As the winter solstice approaches, we also get closer to that annual UK tradition of embracing your inner masochist and snuggling up with Raymond Briggs' special patented brand of emotional devastation. Ever since 1982, families have been introducing legions of unsuspecting young children to Jimmy T. Murakami's adaptation of The Snowman, a beautifully-animated 27-minute film that leaves you wailing out for the sadness and desolation of the world, as is all par for the course with any Briggs encounter. As I noted in my review of When The Wind Blows, I cannot think of another storyteller who has perfected the art of tearing out his readers' heartstrings with quite as much merciless precision as Briggs, all while beguiling them with warm pastel tones and round-faced, benign-looking characters.
Which is not to suggest that I'm down on Briggs, far from it. Although I stand my opinion that The Snowman has the saddest ending to any fictional story, of any medium, I do ultimately look upon it as a very positive story, one that celebrates life and friendship while acknowledging that all things must eventually pass. The final action of James/the young David Bowie, is to reach inside his pocket and discover that the scarf he gained during last night's excursion still remains - important in narrative terms, as it demonstrates that his encounter with the magical snowman wasn't a dream, but it's also a tangible reminder of the brief but powerful connection the two of them shared, one that will bring him warmth and comfort in the chilly days still to come. Thanks to the events of that night, James/Bowie is left a sadder but richer individual, as signified by his ownership of that scarf. It's not an easy ending to take, but it's hard to imagine any other ending that would carry the same kind of emotional weight.
The Snowman was such a roaring success that Channel 4 were obviously eager to repeat the trick, and in the 35 years since its debut the pantheon of Briggs adaptations/specials slowly but surely crept up in number (although we still don't have an adaptation of The Man, which has been at the top of my wish list for years now). With the exception of Father Christmas (1991), which is an unusually lighthearted Briggs romp, none of them are exactly what you'd call feel-good television, even when they wholeheartedly embrace such values as love, compassion and childhood curiosity (and actually, Father Christmas is quite a bit grimmer than you perhaps realise at first glance, if only because Jim and Hilda from When The Wind Blows make a cameo, goading me to believe that it takes place in the same universe and that jolly old St. Nick was ultimately killed in a nuclear blast). There have been one or two missteps among them (Snowdog? No thank you), but on the whole they've been a strong bunch and very worthy of being spoken of in the same breath as The Snowman, even if none of them have ever really rivaled it in terms of cultural impact. Right now, I want to champion the Briggs' special that I personally rate as being the most underrated of the lot - Ivor The Invisible, which debuted on Channel 4 on 24th December 2001. This special isn't as well-remembered as some of the others (possibly because there's nothing at all festive about the story or setting, which makes it harder to promote as a fixture of holiday viewing) and that's a damned shame, because it's one of Briggs' stranger tales, and every bit as emotionally searing as the rest.
Ivor The Invisible was directed by Hilary Audus, who worked as an animator on Father Christmas and whose previous director credits included another Briggs adaptation, The Bear, in 1998, and two Halloween-themed specials, Pumpkin Moon (2005) and The 13th Kitten (2006). Unlike most one-off Briggs specials, this one wasn't adapted from an existing book and was instead an original screenplay penned by Briggs especially for television. It doesn't wreck all-out emotional devastation on quite the same level as The Snowman or When The Wind Blows - unlike those two Briggs adaptations, everybody makes it through the story intact, so perhaps it's easy to come away with the impression that it's one of Briggs' more lightweight stories. Instead, it's sad in a subdued, understated way, the tale of a friendless outsider who desperately wants to belong, only to have their outcast status ultimately reaffirmed. It explores a recurring theme in Briggs' work - that is, the friendship between a child and a strange, supernatural being that's ill-fated from the start (also seen in The Snowman and The Man). A boy named John (Albey Brookes) wakes up to discover that a enormous invisible being has taken up residence in his bedroom. He befriends the creature, whom it's evident leads rather a sad and lonely existence, and the two of them have fun creating mischief together and causing endless confusion for the adults in John's life; that is, until the creature's antics get increasingly out of hand and the novelty gradually wears off for John. Finally, John tells the creature to go away, seriously hurts its feelings and...that's it. The end! Yeah, it's a really barebones story, but watching this back in 2001 I found myself yet again with my heartstrings torn mercilessly from my body and lying in a slashed and bloodied heap before me, as I contemplated that same bleak sense of desolation that had gripped me all those years ago as a four-year-old watching The Snowman for the first time. Curse you, Briggs, you did it again!
The invisible creature cannot talk (the extent of its vocalisations are a muted, radiophonic workshop-style bleeping it emits while interacting with John and his environment), but it does have a rudimentary grasp of written English and is able to communicate with John by writing words in his bedroom mirror. Its first message is an extension of friendship; it asks him to "be my frend" (the creature is a terrible speller, something that we'll later discover it's all too ashamed of). The one nugget of information that John is desperate to know, but the creature won't divulge, is its name; when he asks, it responds by scribbling "No" into the mirror, which John initially misreads as "Ivo", prompting him to name his new friend the closest human name that he can think of, Ivor. At first, John is charmed by the idea of having an invisible companion, but his enthusiasm begins to sour when he discovers Ivor's penchant for playing pranks and causing mischief. Although Ivor instructs John not to tell anyone else about it, its playful and inquisitive nature mean that it can't help but interfere with everything going on around it, wrecking all kinds of havoc and undermining adult authority in all its forms, from John's mother, father and Aunt Barbara (Jane Horrocks, Timothy Spall and Alison Steadman) to a surly local park keeper (David Haig) and John's emotionally fragile teacher Miss Gibson (Emma Tate). Eventually, John's best friend Leila (Archie Panjabi) gets wise to Ivor's existence and forms her own attachment to the creature, but things go a step too far when Ivor causes a major upset at a zebra crossing and makes off with the Belisha beacons, prompting an angry mob to pile up on John's doorstep. At this point, John realises that his new friend has no sense of self-preservation and could potentially bring serious trouble to his family's household, so he asks Ivor to leave.
As I say, it's a very thin storyline, but what keeps it from becoming little more than a series of sketches in which Ivor creates mischief and John cringes with embarrassment are the moments in which the two friends are shown bonding and attempting to comprehend one another. John is fascinated by the mere existence of a creature as fantastic as Ivor, and his thoughts swiftly turn to the puzzling and, in some cases, really quite revolting implications of sharing one's physical living space with invisible giants (John notes that Ivor eats and deduces that it must therefore also excrete, and wonders if this process too is entirely invisible and if a layperson would have any means of knowing if they were about to walk into invisible giant faeces). His invisible chum isn't quite so interested on ruminating on the ins and outs of its own being, however, telling John that it what it really craves is a conventional existence like his own. Ivor understands the power of language in connecting with and being affirmed by others and hopes that it can overcome its physical limitations if it at least has a decent education behind it, hence its insistence to John that it wants to learn to read and spell. Ivor's invisibility represents a massive obstacle to normality and yet Ivor's friendship with John may also depend on it, as is hinted in Ivor's early reluctance to share their true identity with John. Ivor's yearning to belong is counterbalanced by an obvious need to hide. But what is Ivor hiding, exactly? We get a small hint when Ivor first confides in John its greatest desire, by typing, "i wan to be normal" on John's personal computer, which is initially misspelled as, "i wan to be norman" - on repeat viewings, we might catch the Freudian slip that clues us into Ivor's biggest insecurity around John. For there is a final twist regarding Ivor's true identity, which is revealed when John instructs Ivor to go but first implores them to share their real name. Realising that they now have little to lose, Ivor writes their true name in the living room mirror: Beryl. John's new friend was a female all along!
It seems that Ivor purposely concealed this information from John, for fear that he wouldn't accept her otherwise, and perhaps those fears were well-grounded. The revelation comes as a huge shock to John, who angrily berates Ivor/Beryl for not being what he thought she was (even though that was all based on pure assumption on his part). I'm not convinced that this twist ending entirely works, in part because I don't really buy John as the kind of guy who'd actually care one way or the other. I get that Briggs is making a point about prejudice, as well as playing with the audience's assumptions, but here's the thing - John's best friend, Leila, is a girl. He doesn't exactly strike me as a raging misogamist. This paradox becomes all the more salient when Leila shows up at the house and John shares with her, with unbridled disgust, that "Ivor" is really an invisible female named Beryl. She gets annoyed with him, for obvious reasons.
In the end, John and Leila admit that they both like Ivor/Beryl and are clearly saddened by the idea of having to go their separate ways, but they recognise that things have gotten too out of hand with her around. Ivor sheds an entirely visible tear and writes her final message, "see yoo", in the living room mirror; she accepts that she's wrecked too much havoc for John and his community to have any place therein. Whereas The Snowman told the story of a wonderful moment in its young protagonist's life that simply couldn't last, chiefly because the circumstances wouldn't permit it (as soon as the sun got in the slightest bit overbearing, his snowman friend was a goner), here we have a connection that must run its course because what's already in the characters' natures proves incompatible. Ivor is simply too larger than life for these folks to handle. And it's a heart-breaking conclusion. We know that Ivor isn't a bad soul and that none of her actions have been ill-intentioned, as evidenced in her display of kindness toward Miss Gibson after pushing one of her practical jokes too far. We end up sorely wishing that this could have gone another way. But Briggs being Briggs insists on the upset.
Ultimately, Ivor The Invisible seems to purposely avoid much in the way of closure, beyond the sense that Ivor's relationship with John has reached its natural conclusion. It is rather troubling that we never get to see how things pan out with regard to John's family and the angry mob outside; the last we see of this particular story thread, John's father is headed to the door to face them, and it's unclear quite how he's going to explain this situation. Above all, we never learn terribly much about the titular character - in addition to the scatological problems posed by John, there are also the obvious questions regarding what, exactly, Ivor is, where she came from, if there are any others of her kind, etc. None of these are ever addressed in any meaningful detail, and perhaps the story remains all the more haunting and effective for withholding this information. It keeps its central character an enigma, having us experience her entirely from John's perspective, and when she leaves at the end there's a sense that all we've seen is but a tiny snapshot in her never-ending quest for friendship and acceptance, a brief chapter in which she drifted into John's life before overstaying her welcome and having to move onto the next thing, whatever that might be. As Ivor makes her departure and floats off into the distance, she still carries the Belisha beacons she stole from the zebra crossing earlier - partly, this is for the benefit of the viewer, so that they have some visual means of tracking Ivor as she heads her own way, but it also signifies that, for better or for worse, wherever Ivor goes her carefree and playful spirit remains fully intact. An utter downer of an ending for sure, yet there is something curiously comforting about those final images.
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