AngeliC1411

Okay so, why make an animatic on that topic for my birthday? A few reasons: the birthday ruining was a birthday, so it’s pretty fitting. I could have done it for Five’s birthday, which is its exact date in my timeline but March is pretty far away and the birthday ruining is about Miko first and foremost, wouldn’t want to steal Five’s big day. Could’ve done it for Miko’s birthday in July, but I only got the idea for the animatic afterward so like. Not possible. I wanted to create something for my own birthday and the animatic was already in the works so I focused on that.

Also me, brains and the month of August are really good friends actually. A benign tumor was discovered in my brain as a kid, and it took two surgeries a few years apart to get all of it removed. The results of those two surgeries and the overall experience of carrying that thingy in my head were: a deep appreciation for MRI machines, (those horrendous noise donuts are really cool) and a lot of thoughts about creepy crawlies hiding in my head (the brain spider). Both of my surgeries happened in August and both times practically for my birthday, so y’know. I’ve made many artworks inspired by this part of my life, but projecting my experience onto Miko and turning it into Bolypius is the culmination of all of that.

That’s for the context of the animatic, now for its contents, question number one: why this song? C’est une belle journée by Mylène Farmer is a song that I vividly remember listening to in the car as a kid. At that age I wasn’t able to understand the lyrics and the deeper meaning of the song, so I took the title (which literally translates to ‘it’s a beautiful day’) at face value and assumed it was a happy little song about a happy little day and filed the song away as a song I really liked. It’s only as I got older and listened to it again that I realized the song is actually referencing suicide. I’m not using it in the animatic to depict Miko’s suicidal ideation (I don’t think she has any), but I am using the lyrics to reference death (of the original Miko), the fact that other people witnessing it don’t realize it’s about death, and the fear of being alive and wanting things. By choosing a song in French I’m also hoping that the people watching the animatic will experience something adjacent to my own experience hearing the song for the first time and not being able to understand the lyrics.

The few translations of the song I was able to find online completely miss the subtext, so allow me to explain the meaning of the lyrics instead of simply offering a literal translation:

Allongé le corps est mort / pour des milliers c’est un homme qui dort -> laying down, the body is dead, but for thousands it’s a man who is sleeping. That first line can also be interpreted as a reference to a poem from Rimbeau, Le Dormeur du val, which depicts an idyllic scene of a man sleeping in the grass, only to slowly reveal that the man is dead as the poem goes on.

A moitié pleine est l’amphore / c’est à moitié vide qu’on la voit sans effort -> Mylène Farmer’s fancy way of saying ‘the glass is half full but it’s really easy to see it half empty’.

Voir la vie son côté pile / ô philosophie dis-moi des élégies -> once again Farmer juxtaposes optimism and pessimism, this time about seeing life for what’s good about it (to see (‘voir’) something only from one side of the coin (‘pile’ being the French equivalent of ‘tails’ in ‘heads or tails’)) versus asking to be read elegies, which are typically lamentations for the dead.

Le bonheur lui me fait peur / d’avoir tant d’envie et j’ai un souffle au cœur -> the prospect of happiness and wanting things being so distressing that it triggers heart murmurs.

C’est une belle journée je vais me coucher/ une si belle journée qui s’achève -> simply: ‘It’s a beautiful day, I’m going to sleep. Such a beautiful day that is ending.’ When this chorus is the only part of the song you understand because the rest of it uses a vocabulary and metaphors that are much more complex, your first impression of the song is that Farmer sings about this one really good day she just had and that she now has to say goodbye to. Which is technically the true meaning of the song, but you don’t realize to what extent just yet.

Donne l’envie d’aimer mais je vais me coucher / mordre l’éternité à dents pleines -> the beautiful day is giving Farmer ‘l’envie d’aimer’ (quite literally making her want to love), but we’re going to sleep instead. To bite (‘mordre’) something ‘à dents pleines’, meaning with all your teeth, is a French saying typically used to say ‘mordre la vie à pleine dents’ (biting into life with all your teeth) to represent not wanting to let go, doing something wholeheartedly and with passion. Here Farmer is subverting the usual saying by biting into death with all her teeth.

C’est une belle journée je vais me coucher / une si belle journée souveraine -> here the adjective ‘souveraine’ (sovereign) gives the beautiful day an almost divine quality. The beautiful day turns into something sacred and powerful, because the beautiful day is life itself.

Donne l’envie de paix / voir des anges à mes pieds -> which is giving Farmer ‘l’envie de paix’ (the want for peace), and to see angels at her feet. Needless to say we’re well into the lexical field of heaven at this point, with ‘sovereign’ earlier and now ‘peace’ and ‘angels’. The entire song addresses death as something beautiful, linking it to resting and going to heaven.

Mais je vais me coucher / m’faire la belle -> but Farmer is going to sleep. I think it’s weird to put a ‘but’ right after talking about angels and peace when your goal is going to sleep (killing yourself). My interpretation of this one word being there is that it serves to throw this whole thing upside down: life is heaven (it is indeed her beautiful day (life) that makes her want to love and to be at peace) that Farmer is escaping by killing herself. ‘se faire la belle’ is a French saying for escaping a situation, Farmer is now talking about her departure as an escape, not simply as going to bed. ‘Se faire la belle’ can also be interpreted literally: to make yourself look beautiful. My father interprets this line as looking beautiful for your funeral, and he really wanted me to include his take here.

There’s three more minutes of song after this with even more symbolism in the lyrics, but since they’re not relevant to the animatic I won’t address it here. Now it’s time for a fun fact:

Ralphie Bear’s summoning chant was obviously taken from the episode Ralphie Bear Is Back, but did you notice the text on screen also comes from that episode? I used the lyrics that appear behind Five at the start of the episode to replicate it as best as I could: