic. The kid always occupied Cloud Cuckoo Land, but it's here that he seems to derail from reality altogether. Was Mittens the catfood-scented cat ever referenced again? Or did the writers forget they gave the Wiggums a cat, much as they forgot they once gave Smithers a Yorkshire terrier?)

The other notable thing about the sugar subplot is that it really has sod-all to do with the A-story. It's not a strict requisite for a subplot have any kind of meaningful bearing upon the main narrative in order to be successful, but here there's zero intersection whatsoever; the two stories feel lightyears apart from one another. At most, they have a couple of features in common - Marge hovers helplessly on the sidelines of both narratives, unable to find the words that will convince Lisa to see her problem differently, or to talk Homer down from his sugar high, and Skinner also worms his way into both. The most interesting thing the alignment ends up doing is to highlight a somewhat contradictory aspect to Bart, who gets to be both Homer's (overridden) moral compass during his theft of the sugar pile, commending him for his downright decent offer of help to Hans Moleman and questioning the legality of taking of the sugar, and later the force beckoning Lisa into what is, in Bart's own words, "the nether regions of the soul".  Bart revels in mayhem, and he whole-heartedly seizes the opportunity to bring out Lisa's own capacity for devilry, but he is just as capable of drawing the line wherever he senses the responsibility ought to fall to him. The all-important factor, one supposes, is in how much gratification there is to be had in subverting the established order - with Homer, Bart is pretty much forced into being the adult of the situation, whereas with Lisa he gets the satisfaction of seeing someone who figures they're too mature to be playing with fire discover just how intoxicating it can be. That, and Bart does seem to genuinely sympathise with Lisa's plight. Despite that he is clearly posited as a corruptive force for Lisa, in encouraging her to play dirty in her one-sided war against Allison, "Lisa's Rival" still contains a really good example of that ever-enduring Simpsons solidarity, with Bart explicitly wanting to help Lisa because he can't stand to see her so miserable (except in matters of a rubber spider being placed down her dress).

Bart might have Lisa's back, but he clearly represents a kind of danger to Lisa throughout the episode - which is to say, Lisa's shadow self, the slippery slope down which she risks descending if she allows her rivalry with Allison to get the better of her. Lisa is effectively caught between two poles, with Allison embodying the kind of moral and intellectual purity that she acknowledges should be commended, and Bart the darker impulses that complicate her ability to do so. At one point Lisa admits that, "I should be Allison's friend, not her competitor. I mean, she is a wonderful person", with which Bart agrees, but in a backhanded manner that cuts directly to Lisa's deepest anxieties: "Why compete with someone who's just going to kick your butt anyway?" Lisa does not disagree with this assessment, but she objects to Bart's phrasing. The fact that Allison is such a wonderful person is, of course, the most offensive thing about the girl; it a sentiment that Lisa later repeats to Allison's face when she is invited over to her house, but with an obvious resignation that barely disguises her deep frustrations. On the one hand, Allison's arrival is a golden opportunity for Lisa to experience the kind of friendship and understanding that she's often struggled to attain among her peers, a fact to which Lisa herself is by no means blind. Allison is, in many respects, her own mirror image (as per the DVD commentary, Allison was named after Scully's own daughters, Allison and Taylor, although we might also note the number of common letters in "Lisa" and "Allison"). But the mirror is distorted; it is as if two parallel universes are undertaking a freak convergence, offering Lisa a tantalising glimpse of the better version of herself she might have been if the stars were just a little more aligned in her favour. Part of what fuels Lisa's jealousy toward Allison is the realisation that she's having a much easier ride of it than her, at least where adults are concerned - she was moved up a grade, she makes Hoover "Yowee", and she has a father who is a professor and likes to play intellectual wordplay games with her. On that basis, she is living Lisa's dream life. Occasionally, though, we do see flashes of vulnerability on Allison's part - not least that, to her peers, she's just a nail sticking out inviting a good hammering down, as Lisa was before her. In being outshone by Allison, Lisa finds that she's also less visible to bullies, who take to harassing Allison in her place. Lisa's observation that, "It used to be my face in that mud", on seeing Allison get pushed to the ground by a couple of girls, is ambiguous - it's not altogether clear if she's bemoaning the fact that her erstwhile tormentors have moved on to another target, or if she's empathising with Allison's plight, in acknowledging that, yes sir, it does really suck being at the top. With that in mind, you can understand why Allison is so eager to make things work between herself and Lisa. It's not as though she has a whole lot of options for making friends elsewhere. This, actually, may be one of the most satisfying things about "Lisa's Rival" - that it takes the time to make Allison a fully human character too. Inevitably, we are limited in the amount of insight we get into Allison's mindset, since we're seeing the situation exclusively from Lisa's point of view, but we get inkling enough of what her own anxieties and weaknesses are, particularly at the end of the episode, when Allison makes a casual revelation that, with hindsight, casts her seemingly effortless overachieving in a slightly different light. And Ryder brings such warmth to the character vocally that, although we side with Lisa in understanding exactly what kind of threat she poses, it's extremely difficult to feel much in the way of hostility toward Allison personally.

With the exception of Marge (and Homer, although he does not involve himself in Lisa's story), most of the grown-up folk are in full-on jerk mode throughout "Lisa's Rival", grotesque caricatures of adult insensitivity and indifference toward childhood insecurity. They are required to be, so as to act as mouthpieces for this great cosmic giggle at Lisa's expense. This includes Allison father, Professor Taylor, who yields the most staggeringly condescending response when Lisa struggles to play his ridiculous celebrity anagram game (seriously, I've noodled around with the name Jeremy Irons and, as far as I can see, the only halfway viable answer is the one Lisa gave. How many celebrities, besides Alec Guinness, does it even work with anyway?*). But she has a far more gruelling time of it on school premises, where she not only has to contend with Hoover's partialities, but her band audition escalates into an all-out nightmare, culminating in a fake-out so arbitrarily, disarmingly and inexplicably quirky that it's hard to imagine the episode as a whole being quite the same without it. I speak, of course, of Lisa's false awakening after passing out during her saxophone duel with Allison (on top of everything else, Allison has the better lung capacity); Largo congratulates Lisa on having "made it", before clarifying that he was referring to her regaining consciousness, and that Allison won first chair. Lisa screams in horror, whereupon we fade out, to find her back down on the auditorium floor. "Oh, just a dream", she murmurs in relief...only for the exact same sequence to repeat itself, but with the added detail of Largo getting right up in her face and declaring, with disturbing intensity, "AND BELIEVE ME, THIS IS NOT A DREAM!" There's something about Largo's bulging eyes (complete with the disproportionately large pupils that were endemic to this era of the series), his Muppet-shaped nose and that very Aardman-esque mouth that makes the moment legitimately terrifying.

What's odd - and I am going strictly from memory here - is that I swear Sky 1 used to cut the false awakening part of the sequence, jumping directly to Lisa's "Just a dream" and running from there. I recall it came as something of a revelation to later see the sequence intact and to understand her remark in its proper context. Before then, it wasn't exactly clear to me what Lisa was dismissing as "just a dream" - the disastrous endings to her saxophone audition? Her rivalry with Allison, period? Strangely, though, I never felt that the joke lost anything for it. The punchline - the grotesque fervor with which Largo impresses the reality of the nightmare upon her - stands just as well on its own as a declaration of how violently and malevolently the cosmos is determined to rub its displacement of Lisa in her face. Largo's line may indeed be the episode's all-defining one. (Not that fantasy offers any real refuge for Lisa either, as she later discovers when she tries to imagine how life would be if she embraced her Born To Runner-up status and formed a musical act with Art Garfunkel, Jim Messina and John Oates. Why would they come to our concert just to boo us, indeed.)

Skinner is also on good - if absurdly malleable - form in "Lisa's Rival". His presence permeates every corner of the episode - as noted, he has a cameo in Homer's story, and in the opening sequence his voice is heard on the receiving end of Bart's attempted prank call ("As a matter of fact, my refrigerator wasn't running. You've spared me quite a bit of spoilage. Thank you, anonymous young man!"). At one point, Marge hilariously misunderstands Lisa's suggestion that she might be moved up a grade if her mother were "nicer" to Skinner ("Lisa! I am nice!" Yeah, I have a feeling that Skinner wouldn't go for it, anyway). He even appears at Largo's side during the band audition, and while he doesn't contribute anything to this sequence in narrative terms, I dig the subtle character details of him starting blankly and yawning, indicating just how bored out of his skull he is by the entire process. Where he really peaks, though, is in the climax, when he's tasked with judging the entries for the diorama contest, and gets to rabidly turn on Allison the instant she does something to indicate she might be anything less than perfect (although she is very blatantly being set up). Naturally, he is but a puppet getting his strings pulled by some higher power intent on making the situation as unendurable as possible for Lisa, but he gets a nice revealing moment where he lets slip his bitterness at how his own talents and ambitions have been left in the shade ("Elementary school is where I wound up and it's too late to do anything about that!").

With help from her brother, Lisa is given the opportunity to dispose of Allison and reassert her position as resident overachiever - Bart takes Allison's diorama on the Edgar Allan Poe story, "The Tell-Tale Heart", and replaces it with a box containing an actual cow heart, making Allison look like a bit of a sick prankster in the eyes of Skinner. As their stunt plays out, Lisa faces a paradox - she finds that she cannot destroy Allison without also destroying herself in the process. In that regard, the climax of the episode feels less evocative of "The Tell-Tale Heart" than of another Edgar Allan Poe story, "William Wilson". Here, a man is persistently plagued by his doppelganger, before eventually murdering him and receiving the grim warning that: "from now on you are also dead - dead to the World, dead to Heaven, dead to Hope! In me you lived - and, in my death - see by this face, which is your own, how wholly, how completely, you have killed - yourself!"  In engineering Allison's fall from grace, Lisa is called upon to debase her own character and to fundamentally alter who she is - her self-definition is founded on not only her pre-eminence within the classroom, but on her integrity and willingness to always do the right thing. Thus, to defeat Allison in this manner would result not in a restoration of the established order, but the birth of a new and corrupted one, in which Lisa has no chance of recovering all that she was. Malice is never pretty, but it's particularly unpalatable when levelled at someone as sweetly unsuspecting as Allison, who is the very bastion of those values that Lisa herself holds so dear.

Lisa is able to spare herself the fate of William Wilson - her own heart wins out against her eagerness to win, and she returns Allison's diorama. Unfortunately, it's now Allison's turn to discover just how fickle the Simpsons universe can be - no sooner has she been restored to Skinner's good graces, when he suddenly decides that she's lost her lustre. Skinner glances at her meticulously-crafted diorama and declares it, "a little sterile...no real insight." "Meh", agrees Hoover, all out of Yowees. With Allison's welcome having all but expired, the stage appears to be set for Lisa to reclaim her top spot, although Lisa herself is quite miserable at the prospect: "After the way I've behaved, I don't deserve to win." The universe agrees. Instead, it reveals the endgame to this particular round of Status Quo-prodding. Turns out, Allison was merely a pawn in an even more diabolical cosmic joke still - Skinner awards first prize to Ralph, who doesn't know what a diorama is and just showed up with a box of Star Wars action figures (still in their original packages, mind). And really, could there being a more telling sign that life in Springfield is up and running as usual? Perhaps the cruellest aspect of Allison's reign of terror is not in how she honed in so ruthlessly on Lisa's well-marked territory, but in how she taunted Lisa by demonstrating that intelligence and diligence could indeed lead to recognition and reward (if inevitably only to somebody else). Since when has it ever been within Springfield's ethos to value such things? Forced to take her proper place as Lisa's equal in unsung achievement, Allison admits that she's actually relieved to have been upstaged, for once in her life, since it's helped her to see that losing isn't the end of the world. This is an interesting revelation, since up until now, we've never really had any hint that that's what's been driving Allison. Marge's assurance that, "She's more scared of you than you are of her" had previously netted the sardonic response that, "You're thinking of bears, Mom." But maybe Marge was onto something after all. Maybe Allison has lived with the interminable pressure of knowing that one day, if not Lisa, then certainly somebody will come along and prove every bit her own match. That is the real curse of being at the top; to quote the classic Twilight Zone episode, "A Game of Pool", being the best of anything carries with it a special obligation to keep on proving it.

In the end, Lisa apologises to Allison for attempting to sabotage her entry, and Allison, with no hard feelings, asks if the two of them can still be friends. "Only if we're the best," says Lisa. It's a sweet conclusion, but sadly any seasoned viewer knows full well that it's not going to stick. Allison is voiced by an A-list celebrity, and the rules therefore dictate that she will not be staying on as a cast fixture. As with Mindy Simmons, you might occasionally catch her hovering around the background of select episodes, one of her most prominent appearances being in the Season 10 opener "Lard of The Dance", in which she, like everyone else, was wowed over by a new girl named Alex (guest voice of Lisa Kudrow - "Your name's Lisa? Shut up, I love that name!") who puts Lisa in the shade, all while Homer is running around chasing some phantom enterprise in dubiously harvested foodstuff and, jeez, I hope that the writers were at least aware of the irony.

And now for my hottest, spiciest take on anything in "Lisa's Rival". For my money, do you know what's better than the entire sugar pile subplot (Beemobile and all)? Better even than Milhouse's brush with the FBI? Marge reading Love In The Time of Scurvy (a play on Gabriel García Márquez's Love In The Time of Cholera) and her thwarted attempt at saucy fantasy with her imaginary pirate bo. It's a small but charming insight into Marge's quest for alleviation from her own life of thankless solitude (regulated discreetly into the backdrop of the episode, as is often the case with such insights), and I love how it receives a callback a little later on, when we catch Marge reclining with the same tome, only to be jarred back into her pirate-less living room by an anguished Lisa. The theme of corrupted dreaming, of reality ruthlessly hunting you down, no matter how far you attempt to retreat into fantasy, actually seems to be a running one for this episode. To wrap things up with a cheap allusion that takes advantage of our guest celebrity of the week, we might even say that Reality...Bites.

*Although I tried Art Garfunkel and got Feral Gunk Rat. I'm quite pleased with that.

High Time You Grew Up (aka Beware The Friendly Stranger)

There's a connection between an obscure, long out-of-print children's poetry anthology and early 90s pop music that you likely don't appreciate. I myself was entirely oblivious to it until just a week or so ago, when I happened to dig my old copy out of storage. The book in question is High Time You Grew Up, which was printed by Mary Glasgow Publications in 1989, and compiled by poet Fred Sedgwick as part of the This Way That Way series, a collection comprised of ten anthologies, five of which were aimed at the infant demographic (ages 4-7), and five at juniors (8-11). The series seemed to be quite popular when I was child - at the very least, copies were prolific enough throughout my own school - so shame that they've effectively fallen off the face of the planet (before being reunited with my own copy, I'd attempted to source another from Abebooks, and my search came up woefully short). The connection occurs on page 3, with Sedgwick's presentation of "Fragment" by Gerda Mayer. If the accompanying illustration, courtesy of Felicity Roma Bowers, strikes you as oddly familiar, it's because it's the same image (more or less) that appears on the cover for the Genesis album We Can't Dance - and, yes, it was created for this book first, before finding its way into the hands of Collins and crew. On the Genesis album, the background colours have been modified for a more dominant yellow effect, and the child's silhouette has been tweaked - a girl in the original, on We Can't Dance they have been given a more masculine appearance, and a hat similar to that of the adult figure, emphasising that the two are to be seen as generational counterparts, a move that seems particularly evocative of the opening track, "No Son of Mine" (indeed, the "No Son of Mine" single offers another variation on the image, this time showing the child alone and abandoned). That is this anthology's claim to pop cultural fame, and for that reason alone it should not be permitted to sink into obscurity.

 

Original image

We Can't Dance cover

 

I know none of the details regarding how Bowers' art was brought to the band's attention, but it strikes me as wholly appropriate that an illustration from this particular anthology should have touched a nerve with somebody within the Genesis ranks, in seeking a graphic correlative to a song about the regretful frictions that dominate a parent-child relationship. More compelling still is how the cover illustration to "No Son of Mine" seems to function as an extension of the anthology as a whole, its relation thematically as much as aesthetically - the image of a child, left to contemplate the world by their lonesome, perhaps prematurely, but on some level almost certainly permanently, feels like the perfect all-purpose visual tag-line to any number of poems from this collection.

The title of Sedgwick's anthology was taken from the final poem, "High Time You Grew Up" by David Kitchen, and clues us in that the overarching theme of the collection has to do with the anxieties and inevitabilities of coming of age - in particular the clashes of will between parent and child as the latter is tasked with having to navigate from childhood and to adulthood, and confronting the realisation that they cannot stay in their place of perceived safety forever. Not every poem follows this theme overtly - "Home Sweet Home" by John Gohorry, for example, is a charming piece of nonsense verse that appears to emphasise the necessity of remaining young at heart. Ditto "The Walk" by Anonymous, which mimics the structure of a children's party game in which a story is recited continuously in succession, with a new detail added with each participant. Some of the poems examine this sense of bygone innocence from a perspective in which time and space are the antagonists - for example, in "Back Home" by Amryl Johnson, the poet reflects on her nostalgia for her childhood in Trinidad, and the feeling of cultural displacement that continues to reverberate through her present life in London, with the conclusion that, "Back home is just a sad-sweet memory". Some have the echoes of the historical traumas that stand between the past and the present; in "Fragment", we see Mayer, whose Jewish family were forced to flee her native Karlsbad in 1938 to escape the incoming Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, pay tribute to the "frail ghosts...faint tune" that is the memory of herself and her father playfully holding up a mouthorgan to the Bohemian winds. Elsewhere, multiple poems deal specifically with the failure of parents and children to see eye-to-eye, with consequences ranging from the farcical to the downright gruesome. Some of these conflicts are fully benign - "Eating Habits", the only poem in the anthology to be contributed by Sedgwick himself, offers a humorous bit of role reversal in which a child relates their exasperation at being unable to convince their mother to swap her granary loaves for unhealthy white bread ("I've really tried to show that what's, well, good, isn't always good for you"). In "Old Grandpa - A Poem To Finish" by John Cotton, we hear the opening details of an anecdote about a familial senior, a grandparent this time, whose faded eyesight and adrenaline-chasing propensities will spell trouble for anyone foolhardy enough to hop aboard the pillion of his trusty Norton. Four of the poems find children having to cope with situations where they are left without parental oversight, only one of which, "Half Asleep" by Wes Magee, is especially non-threatening in nature. In the others, the children end up contending with demons both internal ("The Purse" by David Kitchen) and external ("Eddy Scott Goes Out To Play" by David Orme), and maybe something in between (the title poem). It's this particular threesome of poems that most got under my skin whilst reading the anthology as a child. Although the We Can't Dance connection immediately made the publication that much more fascinating to me, you might have picked up on the fact that I was looking to reacquaint myself with it before I knew that it was there, and you really have these three poems to thank for that. They made their mark on me because they each, in their own individual ways, managed to chip away at a little piece of my own perceived childhood safety. On a thematic level, they also segue beautifully into one another, and would have made a brilliant closing trilogy to the collection if not for the rather awkward placement of "Eating Habits" in between "The Purse" and "Eddy Scott".

The first of the three, "The Purse", is told from the perspective of a young kleptomaniac who compulsively steals from his mother's purse whenever he's left alone inside the house. His mother is seemingly unaware of her son's thieving compulsions and regularly buys him things; pleads the protagonist: "Each kindness makes it worse/Because I know, when she's next door/My hands will find her purse." The poem plays like a darker, more introspective version of Allan Ahlberg's "I Did A Bad Thing Once" (from the collection Please Mrs Butler), in which the confessor is unable to fathom his compulsive actions, just that he will, invariably, surrender to them. His observation that "my hands will find her purse" indicates that he sees his body as operating independently of his will. In Sedgwick's anthology, the impact of the poem is enhanced by illustrations by Kim Palmer; they are presented in black and white, the only illustrations in the anthology to adopt this approach, the effect of which is to give the images a cold, washed-out feeling that is reflective both of the protagonist's blanched, fearful state and the self-loathing vantage point from which they can only contemplate the whole sorry business. Despite his admission that he has never been caught and made to face any consequences for his actions, he laments that, "I'm sure someone's watching me", alluding to his own guilt and better judgement; this much is captured in one illustration in which we get a voyeuristic glimpse of the protagonist edging toward the purse from a reserved enough distance on our part. Above the protagonist is a framed picture, too far away to make out; on the next page, we see that it is a picture of a woman and child, which we assume to be the mother and protagonist at a younger age. In the present, his back is turned to the image as he steals from her purse. There is a sense of time coming between them and threatening to blemish their relationship - from the sounds of it, his mother is unwilling to let go of that ideal vision of her son, while the boy himself knows it to be no longer there. The world he now inhabits is a more precarious and confusing one, in which is mother remains, in a distinctly unhappy way, a source of comfort and stability; latching onto her purpose is how he maintains his sense of normalcy and stability.

His situation is positively rosy compared to that of "Eddy Scott Goes Out To Play", which may be the darkest, single most fucked up poem I think I've ever encountered in an anthology marketed explicitly toward children. I at least suspect that it was intended for a slightly older age range than the one advertised on the cover. Orme's poem tells the woeful tale of a child whose daily routine involves being turned outside to feed and entertain himself, equipped with a pound ostensibly for his dinner. On this fateful occasion, Eddy blows his coin on a fruit machine and, realising that he has no means with which to feed himself, starts scavenging the arcade desperately for dropped change. He is approached by a stranger who has taken notice of his plight, but it quickly becomes apparent that their concern veils a far more sinister agenda. Sadly, although Eddy has been expressly advised not to "talk to funny men", he sees nothing at all threatening about this scenario (what he really could have done with is a talking cat to keep him grounded), and accepts the stranger's offer to take him out for a slap up meal. The poem ends with Eddy's mother returning home from work to discover that Eddy hasn't made it back. Orme punctuates the narrative with italicised verses in which we are informed repeatedly that: "Eddy's mum's at work all day/Eddy's dad has gone away/Hot or cold, wet or fine/Eddy Scott's sent out to play" - the repetition reinforces the drudgery of Eddy's routine, but also enables Orme to conclude on a particularly ominous note, in offering a final variation of "Eddy was sent out to play". Although Eddy's fate remains unknown by the end of the poem, the shift to past tense isn't exactly a reassuring sign.

The corresponding illustrations are supplied by Barry Rowe, who's chosen to represent the predator as a shadowy figure in a trench coat and fedora who looks as though he strolled right out of a Humphrey Bogart noir. The fact that you can't discern the features on his face, compared to Eddy and his mother, marks him out as a dubious presence, a character doing their utmost not to draw attention to themselves (except to Eddy) and to disappear into the night once they've fulfilled their dubious deed. Pretty effective in its way, but I can't help but wonder how much starker the poem would read with no visual aids, and only Orme's words, where the stranger is identified merely as "someone" and no clear description of them is given (in fact, if we go by the text alone then we can't even take it for granted that Eddy's abductor is male). There, we have no reason to believe that they appear as anything other than perfectly amiable, as they presumably do to Eddy, and they keep a chilling anonymity about them, so that we, as much as Eddy's mother, have no idea with whom exactly Eddy has absconded.

"Eddy Scott Goes Out To Play" disturbed me as a child and it disturbs me now, although inevitably my perspective on the situation has shifted somewhat as I've gotten older. As a child, I think you get the satisfaction of feeling superior to Eddy, as you can spot well ahead of him what kind of danger he's in. We were, after all, taught from an early age that a stranger who offers you sweets and tries to get you to go with them inside their car is the reddest of red flags. I think I was also somewhat inclined to see it as a moral fable in which Eddy suffers the consequences, not simply for being gullible enough to get into a stranger's vehicle, but for feeding his lunch money to that dumb fruit machine in the first place. Revisiting the poem as an adult, however, I don't get the impression that Orme intended it as a condemnation of Eddy, who is, lest we forget, the victim of this scenario. The message is clearly that Eddy gets into his horrific situation because nobody is watching his back, except for the wrong sort of person. Arguably, the poem betrays a slight prejudice toward single parent families, with Eddy's mother posited as unable to manage the situation on her own (there is also deliberate ambiguity as to what is meant by his father having "gone away" - has he abandoned the family, is he in prison or is he dead? Seems a bit optimistic to suppose that he might be off on a business trip); nevertheless, there is a powerful contrast to be drawn between the absence/indifference of Eddy's parents and the observant attentions of the predatory stranger. We suppose that Eddy gravitates toward the latter not simply for the promise of a free meal, but because he's grateful to finally encounter somebody with so much interest in him. What's also striking about the poem is Eddy's total lack of a voice throughout - all of the dialogue heard comes from either his mother or the stranger, bringing a bitter irony to the ending observation that, when Eddy's mother returns home and calls for her son, "There'll be no answer: just her voice/Echoing along the wall". As for that dumb fruit machine, I note that Orme describes it as "hypnotising", making me feel that the stranger isn't the only aspect of this scenario that's ruthlessly preying on Eddy. The opening verse recalls the struggle described by the protagonist of "The Purse", who was willed to the titular object by a compulsion professedly beyond his control. Here, Eddy is lured to the fruit machine because the streets outside are dark and rainy, whereas the arcade appears bright and inviting; in that regard, the fruit machine acts as a precursor to the stranger themselves - attractive offers and a bright, friendly exterior that we expect to disappear not far down the line. The significance of the fruit machine is also echoed in that baleful final line, "Eddy was sent out to play", the suggestion being that Eddy has been prompted to gamble, both recreationally at the arcade, and in a broader, much more urgent sense, in going out every day and having to make life-or-death judgements in a world he's painfully ill-equipped to comprehend.

Finally, we have the anthology's titular poem, "High Time You Grew Up" by Kitchen once again, which I'm convinced was purposely positioned so as to round things off with a little comic levity following the nightmare scenario described in "Eddy Scott". Here, we have another situation in which our protagonist is faring badly with being left alone, except that this time they are safe within their own home. Their parents are right across the hallway, and whatever peril they might sense they are up against presumably exists exclusively within their head. Sleepless and alone in a darkened bedroom, they have a great nocturnal void to fill with whatever ludicrous horrors their imagination is able to concoct, intermittently earning the censure of their parents whenever the impulse to summon them becomes too strong. Like "The Purse", the poem is told in the first-person, giving us a direct line into the protagonist's erratic thought processes, which vacillate between reason and sudden irrational terror - they deduce that the brushing outside their window can't be a burglar, "'cause we've got nothing worth burgling", before going off on some inexplicable spiel about "the man with black eyes and black fingernails" who crawls into your bedroom at night in order to peel back your skin. There is a twist to this particular tale, and we'll get to that soon enough, but the really delicious irony of the poem, for me, lies in how Kitchen has chosen to represent the parents - not as reassuring guardians against the unknowns lurking in the dark, but as behemoths in their own right, periodically roused from their sleep to bring their wrath down upon the protagonist. All of their dialogue is presented in capitals, which helps distinguish their voices from that of the protagonist, but it also gives them a thunderous, intimidating quality that is deliberately devoid of emotional warmth. They are the voice of reason to the core, plain-spoken intrusions on the protagonist's propensity for invention and for wild flights of fancy. This interchange is teased out further by Nicky Marsh's illustrations, which are agreeably colourful but give a certain playful grotesqueness to the characters, familiar but not quite the same beasts in the dead of night as we might expect to see in the day (certainly, the sight of the scowling mother, with her hair in curlers and her burly shadow, did little to help my own sleep as a child). Meanwhile, the parents' movements to and from the bedroom are tracked with a precise, rhythmic onomatopoeia ("A thump/A heavy thud, thud/A light on, four more steps"), the protagonist's attunement to which suggesting that they are well-accustomed to this routine from similar disputes on previous nights.

The character dynamics, and the title, take on a new perspective once we get to the punchline of the poem, when the father permits the protagonist to keep their bedroom light on, and asks them, with evident sarcasm, how old they are, to which they respond, "Thirty four, next birthday, Dad." Oh god, how funny it is now to contemplate that there was once a time in my life when 34 seemed ridiculously old, when reading that line and attempting to calculate how much life's experience that amounted to was utterly beyond my comprehension. Reading this book as an adult, I can't help but wonder if Sedgwick's decision to make this the title poem, and to effectively make that line the punchline to the entire anthology, was intended as his joke at the expense of any adult who might be reading, either back in 1989 or years down the line. Shouldn't you, he teases playfully, be doing something more grown-up than reading an anthology of children's poetry? This implicit jibe is complemented by the winking acknowledgement that there is, of course, tremendous value to be had in immersion into a little nostalgic childhood pleasure - the very nature of the anthology, in emphasising the relentless march of time and the inevitability of change, bears out just how satisfying it can be to puncture through all that and by remaining in touch with who you were back then. Obviously, you can't go home again. You can revisit the same old haunts, but never quite from the same angle. Can you work with what you see now?

In The Aftermath: Angels Never Sleep (aka On A Planet With No Fish)

In 1985, Mamoru Oshii, the future director of seminal anime Ghost In The Shell, released a 71-minute animated project known as Tenshi no Tamago, or Angel's Egg, an unrelentingly sombre and impenetrable feature with minimal dialogue and an abundance of achingly lyrical imagery. Despite amassing numerous admirers in the decades that followed, it did little to impress Japanese audiences at the time, and when, three years later, it caught the attentions of New World Pictures, the former production/distribution company of indie titan Roger Corman, it was deemed that Western audiences would be no more receptive. Instead, the Western release, retitled In The Aftermath, was completely overhauled and re-edited to incorporate a significant amount of new live action footage, under the direction of Carl Colpaert, a 25-year-old Belgian who'd cut his teeth working as an editor on prior New World productions. Both films were unmistakably the products of then-surging home video era - Angel's Egg was an Original Video Animation, or OVA, an anime title released directly to videocassette, the demand for which became significant in the 1980s, boosted by Japan's economic bubble and the proliferation of the videocassette recorder. Colpaert's film also went straight to video, at a time when video rental stores in the West were big business, and required more product than the major Hollywood studios could provide, making it golden era for low budget indie productions to step up and seek appreciative audiences away from theatrical venues.

In The Aftermath definitely belongs to another era of international film distribution - an era where, in lieu of providing a faithful translation and endeavouring to keep the original vision as intact as possible (not that we can automatically count on this to be the case in the current age), it was acceptable practice for producers to cut and paste what they needed from foreign imports, mixing in original footage and creating what was effectively a whole new product, under the assumption that Western audiences, whether rightly or wrongly, would respond less favourably to the original. What was exercised with In The Aftermath was not radically different to what Corman himself had achieved in assembling his 1962 release Battle Beyond The Sun from the plundered skeleton of Soviet sci-fi Nebo Zovyot (1959), complete with newly filmed sequences (directed by a budding Francis Ford Coppola) and, naturally, carefully vetted to extract the anti-Western overtones of the original. This in itself was nothing particularly radical, considering that reptilian icon Godzilla got his start on American soil through Godzilla, King of Monsters! (1956) a heavily edited and localised version of the Japanese Gojira (1954), with brand new footage interwoven starring Raymond Burr. But In The Aftermath carries particular interest for what it reveals of the West's blossoming awareness and simultaneous wariness of Japanese animation. In some respects, it is curious to think that In The Aftermath came out in the same year as Katushiro Otomo's ground-breaking film Akira, which played a significant role in whetting the appetite for Japanese animation in the Western world.

By then, New World Pictures weren't exactly newbies in handling anime; in 1985, they had released an English language dub of Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä: The Valley of The Wind, extensively edited and repackaged for Western viewership under the title of Warriors of The Wind. Miyazaki was famously disapproving, and later took special measures to prevent Princess Mononoke from befalling a similar fate at the hands of the Weinsteins. Nowadays, anime has such a strong following in the West, and Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli in particular are so well-known and respected among general audiences that New World's treatment of Nausicaä is widely regarded as one of the great sins against Japanese animation. A new dub created by Disney in 2003, more faithful to Miyazaki's script, has since supplanted it as the go-to English language version; Warriors of The Wind lives on, chiefly, as a curiosity/cautionary example. Doubtless there are numerous fans of Oshii who view New World's appropriation of Angel's Egg in the same unforgiving light; I am not about to suggest that they are wrong to do so, but as an admirer of Oshii's film with a weakness for curios of all stripes, I can personally attest that there is room in my heart for both productions. I was delighted when, in 2019, Arrow Video released In The Aftermath on special edition Blu-Ray, and the film later became something resembling comfort viewing for me during the lockdown era of 2020, when some of its images of a post-apocalyptic Earth, in particular, the characters' wariness to set foot outside, seemed suddenly very relatable. Ideally, I would have preferred that the film be released as a double feature with Oshii's original, but that was always a long-shot. Despite the increased niche popularity of anime in the West, and the high profile of Ghost In The Shell in particular, Angel's Egg remains something of an obscurity, with In The Aftermath still being the closest the film has to an official English language presentation.

Angel's Egg takes place in what is presumed to be a post-apocalyptic wasteland - the remains of a deserted city, surrounded by water and cloaked in seemingly perpetual night - where a mysterious young traveller (voice of Jinpachi Nezu) arrives and crosses paths with a small girl (Mako Hyoudou) going about her established survival routine with nary another living being in sight. Is she all alone out there? Not exactly; it seems that, intermittently, an army of men clutching harpoons will spring from inertia and take chase through the ruins in a futile effort to bring down the enormous fish that drift across the skies (the fish are represented only as silhouettes, raising questions about their corporeality), but the girl wisely maintains her distance. Her priority is with protecting the large white egg she has acquired under unknown circumstances, and from which she anticipates new life (possibly the reincarnation of the skeletal angel remains she's uncovered amid the debris) will eventually emerge. In a world steeped in decay and desolation, the egg is an obvious symbol of fertility and prospective regeneration, reinforced by the girl's habit of cradling it inside her garment, giving her the conspicuous appearance of possessing an impregnated belly.

The closest we get to illumination on the fate that has befallen this world is when the young traveller recounts the story of Noah's ark, but offers a bleak alternate ending in which the dove sent out to search for dry land never returns, leaving the occupants of the ark stranded in limbo with nothing to do but to physically and mentally stagnate, forgetting whatever world might have existed prior to the apocalypse. His tale is echoed in the film's final image, which reveals the land on which the characters dwell to resemble the underside of an enormous boat suspended amid a harrowing black void. Are these people, whether literally or metaphorically, the progeny of Noah, survivors of some terrible divine judgement intended to destroy the entirety of creation, and whose continued existence may be rooted more in some bizarre fluke than in any immunity specially granted to them? The film's preoccupation with Biblical imagery extends to the New Testament - the young man carries a cross-shaped staff across his back, cluing us in that he is to be interpreted as a Christ-like figure, although whether we are to view him as a bringer of salvation is as ambiguous as everything else. A common interpretation of the film is that it functions as an allegory for the director's own personal abandonment of faith (Oshii himself being an ex-Christian), hence its rather ambivalent attitude to its Christ stand-in. He establishes himself as a danger to the girl's egg early on, suggesting that she break it open if she really wants to know what's inside, a threat he later carries out himself by taking the egg and smashing it with his cross-shaped staff. Why he destroys the egg is unknown - is he looking to demonstrate to the futility of the girl's assumption that it contains new life, or is he determined to shut down any prospect of regeneration? The implication of his take on the Noah's ark story is that the characters live in a universe that has been abandoned by its creator, although perhaps in the figure of the young man we are witnessing that creator's belated return, albeit not to restore the world to its former glory, but to finish what was started once and for all. If so, then are we to perceive their destructiveness as an act of callousness, or of mercy? Likewise, there are those who see the film as a meditation less on the loss of faith than on the loss of innocence in a much broader sense, with the staff being a phallic symbol, and the destruction of the egg signifying some form of sexual violation.

Very little of this ambivalence makes its way into In The Aftermath, which finds a new purpose for the animated characters. The girl and the cross-bearing traveller went unnamed in the original film, but here they are known as Angel (voiced by Katie Leigh) and Jonathon (Ian Ruskin), respectively, and are explicitly identified as a) siblings, and b) angels. The egg continues to play a prominent role in the plot, but here it is ascribed a very specific meaning - Angel is undergoing an angelic initiation ritual, under the mentorship of Jonathon, which requires her to venture into the mortal plane and restore a waning creature to health, should she deem it worthy of receiving the regenerative powers stored inside the egg. In the latter stages of the film, Jonathon, much like his Japanese counterpart, gets hold of the egg and destroys it while Angel's guard is down, an ostensible act of betrayal that is revealed to be all a part of Angel's schooling. Jonathon takes the egg to punish Angel when she violates the rule overt in the film's title, and falls asleep (thus neglecting her angelic duties); when she awakens and acknowledges her error (admitting that her brother "should have spanked me with asteroids"), he hands her a replacement egg, a sequence of animation that viewers of Oshii's film will recognise as occurring before the egg's destruction in the original narrative. This allows Colpaert's film to reach a more optimistic conclusion than Oshii's, although those unfamiliar with Angel's Egg might still detect a note of dishonesty in this seemingly joyous development. Since Colpaert sees fit to incorporate the most distressing moment of Oshii's film - the girl screaming upon discovering that her beloved egg has been destroyed - the viewer has already witnessed an overwhelming despair that Jonathon's reassurances about being "a fairy of second chances" doesn't quite manage to dispel. This despair is so deeply ingrained into the bones of Oshii's production, in the bleakness of the backgrounds and the pallid vulnerabilities of the girl, that it can't help but resonate throughout all of Colpaert's.

Nor are the two films so intrinsically at odds. In place of the story of Noah, we hear the story of Tesseria, a planetary traveller whom Jonathon claims to have once encountered, and a wrecked paradise, once home to a magnificent array of flying, whale-sized fish that Tesseria failed to protect from greedy encroachers. Now, Jonathon tells us, "if you put your ear to the heavens and listen for the sound of a man crying, that is Tesseria siting alone on a planet with no fish." Tesseria's cautionary tale is, on the one hand, a rather baffling means of attempting to tie in the revamped narrative with Oshii's images of men with harpoons inexplicably chasing the shadows of fish, here incorporated as a kind of dream vision Jonathan shares with Angel in order to illustrate what could go wrong should she fail in her angelic mission. But it has bleak implications all of its own. Tesseria's story, for all its eccentric detail, has a similar outcome to that of Oshii's Noah, with a character left to contend with total emptiness and no prospect of renewal. Minus the existentialist anxieties that dogged Oshii's characters, the story lends itself more readily to ecological interpretations, with the men's relentless harassment of the fish signifying an insatiable plundering of the natural world, or else a metaphor for humankind's predilection for warfare. The implicit suggestion is that this planet with no fish represents a probable future vision of Earth, stripped of all its former glory, with the harpoon-wielding men embodying the darker forces within humanity that have already enabled it to fall into such a derelict state. As this apocalypse was self-inflicted, the focus of the story has shifted from God's rejection of creation to humanity's self-loathing for atrocities committed against one another and the rest of creation. The question that Angel grapples with throughout is that of whether or not humankind can be deemed worthy of a continued existence. Which is where Frank comes in.

Frank (Tony Markes) is a flesh and blood mortal, and the protagonist of a parallel storyline interwoven with the recycled footage from Oshii's film. This takes place in a very different post-apocalyptic wasteland, one more overtly related to the nuclear anxieties of the 1980s, where the outside world is too contaminated to venture into without the precautions of gas masks and radiation suits. Frank and his companion, Goose (Kenneth McCabe), are scavenging the ruins for supplies when they run afoul of a Psycho Soldier (as he is credited, to Kurtiss J. Tews) intent on stealing their oxygen (he attacks them with a harpoon, obviously intended to recall the weapons of the fish chasers, although it strikes me as just as reminiscent of Jonathon's staff). In the resulting confrontation, Goose is killed and Frank's suit is taken, exposing him to the toxicity in the air. Angel witnesses Frank's struggle, and is moved by his futile efforts to revive Goose, but still she distrusts the mortal, and flees back to the angelic domain to seek Jonathon's guidance on whether or not he would be a worthy recipient of her egg. Frank notices Angel and pursues her, only to collapse and later awaken in a hospital operating room; he has been saved by a medic named Sarah (Filiz Tully), who advises him that they will be safe so long as they remain in the operating room, the one area of the hospital with a constant supply of clean air. Various tricks are deployed to create an impression of intersection between Oshii's animation and the live action footage, with Angel's image being superimposed onto the three-dimensional backgrounds in some shots, while in others she is represented by a flesh and blood counterpart (Rainbow Dolan). In some scenes Frank is shown attempting to recreate his visions of Angel by sketching her likeness onto a whiteboard (Angel: "He's a doodler, perhaps, or maybe the Devil sketching a scheme"). The culmination of this stylistic mash-up is a surreal interlude where Frank ventures out from the operating room to play "Carnavalito Tango" by Horacio Moscovici on a piano (a pretty lovely composition, I might add), and images from both the real and animated domains (Angel and her egg, a dancing woman presumed to be Frank's lost lover, footage of forests, fields and rivers representing the Earth in its pre-apocalyptic state) merge together to create a haunting elegy to a world wronged by human destructiveness.

It goes without saying that In The Aftermath isn't much of a substitute for watching Oshii's original, but it has its charms as a curiosity piece, both as a strange footnote to Oshii's career and an example of how a bit of editing, recontextualising and resourcefulness can transform an existing production into something notably different and yet still very much imbued with the underlying character of its original form. What is particularly fascinating, in the case of In The Aftermath, is how the reframed animated sequences, juxtaposed with the austerities of their live action counterparts, take on new life as a kind of fantasy world used to confront and navigate through the traumas of reality. There are times when we wonder if Angel's watchful presence is really nothing more than a dream experienced by a sickened Frank as he drifts in and out of consciousness (an interpretation that is disarming for the way it seems to echo the wanderer's suggestion, in the original film, that "You and I and the fish only exist in the memory of person who is gone"). The figure of Angel stands in contrast to the brutalities with which Frank must contend upon the ruined Earth - unassuming, gentle and nurturing, she seems to represent a lost ideal for Frank. This becomes more pronounced during his piano interlude, when her image is repeatedly superimposed with that of Frank's lost love and the unspoiled Earth, suggesting that Frank's fixation on Angel amounts to a yearning for the restoration of a bygone innocence. If we see Angel's dilemma as reflecting Frank's internal struggle between succumbing to the violent despair of his post-apocalyptic being and the preservation of the benevolent qualities that enable him to dream of something better - Man's compulsion to destroy versus his capacity for altruism - then the disquieting bleakness of Angel's domain becomes indicative of Frank's own weary spirit. His unpromptu piano performance is, on one level, a means of connecting with the stranger Sarah, but is also an attempt at reconciliation with the guileless idealism that lies buried beneath his psychological debris, an olive branch to everything from which the scarred and smoking landscape, both inside and out, has allowed itself to become estranged. The irony being that it is Angel who fails Frank, in failing to hear and respond. Mortals might seek escapism, but angels never sleep (except when they do). For the tender, child-like benignity that Angel embodies to become inert and non-functional is to cut off all prospect of redemption. In Angel's temporary stasis, we see acknowledgement that negligence and indifference have as much capacity to harm as outright brutality.

For Frank, everything ultimately ends happily - Angel returns and gives him the egg, permitting him to restore the surrounding atmosphere to an inhabitable condition, and granting Colpaert's film an implicit Biblical allusion all of its own, with Frank and Sarah becoming the new Adam and Eve in a Paradise Regained (I would note, however, that the fate of Psycho Soldier remains unaccounted for - so, erm, potentially Cain is already out there). For Angel and Jonathon, things are a little less clear-cut; again, Colpaert's film is bound by the intrinsic bleakness of Oshii's images, despite the assurances of a triumphant ending in which Angel is rewarded for successful completion of her angelic mission by getting to "go, grow [and] take flight". We see footage of the girl's death from the original film, which depicts her falling into a body of water, embracing a vision of her adult self as she drowns and spawning an assortment of new eggs with her drying breath, before an orb rises from the waters, revealing a legion of statues - among them, a statue bearing the likeness of the girl, seated upon a throne and cradling an egg. Despite the visibly privileged position of the girl's statue, this doesn't feel like an optimistic ending in Oshii's film, recalling as it does the traveller's insistence that the creatures aboard the ark, once poised to determine the future course of life on Earth, were ultimately forgotten and turned to stone. As an image, it is simply too haunting to convey any sense of unabashed triumph. Jonathon, meanwhile, is last seen standing impassively at the water's edge, allowing the tides to wash over him, with Angel commenting that still he "stands alone, and watches time and the planets race by." Presumably, we are intended to draw reassurance from Jonathon's watchful stoicism, although there are echoes, in his sedimentary solitude, of Tesseria's fate. If we see Angel's ascension (albeit in a disturbingly petrified form) as transcendence above the ruination of Frank's world, then Jonathan's miring to the lifeless, unpopulated shore seems to signify the part of Frank that will remain haunted by the darkness of past, a concession to the traumas that cannot be forgotten and the innocence that cannot be wholly regained.

The final image of Colpaert's film, revealing a great, embryonic avian stirring inside a giant egg suspended above the earth atop a monstrous entanglement of elongated roots, is actually the opening image of Oshii's, and it is hard not to entertain the notion that Colpaert has deliberately reordered the sequence as a winking tribute to the iconic closing image of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 science fiction landmark 2001: A Space Odyssey. The embryonic bird is obviously intended to symbolise the awakening of new life, although the alien, distinctly non-human nature of the egg and embryo is troubling, suggesting that, despite Frank's triumph, the future of the reinvigorated Earth does not ultimately belong to humankind, but they are rather the stepping stones in some greater scheme. In Oshii's film, the significance of the bird is discussed in an exchange between the girl and traveller, with the latter claiming to have seen the bird, and speculating that it still lies in its dormant state, dreaming. The girl asks what the bird is dreaming about, a question the man deftly avoids answering. If, In Colpaert's film, we are to perceive the animated figures of Angel and Jonathon as dream beings existing only in the flesh and blood Frank's visions, then perhaps we can see the closing image of the animated bird stirring as an indication of this process coming full circle, with the hint that human existence should be seen as no more permanent or substantial than the content of a dream (or possibly nightmare?) playing out amid the slumber some other form of life. If the bird is to awaken, then humankind must presumably fade away. The juxtaposition of reborn Eden and emergent new life seems almost hauntingly contradictory, and that's what makes In The Aftermath such an enigma of its own.

My Actual Favourite Movie Trailer

A while ago, I may have shared that my all-time favourite movie trailer was the teaser to the 1979 film Prophesy. Since then, I've flushed out the one trailer that might possibly succeed in topping it in my affections - a modest little trailer for a fairly obscure picture, tucked away where few are likely to discover it, so naturally it felt like a real find. I speak of the teaser for the 1992 film Timescape (released in some markets under the alternate title Grand Tour: A Disaster In Time). The contents of the teaser in question? Nothing, more or less. By that, I don't mean that it divulges only the most minimal story details for the picture it's seeking to establish in the public awareness, a practice not at all uncommon for early trailers put together while production is still underway and there is only limited footage for them to work with (although that also applies). The Timescape trailer is on a level unto itself. I'm not sure I've ever seen a teaser so weirdly fixated with dead space; so aggressively intent upon turning nothing into an art form.

I have no idea if this trailer ever saw the theatrical light of day, but you can find it on at least two UK rental releases put out by Virgin Video in 1991 - Mermaids (for my thoughts on the movie itself, go here) and After Dark, My Sweet. It tells us absolutely nothing about the plot of the then-upcoming Jeff Daniels project - except that it starred Jeff Daniels, who had recently appeared in a popular pic involving killer spiders, and that it came from the "creator" (in this case, to mean screenwriter) of the 1989 film Warlock (David Twohy, although he isn't mentioned by name). From the title of the film, you might have accurately guessed that it was a science fiction picture of sorts. But otherwise we have zilch to go off. No flashy title animation, no stirring voice-over narration to tell us something of the plight of Daniels' character and whatever he's going through, just a small succession of white and red titles against a black screen, passively dissolving into one another in complete and utter silence. There's not even a memorable tagline at the end to give the promo a stamp of narrative direction or individual character. It was content to let emptiness do the talking. I'm going to hazard a guess that the frugality of the promo was born more of necessity than of any particular artistic strategy - that the production had yielded very little usable footage at the time they were tasked with creating a promo, and had possibly not much of a budget to boot - but what can I say, it worked like a charm on me. Immediately, I was gripped by the compulsion to learn more about Timescape. While a part of me was inclined to poke fun at the trailer (affectionately so) for how unrelentingly barebones it was, overall that spartan approach spoke less of a lack of substance than of mystery and intrigue - the pitch black titles a blank canvas of seemingly infinite possibilities. More importantly still, they were a quagmire of existential dread, the blackness and the silence becoming voids in which it seemed as though something should be revealing itself, but was refusing to do so. To watch the Timescape teaser was to be plunged into a twenty-nine second vacuum, where the absence of any visual or audio signifiers on which to hang your comprehension leaves you with the distinct feeling of having been stranded far from anything familiar or discernible. It is a tremendously eerie experience. I came away with the gut impression that this communicated far more about the character of the feature in question than a more conventional barrage of images and rapid-fire edits possibly could.

...So much so that I figured the film itself could only disappoint me, once I'd gotten hold of a copy (as Prophesy ultimately did). Happy to report, then, that I actually really enjoyed Timescape the film, although I'll reserve my thoughts on it for its own post later down the line. This one can stand as a celebration of the Timescape teaser on its own.

Overall, I think my fascination with the Timescape trailer stems from the fact that it is such a perfect trailer for the VHS format. As any child of the magnetic tape era well knows, whatever content you had willfully rooted out on VHS invariably lay between two deeply ominous spaces, typically characterised by long stretches of blackness, and punctuated by random snippets of inexplicablity. Putting on a much-loved feature meant first having to navigate a wilderness of fear-inducing logos, discombobulating promos and unsettling copyright notices that could not be bypassed at the simple press of a button, merely trawled through. Even if you hit the fast forward button, you still had to contend with the knowledge that it was still lying there and waiting. Reaching the end of the main attraction meant, invariably, being dragged right back into the great black void, if you weren't savvy enough to hit the Stop button on your remote in time. Compared to the disc experience, which typically returned you to the comforting locus of the interactive menu, or the streaming experience, which brassily tries to drag you out the instant the credits have begun into whatever else it insists you should be watching (speaking as one of those strange individuals who actually enjoys watching end-credits, I had a very bad experience with a recent viewing of Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood, which has only decreased the prospects of détente between myself and Netflix), VHS was the format of the memento mori. The Timescape teaser was right at home amid all that sickening vastness, where the only sound more ominous than complete and utter silence was the sound of tape hiss working its cackling magic.

Discovering the Timescape teaser on the Mermaids ex-rental was an especially bewildering experience, though, for what it's immediately followed by. The first time I saw it, I fully expected the teaser to just be an extended intro, followed by a more conventional preview; hence, when I suddenly found myself slap-bang in the middle of a tropical island paradise (a sensory discord if ever there was one), for just a second or so I was seriously wondering if this was a glimpse into what Timescape had to offer. If so, then it would absolutely not have been what I was expecting. The voice-over narration addressing Auntie Beryl and next door's budgie with a thick London accent (coupled with the non-threatening smooth jazz backing track) clued me in that this likely had nothing to do with the aforementioned Jeff Daniels flick from the creator of Warlock, and yet I'd be lying if I said that the unease I'd garnered from watching the preceding preview didn't bleed over into my digestion` of this ostensibly innocuous Bacardi promotion. I was on my guard for its entirety, as I was seriously anticipating it to reveal itself to be a PIF about the dangers associated with how alcohol distorts your perception...I mean, that IS what's going on in this ad, is it not, however exotically Bacardi might attempt to dress it up? When the bar patrons at the end go out to catch the last bus home...that's where I was expecting things to take a gut-churning turn for the nasty ("it really is the last bus!", or something along the lines). But no, the ad never seems to grasp the darker implications of the narrative it's selling. This is in spite of offering up a splendidly ominous black void all of its own.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #43: Beware The Penguins (Bud Ice)

 (Many thanks to Bryan Bierman for bringing this series to my attention.)

I think it's fair to say that there's nothing really overtly threatening about penguins. They may be one of the most universally beloved creatures in existence, and it's not hard to see why. Nature has produced few specimens that rival them in looking quite so cuddly and irresistibly plush toy-ready. As a bonus, their flightlessness, long, slender flippers and waddling, upright gait give them a more human appearance than just about anything else the bird kingdom has to offer. And yet, when it comes to representations in popular culture, penguins have a surprising track record for association with villainy. Oh sure, between Happy Feet, Pingu and Mary Poppins, there is no shortage of media out there to take advantage of the more lovable attributes of penguins, yet the number of spheniscids from the dark side is nothing to be sniffed at. We'll start with the obvious example - one of Batman's most prominent enemies is called The Penguin. What's more, in the 1992 film Batman Begins he sent an army of actual penguins with missiles strapped to their backs to destroy Gotham City. Disney were at one point interested in introducing a penguin to their own villainous roster - before their 1977 film The Rescuers became the story of two mice rescuing a kidnapped orphan from a backwoods diamond mine, it was envisioned as the story of two mice rescuing a polar bear from imprisonment at the flippers of a maniacal king penguin (a premise inspired by one of Marjory Sharp's novels, Miss Bianca In The Antarctic, but still, I couldn't imagine anything more characteristically Don Bluth) - but abandoned the idea because they struggled with how to make the quirky-looking bird appear as though it could convincingly cow anything significantly bigger than itself. Wallace and Gromit yielded the answer in their 1993 adventure The Wrong Trousers - turns out, all you had to do was have the penguin carry a gun. Not that Feathers McGraw needed to demonstrate that he was armed in order to exude jeopardy; with his beady eyes, silent demeanour and eerily out of place presence, the character was an almost impossibly masterful marriage of understated terror and knowing absurdity. Elsewhere, the 1980s incarnation of My Little Pony had an arc involving King Charlatan, a penguin tyrant. The penguins of Madagascar feel as though as they probably belong somewhere upon this spectrum, except they weren't really that evil, just alarmingly proficient at getting whatever they wanted (much like Martini from Olive The Other Reindeer). Clearly, there is something about the penguin that makes it a particularly satisfying critter to subvert the presumed cuteness thereof. Maybe their more humanoid qualities can also work against them, giving them a slight uncanniness, or maybe they're just such surreal-looking birds in general that it's difficult to know where to pigeonhole them; they feel like they're bending reality just existing.

Not least of the menacing spheniscids was the penguin who promoted Bud Ice for a window in the late 1990s, quite possibly the only other contender capable of rivalling Feathers McGraw in the eeriness department. Helping the Bud Ice Penguin is that he was specifically a Pygoscelis adeliae, which, thanks to those piercing eyes of theirs, are easily the most uncanny-looking of all the penguin species. Unlike Feathers, he could be perfectly voluble when the circumstances called for it, although in most ads he tended to restrict communication to his calling card of compulsively crooning the opening notes to "Strangers In The Night". Compared to Wallace and Gromit's infamous enemy, we never actually saw the Bud Ice Penguin do anything overtly intimidating. The terror was all implicit, and all in the mind-boggling inexplicability of an adeliae penguin singing. "Dooby dooby doo..." Onomatopoeia has never sounded so heart-stopping.

"Beware The Penguins" belongs to the same category of animal advertising as the Quaker Harvest Squirrels, in that it pivots around a narrative wherein consumption of the specified product will allegedly make you a target for some psychotic critter potentially looking to tear you limb from limb. Whereas the Harvest Squirrels were initially conceived as a sort of tribute to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, before becoming more Gremlins-esque in nature, the Bud Ice Penguin has the distinctive air of a slasher movie villain, albeit one who carries out the worst of his atrocities off-screen - there's something hair-raisingly unearthly about his single-minded penchant for stalking and terrorising Bud Ice drinkers at their most vulnerable.

The ads in the "Beware The Penguins" series were affectionate pastiches of the horror and thriller genres, with two being derived from popular urban legends - the backseat killer and the upstairs caller. In both legends, the victims find themselves pitted against what is presumed be a external menace, only to discover, sometimes too late, that the danger was lurking much closer than they'd anticipated; those same narrative beats are incorporated faithfully here, but with the twist that the threat in question is a singing penguin. The backseat killer ad in particular feels like a fairly straight recreation of the original legend (prior to the penguin reveal), but for the rather uncommon variation of having the would-be victim be a male driver - traditionally, the legend was conceived to reflect the fears of the solitary female traveller, and the bugbear of the benevolent stranger and the prospective assailant being indistinguishable in the dead of night. Making the protagonist male was likely a concession to appeal to more to the campaign's intended demographic (beer conventionally being marketed more toward male drinkers), although the knowing subversion of gender expectations also makes it easier to read the re-enactment as existing in quotation marks from the go, particularly with the hilariously on the nose reveal that the occupants of the pursuing vehicle are an elderly couple (a pretty reliable shorthand for harmlessness - although I would note that, for the Good Samaritans that they were in attempting to warn the protagonist about the malevolent penguin in his backseat, they do just drive off and leave him when he's in the process of abandoning his car). The upstairs caller legend, meanwhile, usually involves a babysitter who has the good sense to ask the police to trace the source of the intrusive telephone calls, whilst being inattentive enough to her allocated duty not to notice that some housebreaker has gotten in and brutally murdered her charges upstairs. It's no so surprise that the penguin-ised take dispenses with the charges altogether - for as sinister as the penguin is, I doubt that Anheuser-Busch want to imply that he murders children - and makes the protagonist a young couple looking to have a quiet night in (although for all intents and purposes, their supply of Bud Ice has taken the place of the children, as the precious resource at the centre of the conflict). Again, there are knowing quotation marks around the enactment of the legend (the exposition-heavy dialogue between the couple, and of course, the catchphrase drop early on, making the identity of the caller immediately obvious to anybody already familiar with the campaign), yet our rapid ascension up the staircase to reveal the guilty party still has a twisted intensity. Not to mention, what are we intended to make of the final scene, with the police attempting to re-establish contact with the couple, who are suddenly nowhere in sight. Did they flee the house or did the Penguin get to them? Either answer feels just as applicable.

Another of the ads was fashioned more along the lines of an espionage thriller, with a protagonist monologuing about how he's been pursued from Buenos Aires to Budapest, before boarding a train and failing to evade the Penguin yet again, the source of their friction being the clandestine bottle of Bud Ice he has stashed away in his luggage. The Penguin also appeared as the leader of a tribe of natives who'd cornered a team of explorers in the deep dark jungles (again, it was their choice of recreational beverage that made them targets), and in another ad broadening his mugging skills to make off with the Stanley Cup. The little terror certainly got around. Although his nefarious antics proved popular with viewers, the campaign was not without its share of controversy - Budweiser had been running animal-based campaigns for some years by this stage, whether involving frogs or dogs or horses, so they must have been prepared for the usual charges of attempting to appeal to underage drinkers, although in the Penguin's case there was additional contention involving a sports apparel company, Supreme International, who filed a lawsuit against Anheuser-Busch for what they saw as infringement on their own penguin trademark.

Inevitably, we find ourselves circling back to that most important of questions - why a penguin? Obviously, the "Ice" aspect of the brand name makes a penguin a pertinent fit, but why should such a small and ostensibly unthreatening bird, even with those piercing adelaie eyes of his, prove such a persuasive source of menace? Part of the joke is that the in-universe terror he provokes among prospective victims is blatantly over the top, and yet there is something genuinely unsettling about it. It's never exactly obvious what this little penguin is going to do to any of the Bud Ice patrons he meets, but I'm sold on the implication that you don't want to stick around and find out. I would argue that the Bud Ice Penguin succeeds on much the same principle as Feathers McGraw - that the notion of this sociopathic penguin tacitly conspiring against everything around him is so flagrantly absurd, so blatantly out of line with the conceivable order of things that it's spooky. Like The Wrong Trousers, the ads become exercises in how efficiently their creators can tread the line between flat-out silliness and a surrealist nightmare.

The most terrifying thing about the Bud Ice Penguin, though? It isn't actually clear just how many of him there are. Up until now I have been referring to a single Bud Ice Penguin, because to my knowledge we were only ever shown one penguin on screen, and in one of the ads we hear the announcement that "the Bud Ice Penguin has been captured", which would appear to confirm that the pint-sized menace operates alone. But this is curiously at odds with the campaign's slogan, which clearly cautions us to "Beware The Penguins", implying that there could potentially be a whole army of singing, backseat slashing adelaies out there, to the point that we can't even be certain that we're always seeing the same penguin in every ad. So what's the solution? You might want to keep a leopard seal in the trunk of your car for real emergencies, for a start.

Fortunately, Teddy Bears Are Impervious To Your Hatred (Goodbye David McKee)

The passing of children's author and illustrator David McKee last month got me thinking about what might be his most underrated work, I Hate My Teddy Bear, which was first published in 1982, and which I'll wager you didn't read about in too many of his obituaries. McKee was better known for his series of books about Elmer, a multi-coloured elephant, Mr Benn, a habitual cosplayer, and King Rollo, a monarch who appealled to me as a nipper because, much like myself, he struggled with getting his laces tied (Rollo, though, found arguably too easy a solution). His most famous one-off story was Not Now, Bernard from 1980, a surprisingly chilly tale of parental negligence, in which a mother and father are too wrapped up in themselves to notice that their son, the titular Bernard, has been killed and replaced by a hulking purple monster. By the end of the story, the monster itself has grown disturbed by this state of affairs, and protests that, "I am a monster", only to be met with the same disinterested response that Bernard presumably received for much of his life. To the adult reader, it is tempting to apply a metaphorical reading of the story, in which Bernard "becomes" the monster in acting out against his apathetic parents. As such, it might be understood as a deliberate inversion on the ending of Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are; whereas Max ultimately comes in from the wilderness to reassurances of his mother's unconditional love, in the form of the "still hot" supper, "Bernard" receives no such consolation, the TV dinner and bedtime milk prepared for him being perfunctory tokens of a half-hearted parenting routine in which neither his mother or his father can find time to properly acknowledge his existence. Crucially, Bernard's innocence is not recovered by the end of the story - he embraces his Wild Thing and allows it to consume him and remold his identity. His parents have not grown or changed in any way, but Bernard has taken his first major steps in what will undoubtedly be a long and messy journey in figuring out how to survive in such an indifferent world.

Regardless of whether you prefer to take the story literally or metaphorically, McKee leads us to an unrepentantly harsh conclusion, one that might occasionally prove too much for some readers. In my experience, the book is more likely to strike a nerve with adults, presumably because they're going to be more receptive to McKee's implicit commentary on deadbeat parenting; children, I think, are more liable to appreciate it as a grisly tale with a clear punchline, one that feels more at the expense of the unwitting parents than either Bernard or the monster. One of my fondest memories of infant school was when a supply teacher came in and read my class Not Now, Bernard. We already knew how the story went, but this was clearly her first time reading it, and she couldn't conceal her horror at the outcome. Another teacher attempted to deflect from the bleakness of the ending by pointing out how nice it was that the monster was, for a moment, able to sit down peacefully and read one of Bernard's comic books (though she disapproved of him breaking one of Bernard's toys). Still, Not Now, Bernard was hardly an anomaly in McKee's output - he had a distinctively morbid side that would intermittently show its claws, and trusted that his readership could handle a sour conclusion. Tusk Tusk (1978), about a war between two tribes of elephants, is a cautionary fable about the dangers of not accepting differences in others (and just when you think the elephants have reached a peaceful solution, McKee insists on upsetting the equilibrium on the final page). The Sad Story of Veronica Who Played The Violin: Being an Explanation of Why the Streets Are Not Full of Happy Dancing People (1987) advertises its own playfully doleful intentions in its deliberately overwrought title; a shaggy dog story about a young violin virtuoso whose music invariably brings her listeners to tears, it reaches an abrupt and particularly mean-spirited punchline that, as with Bernard, has zero qualms with abandoning its protagonist in the digestive system of a raging beast. This punchline does, however, call attention to what appears to be a running theme throughout many of McKee's works - which is to say, communication, and the characters' failure to understand one another. It is this lack of communication that tends to be the root cause of tragedy in much of his work.

I Hate My Teddy Bear finds McKee in a considerably more genial mood than with Bernard, Tusk or Veronica, but it strikes me as the book in which the theme of thwarted communication is most poignantly expressed. I was also read I Hate My Teddy Bear back in infant school, and it made a pretty strong impression on me, though I'll confess that I did not commit the title to memory, nor the fact that teddy bears played any role at all within the story. I simply remembered this strange book about a couple of children who were arguing, while there in the background was a peculiar parallel storyline involving enormous stone replicas of human body parts being carted around (mostly hands, with one lone foot - I had remembered there being a nose in there too, but perhaps I was confusing that with some other book). As a child I never did figure out what that was about. Neither did my teacher, who commented that, "Maybe they were building something," and left it at that, which got me speculating that the items in question were being pieced together to create a single giant statue, and I shuddered to think what kind of sculpted creation would require so many hands and only one foot. I wasn't sure I actually wanted to see the finished product. When I came across a copy of the book later in life, I scrutinised the picture very carefully, hoping to finally make some sense of those mysterious statutes - and, as it turns out, McKee does indeed reveal the in-universe purpose of the concrete hands, but only in the final illustration. That much does not remain a mystery. What McKee is less upfront about is how are we expected to interpret the motif of the statues in conjunction with the A-story about the book's protagonists, John and Brenda, two children professing mutual disdain for their teddy bears (John's bear is blue while Brenda's is pink, which admittedly doesn't register as very PC from a contemporary standpoint), but also cannot tolerate the thought of their own teddy bear appearing inferior to the other. As per the blurb on the back of the book, "Brenda and John are so busy arguing about their teddy bears, that they don't notice something very strange is going on around them", which directs that our focus to the nature of this narrative mismatch, and what is potentially revealed therein.

Like Lily Takes A Walk by Satoshi Kitamura, I Hate My Teddy Bear is a first-class example of a picture book in which the story being told appears to rest in a certain discrepancy between word and image. In textual terms, it is a straightforward tale about two children who, having been turned outside to play together by their respective mothers, engage in a string of petty, passive aggressive arguments. As the children talk, a rhythm emerges in their dialogue, with John ascribing some kind of outlandish quality to his bear (it can talk, count backwards, sing and fly, according to John), and Brenda insisting that her bear is every bit its match. This goes on, with the tone of their exchange becoming increasingly heated, until they are summoned inside for tea by John's mother. At this point, the children abandon all hard feelings, and the focus of the text suddenly shifts to a conversation apparently going on between the bears themselves. Having spent the duration of the story passively listening to their young custodians talking them up (albeit from afar - the children abandon their bears early in the story, only retrieving them at the end), they congratulate one another on the amazing things they can supposedly do. The Pink Teddy admits that at least one of the talents ascribed to it by Brenda was an exaggeration: "But I can't fly". "Neither can I," says the Blue Teddy. The only extraordinary plot point conveyed in the text is in this closing revelation that the bears are alive and capable of conversing with one another, and if you had the story read to you without seeing the illustrations you might very well assume that this is the very strange "something" to which the blurb alludes. Looking at the images, the giant hands are so dominant, and the milieus in general are so richly detailed, that John and Brenda appear intermittently to merge into the background, a recurring feature in a picture so visibly bigger that, if not for the narrative grounding of the text, it would be easy to lose track of them.

Ostensibly, there are echoes of Not Now, Bernard in the basic set-up, in that both books deal with children who, having been turned aside by their adult caregivers, seek an outlet for the resentment they are unable to express directly. Here, however, McKee's illustrations are much more sympathetic to John and Brenda's mothers, in giving them a micro-narrative of their own that does not reach a clear resolution. The text informs us that "On Thursday, Brenda's mother came to visit John's mother", but the reason behind her visit is revealed only minimally within the images - it is apparent that Brenda's mother has come to John's mother in search of emotional support due to some distressing news she has received via letter. The text states that, in addition, "Brenda came to play with John", and while the two children are seen eating biscuits together in an amicable fashion within the accompanying illustration, the illustration does not privilege John and Brenda by making them its obvious focal point. Elsewhere in the room, the sight of Brenda's mother sobbing as John's mother surveys the letter - supplemented, cryptically, with the photograph of an unidentified man - and, outside the window, the toes of the giant foot statue passing by all seem every bit as prominent. The text indicates that we should be paying attention to John and Brenda, but it is difficult not to feel invested in what is happening right over their shoulder. Notably, as John and Brenda eat biscuits together they are smiling contentedly, suggesting that they are unaffected by the adjacent display of sorrow. In that regard, the book might even be seen as anti-Not Now, Bernard; whereas the former story was all about adult indifference toward childhood angst, I Hate My Teddy Bear touches on childhood obliviousness to adult grief, an important distinction being that John and Brenda are not so willfully in the dark. It can be deduced that John's mother sends them outside with their teddy bears so as to avoid exposing them to the harrowing conversation she is about to embark on with Brenda's mother. These undertones of parental hardship might also call our attention to the curiously spartan conditions in John's flat; while the kitchen is adequately furnished, the living room is mostly bare, with mostly makeshift furniture made from overturned crates and a sunbed, raising questions about the circumstances of their accommodation (eccentric decorating style, financial hardship or hurried relocation?). Likewise, the respective fathers of John and Brenda are conspicuously absent from the story, and it seems that McKee does indeed intend for us to ponder their whereabouts; a framed picture on the kitchen unit shows a blonde-haired man who could be John's father (although if should also be noted that John, unlike either of his parents, has red hair - it still wouldn't be out of the question for the blonde man to be his father, but McKee hasn't made their potential biological connection overtly obvious). If so, is he still in the picture figuratively speaking? On that same note, we might speculate that the man whose image was attached to the letter that has Brenda's mother so upset is Brenda's father, and that the source of her distress has something to do with their relationship (my tentative theory is that he's been declared Missing In Action in some war). For now, whatever concerns their mothers have to share might appear to go over John and Brenda's heads, but their erratic behaviour outside of the building suggests that they do sense a degree of unsettlement. After all, no obvious motivation is supplied, either within the text or illustrations, for why John turns so abruptly on his teddy. We can only assume that he is taking the opportunity to enact some form of misplaced anger in the absence of parental authority, although the nature of this anger is also unclear. The parental anguish glimpsed at the beginning sets up an undercurrent of unease that runs throughout all the story, in which the children's acts of hostility against their teddies and one another provide a crude kind of outlet for what goes otherwise unarticulated.

That McKee bothers to specify that the events in question take place on a Thursday seems entirely incidental, although it does lead into one of the book's broader themes, which concerns everything being part of an ongoing flow, with no clearly defined beginning or end. The happenings of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were essential in getting us to where we are today, much as the events depicted here will have consequences of their own for Friday and Saturday. The lack of any real closure regarding the mothers' narrative thread seems only fitting in that sense; whatever is paining Brenda's mother will presumably not be remedied within the very brief window of time in which the story unfolds. Instead, the story ends with a moment of harmony in which the balance of the universe appears to have been restored for just a second. The penultimate illustration shows John, Brenda and their mothers inside the flat, snacking on tea and cake. Brenda's mother wears a dreamy expression, suggesting that her mind is preoccupied, but for the time being her weeping has stopped. The room in which they are all based is visibly different to the one seen at the beginning of the story, with its intriguingly bare-bones decor; furnishing is still minimal, with the mothers seated on a rug on the floor, but the room boasts a warmer, more vibrant feel, with the added comforts of carpeting, cushions and curtains, perhaps reflecting a rosier outlook for the characters. There are, nevertheless, traces of unease that pervade this scene - John and Brenda are no longer at odds, although McKee denies them any explicit moment of reconciliation, and it might bother us that the children are positioned in different areas the room, their attentions directed away from one another, in contrast to the page's opening counterpart, when they were shown eating biscuits side by side and smiling (also troubling is that John's facial expression, in the penultimate image, is obscured by a teacake, meaning that we can't actually see if he is happy or sad with the ending arrangement). McKee instead gives the closing display of unity to the bears, who are standing out on the balcony. The final illustration shows the view from the balcony, and with it, reveals the purpose of those strange hulking hand statues - they are part of an art exhibition happening in the neighbourhood park. But where one puzzle closes, another merely opens up - the juxtaposition of the exhibition with the image of the two bears huddled together amicably suggests that there is a thematic parallel to be drawn between the bears' mutuality and the giant hands that permeate every last inch of the story. Notably, the final illustration is the only one in the story in which John and Brenda do not appear - this particular glimpse of chiselled paradise is reserved exclusively for their teddies, presumably because their earnestness makes them more receptive to it (ironically, though, they are not looking at the exhibition but at each other).

As with Lily Takes A Walk, the story revolves around the failures of participants to see eye-to-eye, a theme that extends not only to John and Brenda's arbitrary disagreement but to the reader's more comprehensive view of the world surrounding the protagonists, and the multitude of interconnected lives with which they unwittingly cross paths on their short excursion. Every illustration in McKee's book is an incredibly busy one, inviting the reader to examine each image with a Where's Waldo/Wally-like scrutiny. The bizarre assortment of hand statues being carried throughout the book provide most the dominant parallel narrative, but there are various other micro-narratives that emerge and unfold across multiple pages. In one image, we see a dropped glove upon the ground; in another, a woman wearing only one glove frantically inquiring about something with another passer-by (this narrative thread too is given no resolution; neither the woman nor the glove feature in any subsequent illustrations). We also see a man purchasing a harmonica and being trailed by a mysterious woman in a pink hat (seen only from behind), intent upon following him - as it turns out, he is heading to a bandstand in a park, where she takes her place the lone spectator to his performance. It becomes apparent that hands are an important motif, not simply in the hulking statues that feature in every illustration, but in the most modest gestures being enacted by the various bystanders - one person is seen reading another's palm, an elderly couple holding hands lovingly (one of them is also holding a hand-shaped lollipop in their free hand), and others carrying out various tasks all dependent on dexterity (knitting, painting, photography). McKee puts great emphasis on the plethora of ways in which the characters make use of their hands, to the point that the book becomes a low-ley celebration of the human hand and its tremendous potential. From a thematic standpoint, the hand serves two key functions - firstly, as a means of communication, as reflected in the numerous gestures the bystanders make with their hands throughout, and, by extension, a means of connection. 

Connectivity, both physical and otherwise, seems to be the prevailing theme of McKee's story, as suggested in the illustration on the title page, which shows the two teddy bears smiling directly at the reader with their arms linked (another irony - given that the bears symbolise this connection in most ideal state, they themselves have no hands). Somewhat incongruously, at their feet (or lack of) we also see the solitary dropped glove that features in one of the illustrations within the story, underscoring the importance of the hand as a motif but itself signifying detachment and misplacement. The glove is a symbol of vulnerability, and the threat of being lost and left behind in a world of overwhelming scope. The disconnect between the protagonists and the overflow of activity around them, more than simply chiding John and Brenda for their inattentiveness, seems to play into that vulnerability - the paradox that, in an environment so seething with life, the characters are so dominated by the omnipresent risk of ending up alone. John and Brenda's ridiculous argument is, in its own way, a kind of bonding ritual, with Brenda following John's every lead in order to keep with him, and John continually upping the scale of his challenge in order to reassert his advantage over Brenda. Both children are clearly dependent on one another in order to reaffirm their worth, but the rules of the game state that neither is permitted to show weakness to the other. Their plush companions, by contrast, are open about their own limitations (that neither is able to fly) and discover that they are not so alone in that regard. We might see the bears as representing the inner voices of their respective owners, in expressing the kind of mutual sympathy that John and Brenda are dying to communicate with one another, but each too guarded against. 

The hand sculptures, meanwhile, provide the book with a quirky visual through line, one that, despite the celebratory arrangement of the closing page, produces its own undercurrent of unease. The sight of multiple people hauling these great, absurd statues across each page is undeniably humorous, yet their imposing nature gives them an edge that is equally as sinister (it does not surprise me that I was so bothered by their presence as a child), causing them to seem intermittently grotesque, even predatory - in one illustration, we see a giant hand lurching from the lower-left corner of the image with its fingers outstretched, as if intending to prey on the two unwary children. In other images the hands appear to be dictating the action around them - on one page, we see a statue with its hands pressed forward in a pointing motion, and the majority of bystanders gazing in the specified direction (at what, McKee does not reveal; besides John and Brenda, there is one other dissenter pointing in the opposite direction, apparently having spotted something equally transfixing - McKee's salute to non-conformity, and a reminder that there is something of value to be discovered at every angle of life). Another hand has its fingers crossed, which could be seen as a gesture of hope, or alternatively duplicity, to indicate that the speaker is knowingly divulging in some untruth (underscoring the feigned posturing of John and Brenda's ritual). More genially, as John and Brenda run back inside the block of flats, the hand glimpsed through the door behind them is stretched out in a waving motion, as though bidding the two farewell. The hands, feeling less like sculptures than divine forces overwhelming the lowly mortals beneath them, appear to signify the bigger picture - the overpowering flow in which everything is ultimately swept up, and the fluctuating river of joy, anguish and confusion it persists in dragging its subjects down. The final illustration (notably, the "waving" hand is positioned at the centre of the exhibition, signifying McKee's farewell to the reader) lauds our mutual helplessness within this broader scheme as a great unifier, with the indication that understanding can be achieved through the recognition that we are all as fundamentally fragile as one another.

One further mystery rears its head - in the last two pages McKee appears to broaden his thematic palette and develop an interest in shoes, suddenly making that lone foot statue (also featured in the final display) not seem like such a galling anomaly. Both John and Brenda's mothers have their shoes removed and positioned near the rug in the penultimate illustration. In the final image, we see a pair of discarded shoes, with no obvious owner in sight, and this, as much as everything else, feels like it might be the real punchline of the story. The shoes could be a symbol of empathy, an allusion to the familiar idiom about walking in another's shoes, although McKee does not make this connection particularly explicit. More persuasively, they are a callback to the dropped glove from earlier in the story, although - unlike that glove - the shoes have been discarded together and are thus do not make for such a forlorn image. Again, it is as if McKee is saying that we are all lost in this world together, and this is something to be cherished.