Ident (aka Maybe I'm A-mazed...)

There can be few talents at Aardman more under-championed than Richard Starzak.The Bristol-based studio is so synonymous in popular consciousness with the work of Nick Park that it would be quite accurate to describe just about any of its non-Park talent as under-championed - not least studio founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton - but Starzak has always struck me as a particularly fascinating example, in part because he can be readily posited as a freakier, more sour-tasting counterpart to Park, epitomising the weirder body of work taking place at Aardman as Wallace and Gromit were winning the public's hearts. Back in 1989, when Park was preparing his breakout short Creature Comforts, Starzak (or Goleszowski as he was known at the time) was another rising claymation whiz getting the chance to flex his idiosyncratic muscles. Both had earned their stripes by working as animators on Aardman's most ambitious project to date, the apocalyptic Babylon, and each was given the opportunity to create their own five minute piece for the upcoming Channel 4 series Lip Synch, an anthology of five shorts designed to showcase the studio's individual talent. From the start, Starzak established himself as a darker, more surreal voice than any of his peers - his contribution, Ident, was by far the strangest of the five, an absurdist fantasy charting a day in the life of a beleaguered everyman as he navigates the walls of a maze and the dystopian society housed within, modifying his identity in an effort to blend in with the various social pockets he encounters, before his dog finally shows him that there may be a better way (maybe...).

Naturally, Ident didn't receive half the attention that Creature Comforts did, which is not say that it made no impact whatsoever. Like Creature Comforts, it did eventually lead to its own spin-off series...of sorts. Ident boasts the very first appearance of Rex the Runt, the two-dimensional plasticine hound who would go onto become Starzak's signature character throughout the 1990s, here featured as the pet of our chameleonic protagonist. It was followed by a trilogy of shorts exploring the further adventures of Rex, once he'd slipped the maze and learned to talk and walk upright - How Dinosaurs Became Extinct (1991), Dreams (1991) and North By North Pole (1996). Rex finally received his own full-fledged TV series in 1998, which the BBC bizarrely attempted to market as a kind of fill-in Wallace & Gromit, airing it in various lunchtime and early evening slots across the Xmas/New Year period. Brilliant though it was, Rex was never destined for the same kind of mass appeal as Wallace & Gromit - again, I fear that Starzak's humor was always too random, unsettling and off-the-wall compared to the altogether warmer eccentricities of Park's creation. This was 3 AM student insomniac television, awkwardly shoehorned into the niche of festive family entertainment; I'm not sure what stuffing-addled viewers made of it in the dying embers of 1998, but whenever Rex was repeated the BBC typically tended to squirrel it away in the late late hours.

Before he teamed up with Wendy, Bob and Vince, Rex led a humbler but stranger existence as the loyal companion of a phallic plasticine being living inside a labyrinthine dystopia. Compared to subsequent incarnations, this Rex is less anthropomorphic and largely behaves like an ordinary dog. He does not possess the gift of the gab, although in that regard he's at no more of a disadvantage than any of the maze's "human" inhabitants. Lord has stated that Aardman never settled on a unifying theme for Lip Synch, although the title suggests that dialogue and communication are of significance to all five shorts, and Ident is unique among them for containing no discernable dialogue (Barry Purves' contribution, Next, is an almost completely dialogue-free experience, but not quite). The characters all speak gibberish, although the nature of the gibberish changes according to the speaker. One character, who may be the protagonist's girlfriend, communicates by reciting letters of the alphabet in sequential order (although she skips the letter "g" for some reason). Another, presumably his boss, haughtily regurgitates the word "blah" over and over. The climax of the short has the protagonist head to the nearest watering hole, where he engages in drunken blather with its patrons (albeit before he's even touched a drop himself). Clearly, nothing of substance is communicated in their garbled murmurings, but the characters engage in rituals designed to give off the appearance of interchange, all the while revealing the fundamental disconnect between the participants. The failure of the protagonist and his girlfriend to see eye to eye results in both parties coming out worse for wear (and the possible breakdown of their relationship). The protagonist's display of over familiarity with his boss results in reproach. Masks are a recurring feature of interaction in the maze; the protagonist both annoys his girlfriend and appeases his boss by donning a mask and obscuring his true face. The backdrop his work environment consists of an assembly line of identical masks, suggesting that the protagonist is either involved in their manufacture, or (more likely) signifying the erosion of individual identity amid the capitalist grind.

In creating Ident, I strongly suspect that Starzak was influenced by Jan Švankmajer's 1983 film Dimensions of Dialogue, a collection of grotesque visual metaphors on the damages dealt by the inadequacies of human communication, particularly the manner in which the speakers aggressively distort one another's appearances as part of their pseudo-conversations. In Švankmajer's film, a succession of humanoid figures constructed from various household objects (vegetables, cooking utensils, office stationary) devour and regurgitate one another, grinding each other's basic components down until all differences are completely eradicated. The characters in Starzak's film endure a more comical but no less devastating evisceration, the emotional toll of all this assimilation being reflected the various scars accumulated by the protagonist throughout the course of the day. The discord with his girlfriend causes his face to be smeared with clown make-up (literally making a fool of him), while the mask he puts on for his boss appears to be altering the basic shape of his face, as his identity becomes conflated with the outward guise he is forced to assume for his daily survival. The characters do not literally consume one another, as in Švankmajer's film, but there is nevertheless a sense of them preying on one another's vulnerabilities in order to assert their own supremacy, with characters physically shrinking after enduring a particularly withering personal blow. Our protagonist is not an innocent in this process - in addition to the damage he unintentionally inflicts on his girlfriend by failing to understand her, he takes out his anger on a maze denizen significantly smaller than he; a denizen who approaches him to ask a question (he holds up a card with a question mark, which seems an appropriate reaction to the general situation), bringing an opportunity for connection and the sharing of knowledge, but whom the protagonist would sooner antagonise than attempt to understand. The inhabitants are a motley collection of figurative Minotaurs, brutally goring one another at evert turning, the grey, oppressive walls of the labyrinth signifying that they are all prisoners of their own conformity (entrapment and isolation are also central themes to at least three of the five shorts in Lip Synch).

As a counterpoint to the gloomy conventions of life within the labyrinth is the character of Rex, who does not exactly accompany the protagonist on his journey throughout the day, but the two of them have a tendency to keep running into one another. Rex is a faithful friend (although there are limits to his loyalty, as we see at the very end of the film), constantly seeking out his master and appearing to speak to some kind of latent urge that is contrary to the will of the maze. It could be because Rex is a dog, and therefore entirely lacking in human pretension. I suspect, though, that Rex is a largely symbolic character, a manifestation of the independent self our protagonist is repeatedly required to suppress in order to blend in inside the labyrinth. Rex signifies the protagonist at his purest and most honest toward himself. Significantly, the dog's appearances are usually heralded by the protagonist taking the time to examine himself in the mirror, reinforcing the idea that Rex "speaks" on behalf of his master's reflection. At the start of the short, Rex objects to the protagonist's (relatively low-key) efforts to smoothen out his wrinkles; he later barks aggressively when his master returns from his dispute with his girlfriend in full clown make-up, signifying the disparity between his inner and outward identities - he has become unrecognisable to himself. Although the dog and protagonist frequently appear to be at odds with one another, there is a surprising display of tenderness between the two when the latter is inebriated. He induces inebriation as purely a defence mechanism, to emulate the rituals of his peers, but just for a moment he lets his guard down and shows a smidgen of affinity for his overlooked friend.

It is ultimately through a mirror, and the guidance of Rex, that our protagonist is able to exit the labyrinth altogether. Rex demonstrates to him that the mirror is actually a portal to another world, if he can muster the gumption to cross through it. There is a strange duality to the very concept of a mirror providing the means of escape - the function of a mirror, after all, is to reinforce the concreteness of whatever environment is juxtaposed with it, the ubiquitousness of mirrors around the maze suggesting that they, like the masks, are tools of oppression, reflecting only the greyness of the walls and the inhabitants' inevitable slide into debasement. Rex's demonstration of what lies beyond the mirror is naturally a call to look past surface appearance, but also evokes the importance of self-empowerment and of taking charge of one's own destiny. Earlier in the film, we saw the protagonist pass a window revealing only the unending passages inside the maze, and obscure it with a picture of an altogether different world, a sunlit one with greenery and open spaces; a perfunctory and seemingly futile gesture of escapism, yet in the end he discovers that such a world was lying in wait for him the entire time. All that was keeping him boxed in were the limitations of his own mind. His earlier action constitutes a rejection of the maze, but in the most superficial way possible; the potential for ingenuity is in him, but at first fulfils no greater function than the masks, as a defensive means of covering up what is undesirable while leaving it fundamentally unaltered. At the end of the film, he finds a way out by acknowledging and fully embracing his potential as an individual, not simply as a means of escapism, but of empowerment to go against convention and change his circumstances.

Unfortunately, the basic limitations that have dogged him all the while are not so easily overcome. For all the beauty of that final revelation, Ident reaches a humorously - and disturbingly - pessimistic conclusion. The protagonist leaves the maze behind him and sets out in a new direction, only for the same cycle of hectoring and alienation to continue beyond its walls. He meets another figure who his double in almost every way, an encounter that at first appears to bring both parties joy, before they suddenly turn on one another. Given that the protagonist has seemingly escaped into his own psyche, this lashing out against his own doppelganger can be interpreted as an expression of self-loathing, a sign that he will never be contented with any reflection that he sees, and effectively always banging his head against the walls of a maze, whether literal or metaphorical. In the background we see the silhouette of Rex watching the entire sorry exchange play out, before he finally decides that his master is a hopeless case and goes his own way. Unlike Park's signature canine, Rex doesn't have the infinite amount of patience required to play guardian angel to an obtuse human (or whatever our protagonist is) and would sooner go and seek out his own pack.

As an endnote, when Creature Comforts received a spin-off television series in 2003, it was ironically Starzak, and not Park, who was the main driving force behind the project. While for the most part Starzak was able to keep his more acidic sensibilities to the sidelines, it seems that he had been interested in taking the concept in a darker direction; apparently, he wanted to do an episode based around animals in a vivisectionist lab, but the higher-ups talked him out of it.

Logo Case Study: Aardman, Meet Pandaman (aka Mommy, What's Wrong With That Man's Face?)

Aardman aren't typically renowned for being the kind of animation studio to propagate childhood nightmares (whether rightly or wrongly), but they made a solid (if largely unsung) contribution to the pantheon of disturbing production logos just around the point that their time in the sun was getting underway. This is what served as the company's logo during its breakout era, between the smashing success of Creature Comforts in 1989 and their initial efforts to ride the shoulders of the Hollywood giants at the dawn of the new millennium. This was the era that gave us the early Wallace & Gromit shorts, Adam, the Creature Comforts electricity campaign and a variety of strange and demented animated pieces from the increasing multitude of individual talent at the studio, and Aardman certainly weren't averse to scaring the wits out of their ever-expanding legions of fans. If you stuck around to the very end of The Wrong Trousers (as I made the mistake of doing), your reward was to be greeted with a smirking claymation face, about which there was something distinctly, unsettling, immediately wrong. I call this one "unsung" because I rarely see it featured in lists of scary production logos, but it passed the test as far as I was concerned.

The face in question had a large dotted bow-tie, a toothy, lopsided smile, and no discernable eyeballs, features that combined to make it look unspeakably uncanny. My initial assumption was that this mysterious figure was intended to be the "Aard Man" referenced in the studio's moniker (in actuality, the eponymous Aardman was an accident-prone superhero created by studio founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton for a skit they made for Vision On). For a while, I was in the habit of calling him "Pandaman", simply because the dark patches on either side of his nose reminded me of the eye patches on a giant panda, and from a distance I presumed that those curious features were supposed to be his eyes. All the same, I never really settled on how to make sense of this face, and it perturbed me so. Something about the smile struck me as downright unwholesome; the apparent lack of eyes gave the form a distinctly inhuman edge, as if some monstrous being had attempted to mimic human form and not quite managed to master the eyes. Instinctively, I always knew that Pandaman wanted to devour me whole; that an encounter with him would invariably result in winding up on the wrong side of those horrifying gnashers. In other words, he was right at home among the studio's output for the era, which was all about giving a beating heart to the weird and the eerie - check out the 2000 VHS/DVD release Aardman Classics to see what a diabolical little chocolate box it was.

Emphasis upon that beating heart, because as with many of Aardman's freakier pieces, its freakiness goes a long way in bolstering its charm. The fact remains that this is a deeply charming logo, although its charms are more apparent in the full animated version than in the still version that tended to bite the ankles of most productions. In the animated logo, we see the landscape from which Pandaman emerges coming together, and it's a green and vibrant land, brimming with all of the hand-crafted warmth one would expect from the claymation legends. As we encircle the plasticine grass, various cranes and pillars in the backdrop end up forming the frame around Pandaman and the Aardman lettering, when viewed from the pivotal angle, while Pandaman's uncanny mug and various two-dimensional clouds on wires drop down from above to complete the image. In a particularly endearing touch, that garish bow-tie transpires to be a butterfly that flutters gracefully toward his shirt. The accompanying music is a tad ominous, but also stirring, as if something wondrous is taking place. A particularly neat variant is featured at the beginning of the 1991 VHS release Aardman Animations Vol 1, which includes time-lapse photography of an animator putting the numerous components into place, before we zoom in and Pandaman gets to work his typically unearthly magic.

So far as I can tell, the Pandaman logo originated from the titles used for Aardman's series Lip Synch, a collection of five short pieces commissioned by Channel 4 in 1989 (in addition to Nick Park's Creature Comforts, by far the most famous and influential of the five, there was also Ident by Richard Starzak, Going Equipped and War Story, a couple of animated monologues by Peter Lord, and Next by Barry Purves, who at the time was working as a freelance animator on various Aardman projects). Each short was preceded by the unnerving image of a mouth appearing in a small beige frame and growling the words "Lip Synch", while one of the red spots from his conspicuous polka dot bow-tie rolled out and created the corresponding lettering. Many of Pandaman's characteristics were carried over from this face, including the bow-tie and the shadowy blotches around the jaws. Given the title of the series, the focus on the mouth makes total sense, although here the frame is so tightly boxed around the feature in question that his uncanny lack of eyes goes unrevealed. Which is not to say that the Lip Synch titles are any less unnerving than the Pandaman logo; the snarling, disembodied mouth is still pretty freaking monstrous, its enormous teeth no less carnivorous, the guttural manner in which it spits out the title appropriately inhuman.

By the late 1990s, Aardman were seeking a new look, and what's interesting is that they did initially appear interested in retaining Pandaman as a long-term emblem and incorporating his terrible form into future branding. The closing titles for the 1998 series Rex The Runt feature a different, two-dimensional logo, in which Pandaman is depicted shouting through a megaphone (although the logo is rendered in such a way as to downplay his monstrous features, so that he just looks like any regular human with a bow-tie). This was not to be, however. Pandaman disappeared shortly after and was long out of the picture by the time Chicken Run, Aardman's first theatrical feature film, debuted in 2000. Aardman presumably wanted their signature image to herald the bold new era they were currently entering, and subjecting mainstream family audiences to the delights of Pandaman in a theatrical setting was possibly deemed a step too far. Instead, he was replaced by a completely new concoction, in which various two-dimensional figures are shown rotating around the gears in a great machine, only to come to an immediate halt when a hand reached in and presses the central figure, a small black box with limbs and a head, and on its torso, a bright red star which was to serve as the company's new trademark going forward. There are few forms less objectionable than that of a star, but also few more generic, and the demented character of Pandaman is very much missed. Not that the gears logo (which itself appears to have fallen by the wayside) doesn't have a likeable ingenuity all of its own - it is, after all, more benign than Pandaman only so long as you don't focus on the tortured faces of the various forms trapped within those rotating cogs. There's a childhood nightmare to be derived from that, I'm sure.

Lily Takes A Walk Into The Urban Abyss (A Spooky Surprise Book)

One of the creepiest books I remember reading as a young child was Lily Takes A Walk by Satoshi Kitamura. So creepy, in fact, that it inevitably became an obsession of mine. The book tells the story of a girl named Lily who takes regular walks into the heathlands outside her town, accompanied by Nicky, her faithful Jack Russell terrier. We follow them on the return journey of one such walk, as they navigate their way through the assortment of streets and back to Lily's house in the fading evening light. Early on, Kitamura establishes the central irony that haunts the story: "Even if it begins to get dark on the way home, Lily is never scared because Nicky is there with her." Unfortunately, the sentiment isn't mutual, for Nicky encounters a great deal on their seemingly ordinary journey that scares the jittery terrier to his wits' end, and having Lily there is blatantly of little consolation to him.

Lily Takes A Walk is a particularly witty example of how the illustrations of a picture book can be used to create additional layers of meaning for the narrative therein. The text and illustrations appear to be playfully at odds with one another, for they are not quite telling the same story. If you were to listen to a reading of the book without looking at the pictures, then you would get an entirely genial account of a fairly nondescript journey from Point A to Point B, with the aforementioned reference to the dark providing the only hint of any potential peril. Lily does some shopping for her mother, greets a neighbour, admires the bats and the evening star, pauses briefly to watch the ducks on the canal, and finally reaches home, where she is welcomed by the reassuring smell of a hot supper cooking. The text offers a very straightforward representation of how Lily perceives the walk. All very pleasant, you might think, but what was the point? The visuals, however, convey what the experience is like for her companion Nicky, and it's a markedly different one. Nicky sees dangers that Lily does not, with every step of the journey revealing another menace, another terrible set of eyes trailed upon them. To begin with these spectres have a degree of subtlety about them, which makes Lily's obliviousness more understandable - there are aptly camouflaged monsters masquerading as commonplace objects like trees and letterboxes. Sometimes multiple objects appear to come together to create a single entity - on one page, for example, Nicky sees how the moon, a clock tower and a street light, when viewed from a particular angle, combine to create a buck-toothed, beady-eyed face in the sky, an absurd image that is nevertheless unsettling with its suggestion of clandestine surveillance. As we get closer to home, the monsters get bolder and more prominent, and Lily's obtuseness to the matter seems increasingly ridiculous. Sights toward the end of their journey include a giant tomato-drinking vampire (he lacks the trademark fangs, but he has a pale complexion, appears around the bats and bears a marginal resemblance to Bela Lugosi, so vampire seems a safe bet), the Loch Ness Monster's canal-dwelling cousin and a pack of monsters raiding the trash cans outside of her house (in one of the book's quirkiest visual gags, one of these creatures is recognisably a hippopotamus).

Lily Takes A Walk was published by Picture Corgi Books in 1987 as part of a series known as "Spooky Surprise Books".  So far as I can tell there were three other titles in this series - The Hairy Toe and Teeny Tiny by Amelia Rosato, both re-tellings of traditional horror yarns, and another title by Kitamura, Captain Toby. What they all have in common, besides a generally macabre theme (although Captain Toby is probably the least macabre of the lot) is a final, extended page folded over into a flap which the viewer is required to lift to reveal the story's closing visual punchline. In the case of Lily Takes A Walk, it's a befittingly odd punchline that utterly baffled me as a child and, even today, I'm not entirely sure how to make sense of it. But perhaps we can take a crack at it here.

There is an entire chapter dedicated to Lily Takes A Walk in the book Children Reading Pictures: Interpreting Visual Texts by Evelyn Azripe and Morag Styles, in which they document the reactions of young readers to the book. Some of their observations sync up with my own, others are much more divergent. Among the most interesting was the following: "...most readers were more concerned about the feelings of the over-imaginative dog than with the child, while at the same time laughing - not unkindly - at him. This also allows quite young readers to enjoy the experience of feeling a little more grown up and mature than the characters in the book." (p. 58). Interesting, because when I read this book as a small child I was very firmly on Nicky's side and the last thing I'd have done would be to laugh at him. It honestly never occurred to me that the demonic figures lurking on every street corner might only be figments of a paranoid mind - possibly pathologically so - whose facial recognition was working overtime. I guess back then I was very receptive to the idea that there might be hidden horrors lurking in the most mundane of places, monsters who were every bit as at home in modern cities as in secluded caves and marshes. I took it as a given that the dog was the smart and perceptive one, attuned to the terrifying reality of the world around him that passed his inattentive owner by, and that is the interpretation I still prefer. Throughout the former half of the journey, it seems reasonable enough to ascribe ambiguity to Nicky's perspective, when the monsters take the form of ostensibly commonplace objects, although it becomes harder to say what Nicky might otherwise be seeing when menaced by something as unambiguous as the canal monster. Moreover, if you read the illustrations as reflections of Nicky's dementia, then the story, while visually inventive, the story seems kind of funny and kind of sad but overall much less juicy. I am instead inclined to liken Lily's obliviousness throughout her walk to that of the hedgehog at the start of the 1975 film Hedgehog In The Fog, who is so accustomed to walking a particular route each evening to go stargazing with a friend that he fails to notice the owl that stalks him and gets frighteningly close on this particular journey. So too is Lily so comfortable with what has become a familiar routine to her that she repeatedly fails to pick up on the monstrosities lurking in plain sight - monstrosities that, perhaps disturbingly, only seem to get more and more conspicuous the closer she gets to the definitive comfort of home. Azripe and Styles observe that some readers see Lily's obliviousness to Nicky's fears as comparable to that of an insensitive parent, but contend that this "does not correspond to the representation of Lily as a child who enjoys the sunset and the stars and likes animals (even bats!)" This, though, strikes me as one of the story's great ironies - Lily does have a deep appreciation for the world around her and takes time to enjoy the various sights she encounters along the way, be it the evening star (or Dog Star), the swooping bats or Mrs Hall at her window. But her gaze is always averted away from the really critical event happening in every picture. There is another side to Lily's town that Lily herself lives in blissful ignorance of. She sees what she wants to see, or at least what she expects to see. The fact that this is all stated to be part of a regular routine raises questions as to what the walk typically looks like for Nicky. Is this the first time he's seen these monsters, or is he accustomed to the need to keep his guard up while walking? Is the implication that our heroes will go out again and Nicky will be subjected to the same nightmare visions on subsequent walks?

The plot of Lily Takes A Walk bears more than a passing resemblance to the classic 1948 Looney Tunes short Scaredy Cat, in which Porky Pig and Sylvester take up residence in a shadowy old manor where the previous occupants have apparently been dispatched by a cult of murderous murids, and Sylvester alone cottons onto the terrible danger they are in. In fact, I am half-inclined to interpret the puzzling ending of Kitamura's story as a tribute to Scaredy Cat - both involve nasty surprises from rodents with a flagrantly sick sense of humor. A major difference, however, is that Lily and Nicky's disparate perspectives never bring them into direct conflict as with Porky and Sylvester, with Lily remaining cheerfully oblivious not only to the nightmares on her street, but also to Nicky's corresponding behaviours. That, I suppose, is the poignancy nestled at the heart of Lily Takes A Walk - Nicky's total inability to open up and communicate his troubled perspective to Lily, in part because he lacks a voice to begin with, but also because Lily doesn't seem terribly interested in him. It would be unfair to suggest that Lily ignores Nicky altogether, for she talks to him regularly throughout their journey. The early pages make it clear that she values the dog's companionship, yet she pays him very little in the way of close attention. The one thing Lily consistently fails to do throughout the story is to look at Nicky, except on the title page, which Arizpe and Styles correctly identify as the only instance in the book in which Nicky displays any kind of positive energy: "The title page belies the cover in that the dog is actually looking quite happy to be going for a walk. Perhaps this is because they are just starting out or because Lily is actually looking at him for once." They're incorrect about that first point, as the illustration shows Lily and Nicky not starting out on their journey, but actually on the heath, the location in which we are told they will sometimes walk for hours and hours, but which is represented only briefly in the story proper.

The opening page is notable for being the only illustration in the entire book to conceal no discreet (or otherwise) menace (besides the aforementioned title page, and even that's up for debate - see below). We see Lily and Nicky on their way out to the heath, walking along a pavement and past an apparently ordinary tree. What's interesting about this page is that both characters are breaking the fourth wall and looking directly at the reader (it isn't the only time that Lily does this). On the next page, we jump to them already out on the heath, at the furthest point from home we'll find our heroes throughout the course of the story. It is, perhaps not coincidentally, the most serene and picturesque illustration in Kitamura's book - there is an atmospheric calm amid the lush greenery and open space of the heathland not replicated in any of the sights of the town, represented here by a small collection of buildings stretching off into the distance, beckoning our heroes with the reminder that they must ultimately return to its hold. Even here, there is a hidden disturbance, for as Nicky cocks his leg against a clump of grass he becomes aware of a snake gazing back at him from an adjacent tree. Compared to the menagerie of surreal delights awaiting our heroes on the route back home, the snake on the heath seems like a positively humdrum detail, a harmless (in all odds) and not entirely unexpected sight to encounter while out in the wilds (unlike that trash-hungry hippo at the end of the journey). Yet there is something undeniably sinister about the snake; it stares at Nicky with an intensity, and a crooked smile that suggest a conspiratorial nature to its appearance, as if it knows and enjoys the fact that only Nicky can see it. This page establishes the prevailing dynamic of the story - Lily is staring, apparently deep in contemplation, at the world around her, her back turned to both Nicky and the snake, and by extension the reader. This clues us in that though Lily may be the title character, it is Nicky with whom our sympathies are to be aligned.

The text, coupled with the slightly shadowy ambience of the illustration, indicate that Lily and Nicky have reached the end of their most recent session on the heath and will soon be preparing to make the dreaded (for Nicky, anyway) trek home. In this regard, the snake functions as a kind of omen of the terrors that lie ahead. The buildings in the distance too seem more like a threat of what is to come than a reassuring reminder that home is within walking distance. We might relate this illustration back to that on the title page, which presumably shows an earlier, more carefree point from their adventure, suggesting that, snakes aside, Nicky does actually enjoy the heath portion of their excursions. That is the other great irony of Kitamura's story - the implication that Nicky feels his safest when he is at his furthest from home. The necessity of having to return there is what poisons his particular Eden. The title page seems to represent the purest state for both Lily and Nicky, when the two are at their most mutually happy and untroubled, but even then we see a slight spot of trouble on the horizon in the form of a single building nestled off in the distance, its out of place appearance and multitude of dark windows making it seem like it is the hidden menace of this particular illustration.

I am very conscious that I recently wrote a little piece on the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, which also follows a trajectory from nature into urbanisation, with an implicit message that expansion of the latter is gradually eroding the former. Although I don't detect an overtly environmentalist theme to Kitamura's story, it too conveys a distrust of urbanisation, which stands in contrast to the relative serenity of the natural world. I suspect that, largely, Kitamura is having fun with the irony that the dangers get more egregious the closer Lily and Nicky get to home, but there is something distinctly haunting about the entire character of the urban landscape they traverse, even without Nicky's monsters there to personify its covertly unpleasant nature. It is notable, for instance, that the town does not appear to be particularly well-populated; early in her journey, Nicky interacts with a market vendor, who ends up being the only other form of human life we see stirring in the outside world. We are informed in the text that Lily waves to a neighbour, Mrs Hall, as she passes her window, but Mrs Hall is not represented in the illustrations. Instead, Lily appears to wave directly at the reader, in her second instance of fourth wall breaking, leading to a curious paradox where the reader temporarily assumes the role of Mrs Hall and is complicit in Lily's facade of a warm and cozy community, whilst getting a window-side view of Nicky and his buck-toothed sky monster. The only other resident glimpsed throughout the journey, for the eagle-eyed reader, is a figure staring out of a distant window in the vampire illustration. The lack of residents out on the streets might not strike us as overly unusual, given that most of the journey takes place at night, but even then only a minority of houses have lit windows. Most of the buildings stand in eerie darkness, raising the possibility that they aren't occupied at all. Kitamura depicts the town as a dead, artificial space filled with unnatural lifeforms. Conversely, in some cases these lifeforms take on natural guises, such as the monstrous tree Lily and Nicky pass, suggesting a nature that has been corrupted by the imposition of the town. In the case of the sky monster, we have the natural and the unnatural literally combining to create a great uncanny entity. Others, such as the snarling letterbox that devours and regurgitates letters, suggest a corruption of industry and technology, it having turned against its original purpose to facilitate communication. The enormous vampire emerging from an advertising billboard promoting a brand of tomato juice, meanwhile, puts a comically monstrous face on the kind of consumer culture examined in Koyaanisqatsi. While I am not fond of the interpretation that the monsters are merely figments of Nicky's imagination, I am prepared to accept them as symbolism for a darker, more distasteful side to this town and its absent community, of which Lily remains entirely innocent. It is a grunginess only vaguely hinted at in the town's darkened alleys and the various items of litter seen strewn across the streets.

Unfortunately for Nicky, the story does not stop once he and Lily reach the ostensible safety of home. After all, what makes us think he's going to be any safer indoors in the company of Lily and her parents? The following illustration shows a continuation of Nicky's plight, with Lily and her parents at the dinner table, as Lily, as per the text, describes everything she has seen on her walk, while Nicky, alone (or so he thinks) with his own food bowl at the corner of the room, makes a futile attempt to communicate his side of the story. His frantic expression, coupled with the barrage of speech bubbles containing images of the assortment of monsters he has seen on route (the snake is absent, suggesting that we should discount it as part of the pattern), convey his eagerness to be heard, but he is predictably paid no attention. The display of family unity in this illustration is tempered by Nicky's evident exclusion. It is also one of only two points in the story in which Lily is shown within the presence of adult supervision, the other being the market vendor who sells her a bunch of flowers. A question that never crossed my mind as a child but bothers me a lot as an adult is that of just how old is Lily intended to be. The assortment of toys in her bedroom suggest that she probably isn't older than 12, but that begs the question as to why her parents would allow her to go on these long, unsupervised treks through the darkness at all. I appreciate that some suspension of disbelief is often required with these books, but nowadays I can't help but see a slight subtext here about parental negligence, with Lily's obliviousness to Nicky's upset suggesting that she is inheriting, whether by nature of nurture, her parents' own casual attitude toward her. Crucially, in her parents' single appearance, her father's eyes are closed and her mother has her back to the reader, much like Lily in the early illustration upon the heath, suggesting that both maintain their own wilful blindness to the situation.

The disturbance in the dining room is the most low-key of the story, and you might not even notice it on your first read. There is a fifth presence in the room, not far from Nicky and his bowl, and apparently taking an interest in the dog. This time, Nicky himself doesn't even see it.

We're now onto the final page of the story, and here's where we finally get into the source of so much childhood confusion for me. I mentioned that a key characteristic of the Spooky Surprise was that the final page was always extended, the extended portion being folded over into a flap you had to lift to reveal the story's ultimate spooky surprise. In the case of Lily Takes A Walk, we find ourselves in Lily's bedroom, as she retires to bed following what has been (from her perspective) an entirely agreeable day. The folded portion of the page shows a rather miserable-looking Nicky in his dog basket; here, he doesn't look afraid so much as physically and emotionally weary. The final words of text take the form of the fondest of wishes from Lily to her dog: "Goodnight. Sleep well." We suspect there is little chance of that, however, even before we lift the flap, which reveals Nicky being startled yet again, this time by a swarm of mice who have crawled out from the skirting board, complete with their own miniature ladder so that they can access the top of his basket. As I say, there are definite shades of Scaredy Cat here.

What always puzzled me about this ending, as a child, had less to do with the intentions of the mice (it is unclear whether their actions are carried out in a misguided attempt to befriend the nervous dog or if they purposely enjoy unsettling him further) as the implications of that fold-out page. It was unclear to me which of the two illustrations I should take as the final one. After all, if you turned over the extended page the top of the flap, showing the exhausted Nicky, forms part of another illustration, in which the mice and their ladder are just visible from the skirting board. I was never entirely sure if this image was intended to be an extension of the original scene in Lily's bedroom, before we lift the flap to reveal the mice around Nicky's basket, or if it represents the aftermath, with the mice retreating back into the hole with their ladder, and Nicky resuming his previous expression, yet again weary of it all, not least that he allowed some mice to get the better of him. If the former, then the problem is that it is impossible to view the complete scene at once. If the latter, then it suggests a slightly more positive outcome for Nicky, who is at least shown being left in peace by one of his aggravators at the end of the story. And that makes all the difference, particularly when you're a young reader - at what point in the story do we leave poor Nicky? I own two other books from the Spooky Surprise series - Teeny Tiny and Captain Toby (currently, every single price tag I've seen on The Hairy Toe has been way too high) - and unfortunately they don't add any clarity to the situation, as in both their cases, the other side of the extended page is blank, other than what's on the flap.

Either way, the final message is clear - there can be no place of genuine safety for the beleaguered Nicky. Even Lily's ostensible shrine to childhood warmth and innocence offers little comfort. In some respects this is the venue that most evokes a wilderness, ironically so since it is at the heart of our urban labyrinth. Lily's room is populated by a variety of plush animals, she has a calendar depicting a scene not unlike the heath she has returned from, and on the wall, close to Nicky's basket, is a poster of a tiger wading through long grasses. But these too are unnerving images. The tiger in particular seems to have been deliberately positioned so as to appear to be looking at Nicky, giving us an uneasy sense of a predator stalking its prey. Most of the plush animals, meanwhile, have wide, frantic eyes, suggesting an unsettled environment in a state of constant vigilance. It seems to evoke the more brutal side of nature, as a place in which animals are obligated to watch their backs at all times for fear of predation - somewhat conversely, as it is positioned within the context of a child's optimum place of comfort. Among the flesh and blood animals within the room, we get a playful subversion of traditional predator/prey dynamics, with Nicky, a terrier, being terrorised by a pack of rodents. The mice, naturally, represent a breakdown of the barriers between wilderness and domesticity, with the irony that the wilderness recreated inside Lily's bedroom is not the same one lurking right outside her doorstep. The images in Lily's room suggest a nature that has been broken in and defanged, in spite of their uncanny aura. The plush toys and tiger poster constitute a domestic remodelling of a wilderness that either no longer exists or is slowly vanishing, and being replaced by a wilderness of a different kind, one far more twisted and perverse but so mundane and familiar to its inhabitants that they do not feel the same need for vigilance as our jungle friends, and its numerous horrors go unnoticed. Indeed, the real hidden menace in the bedroom illustration is not the mice, but rather the building we can just make out through the gap in Lily's window where the curtains have not been fully drawn. It is as if the building, with its characteristically darkened windows, is peering on our heroes as they settle down to sleep, a threatening reminder that they must eventually venture out and repeat the nightmarish cycle all over again.

The one truly heart-warming detail in the final illustration is the picture Lily has been drawing on her desk, a picture of Nicky. The dog really is number one in Lily's world. All the more poignant, then, that she never seems to pick up on his.

I Can't Dance (Genesis)

There exists a powerful symbiosis between advertising and popular music. Advertising has a well-established history of capitalising on the public's nostalgia and goodwill toward much-loved tunes in order to transfer some of that pre-existing emotional investment onto the products being hawked, while exposure in such a campaign can do wonders to make get any song, familiar or brand new, embedded into contemporary zeitgeist. Occasionally, you'll find a scenario that gets the process backwards, with a pop song that only exists at all by starting life as an advertising jingle. So much of the creative energy in advertising is fuelled by music, but how often do we find the boot on the other foot? Are there many pop songs out there that take advertising as the main source of their inspiration? I've already covered a couple of tracks by Negativland that satirise the tactics of soft drink commercials, but if we look for more mainstream examples then the first tune that comes to mind is the Genesis single "I Can't Dance". Released in 1991, the song offered a light-hearted potshot at trends in contemporary denim advertising, which was still riding a fashionable high that started when Nick Kamen walked into a 1950s laundrette in 1985 and stripped his Levi's 501 jeans (and everything else he was wearing, save his underpants) to the sounds of Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" (naturally, "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" was re-released and became a UK chart hit soon after).

In the early 1980s, the Levi's brand had lost much of its lustre with younger consumers, who'd tagged them as the kind of unhip clothing their parents wore, and the Kamen ad was conceived as a means of reinventing their image (come to think of it, Levi's was facing much the same problem in the late 1990s, only their response that time around involved a terminally depressed hamster; I still cannot fathom how anybody thought that was a good idea). The strategy paid off and sales of Levi's jeans increased by 800%. It was followed by a series of ads heavily emphasising the soundtrack of yesteryear and the sex appeal of their male protagonists. One of them, memorably, featured a young Brad Pitt greeting the desert highway in his boxers, which seemed to be recurring motif for the series.

The music video for "I Can't Dance" is best remembered for that knowingly awkward swagger that band members Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks deploy whenever the chorus kicks in (thus accounting for the title), but the really fascinating element is of course when they take on the then-established conventions of designer jeans advertising. The lyrics of each individual verse and the corresponding visuals all lampoon a different contemporary jeans commercial, starting with that iconic spot for Bugle Boy jeans in which a female motorist briefly stops to ask a male hitch-hiker if he's wearing the brand in question before leaving him permanently in the dust. Also under the spotlight are a couple of ads for Levi's 501, one featuring a beach hunk who has his dog keep watch over his coveted jeans while he catches some waves, another following a 501 patron who slays the competition at a bar pool table and demonstrates his authority by getting his opponent to reveal (what else?) his underpants. Collins plays the denim-sporting protagonist in all three scenarios; things don't work out half as well for him as they did the heroes of the aforementioned Levi's ads, although he gets much the same treatment as that unfortunate Bugle wearer.

 Let's dig in a little deeper.

Hot sun beating down,
Burning my feet just walking around.
Hot sun makin' me sweat,
Gator's getting close, hasn't got me yet.

 

Of the triad of ads being sent up in this song, this one is represented the most tenuously in the lyrics. In fact, if not for the music video I doubt I would have connected it with the infamous Bugle Boy hitch-hiker ad. I think what particularly throws me off is the reference to this mysterious alligator that's apparently stalking our hero, something that occurs in neither the original commercial or the Genesis music video. As such, I draw a blank as to how it fits in here (I've heard it suggested by at least one person that the "gator" is a reference to the French clothing brand Lacoste, but I doubt that - for one thing, their mascot is a crocodile). In the video, the scenario plays out in a very similar fashion to the original ad, except here the motorist doubles back not to question Collins about his taste in denim, but to offer a ride to his reptilian cohort (an iguana, not an alligator). There's also a lot more emphasis on Collins getting showered with dust on both occasions that she passes him by; a running gag throughout this video involves Collins winding up on the receiving end of some form of slapstick/humiliation, subverting the cool and confident rebel archetype that was pivotal to the Levi's 501 campaign in particular. 

Next up... 

Blue jeans sittin' on the beach
Her dog's talking to me, but she's out of reach.
Ooh, she's got a body under that shirt
But all she wants to do is rub my face in the dirt.

 

This verse homages "Beach", a 1990 ad for Levi's 501 in which a dog is tasked with keeping watch over a pair of jeans while their mutual owner, a surfer, is off chasing waves. The dog performs its duties diligently, but falters when approached by a girl in a bikini who figures that the jeans are up for grabs. She gets as far as donning the jeans and turning to make her exit before the dog's protective urges are reignited, and it makes a sudden lunge at her ankles. At this point the dog's owner, a typically glamorous 501 hero, returns and diffuses the situation. He gives the dog the okay signal, and the three of them strut off together, one big happy beach family. The adventure is set to the sounds of "Can't Get Enough" by Bad Company.

 

The Genesis video tweaks the scenario marginally, so that the dog now belongs to the bikini wearer, who seems peeved to even acknowledge Collins' existence. The dog takes it upon itself to tussle with Collins for ownership of the jeans, with the result that Collins exits the beach with a bite-sized hole in one of the cheeks, a far cry from the triumphant adieu of our 501 surfer boy.

And finally...

 

Young punk spillin' beer on my shoes.
Fat guy's talkin' to me tryin' to steal my blues.
Thick smoke, see her smiling through.
I never thought so much could happen just shootin' pool.

 

The most recent addition to the 501 campaign at the time that "I Can't Dance" was conceived was "Pool Hall", in which a characteristic 501 protagonist runs afoul of a cue-wielding bar goon who cajoles him into gambling his precious jeans on a game of pool. Naturally, our young and glamorous hero turns out to be an absolute wizard at the pool table, much to the delight of an attractive bar maid who silently roots for him from across the room. To the victor the spoils; not only does he retain ownership of his jeans, but he gets the satisfaction of refusing a cash prize payment from his bewildered opponent and forces him to drop his (non-denim) trousers instead, confirming to the bar patrons that he wears boxers and not briefs. Characters shedding their pants to reveal the garments underneath was a recurring image in the 501 campaign, and could be empowering or degrading, depending on the context. Whatever a man wears around the lower half of his body is clearly posited as the height of his personal expression and autonomy. Kamen's willingness to voluntarily parade his near-naked form around a laundrette was the ultimate mark of confidence and poise, but elsewhere in the campaign we have multiple examples of one character depriving another of their dignity by denying them the privilege of a well-clad waist. Both the hero and villain of "Pool Hall" know how to hit each other where it hurts, hence why the sight of their opponent in their undergarments is worth so much more to them than money. In Brad Pitt's entry to the campaign, we see him turn the tables on a sadistic prison guard who gets a short-lived kick out of turning Pitt loose in just his boxers, symbolic impotency that's swiftly obliterated when rescue arrives in the form of Pitt's waiting girlfriend, who brought a spare pair of Levi's, and with it Pitt's restored prowess. Command a man's pants, according to the campaign, and you command the man. In the Genesis video the pool hall scenario goes in the other direction entirely, with the bar goon absolutely slaughtering Collins and forcing him to surrender his jeans, which frankly seems more realistic than the improbable David vs Goliath outcome in the original ad. Anyway, it's thanks to "Pool Hall" that "I Can't Dance" exists at all; apparently the song started life as a riff inspired by "Should I Stay or Should I Go" by The Clash, which was used as the soundtrack to this particular ad.

 

One thing you might notice about the trilogy of spots being lampooned here is that none of the protagonists therein had actually attempted to dance or sing. The Bugle Boy jeans ad doesn't quite fit the mold, as the hero does get to open his mouth, albeit briefly, but the 501 ads avoided dialogue altogether and let the classic rock track of the hour do the talking. So what exactly are Genesis getting at in mocking these well-dressed rebels for supposed deficiencies in abilities we never even see them take a crack at? Circle back to where this all began, with Nick Kamen in that laundrette. After selling an entire generation on the delights of Levi's 501, Kamen attempted to capitalise on his newfound acclaim by making the transition from model to pop musician, but the response was much more tepid than when he had Marvin Gaye do the heavy lifting. He found early success with the Madonna-penned "Each Time You Break My Heart", which reached number 5 in the UK charts in 1986, but the law of diminishing returns set in quickly for Kamen, and while he continued to net appreciative enough audiences in several European countries throughout the latter half of the decade, as far as his native Blighty was concerned all Kamen's flavour had already been licked dry. In the book 100 Greatest TV Ads, written by Mark Robinson to tie in with a popular Channel 4 program in 2000 (Channel 4 did a lot of these "100 Greatest" things when they had a couple of hours to fill in the 2000s, and they by and large made for very poor viewing, but this one at least appealed to the budding ad buff in me), TV presenter Kate Thornton is quoted surmising what went wrong for Kamen: "He broke the rule - he talked. We just liked looking at him. It was as simple as that...fundamentally he was to be looked at and lusted over - and never to be taken seriously." (p.121) That, in a tidy little nutshell, is the message of "I Can't Dance". The rebel in shrink-to-fit denim was a mythical figure that existed only in the most facile of surface detail. A fantasy world in which all ambient noise was conveniently filtered out by your favourite retro radio station, not merely for the purposes of exploiting nostalgia, but because any first-hand vocalisation from our well-dressed maverick would have ruptured the mystique and brought us crashing back down to reality. "I Can't Dance" was about taking a humorous look at the absurdities nestled beneath the artifice.

 

Robinson offers the following epilogue to Kamen's career: "He turned a new Levi's ad into a much-hyped media event and ended up eventually being replaced in 1999 by a fluffy yellow puppet called Flat Eric." Somewhere in between there was also that hiccup involving a hamster, but Robinson was tactful not to mention that.