Mei

by KEMI

congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!

Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?

An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.

A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.

This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we'll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn't present, and the location is uncertain. And it's a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small -- but the feeling of "ocean" isn't really there yet, is it? It's unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that's okay, there's still time.

And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!

Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you're striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he'd only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that "if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive." He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn't believe he was finished -- he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.

And he wasn't finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.

Well, on some level that started already in Chapter 4, with the Hammer of Justice introducing the idea of Lightners being reborn in Dark Works as Darkners under very specific circumstances.

But the Flowers really put that point front and center. They are living things that receive some sort of Wish-Fulfillment in the Dark World, much like how our Lightner characters receive cool outfits and powers… but the main Wish being fulfilled for them is having a higher form of consciousness and a more anthropomorphic form, like how Darkners come to life in the Dark World. Flowery’s portrait is Black-and-White, much like the Lightner characters, because he is a kind of Lightner as far as the metaphysical mechanics of Light and Dark function… except he also has colorful Darkner-like Golden eyes.

And so much of the conflict of this Chapter is based on their unique liminality. They’re Lightner enough that being reduced back to their Light World ‘inanimate’ form feels much more like a death to them then it feels to a regular Darkner (who can find contentment as inanimate objects, as they are ‘alive’ from the Dreams the Lightners associate with them)… but also Lightner enough that they can’t actually survive for long in the Dark World, their physical bodies still have their regular physical needs, but unlike Susie, they also can’t exactly pull out of the Dark World, grab a snack for nourishment and then pull back in.

And then the Secret Boss is another kind of Liminal being, a more traditional Darkner (in the sense of a truly inanimate object come to life) that’s also being brought to life due to being possessed by a Lightner ghost. Another sort of unique being who is not quite as Ontologically Doomed as the Flowers, but struggles with figuring out what her identity is in her own way. She feels more at home with other Liminal Beings like the Flowers, despite being technically a different kind of being.

All of this feels like build up to exploring the nature of Ralsei, the so-called ‘impossibility’, who already has some of their own ‘Liminal’ elements - they look much more ‘like a Monster’ than any other non-Gerson Darkner, they can appear and survive in every Dark World, and from a meta-narrative perspective, their role as a Darkner Playable Party Member seems to clash with the game’s meta-commentary making Darkners to be like a whole species defined as Video Game NPCs on some level.

They don’t quite seem to match any of the ‘Rules’ of the Liminal Beings we know of so far. Resurrected Lightners like Gerson are specifically mentioned to only appear in very specific Dark Worlds, so this is like the opposite of Ralsei’s situation, and even with their white fur, their portrait seems considerably less monochromatic to me than Flowery’s. But I think this is still a thematic build-up being done to explore different kinds of liminality between Light and Dark and how they affect the relevant characters, before we get into the particular kind of liminality that Ralsei represents.

House 1977 has not one but two horses featured over its 88 minute runtime.

First, one that’s easy to miss is this small horse outside of the shoesmaker’s workshop seen here next to Mr. Togo’s car. (And sharing the scene with director Nobuhiko Obayashi’s daughter Chigumi Obayashi, a cowriter of this film.)

This horse is shown a second time when Mr Togo returns to use the shoesmaker’s phone a few beats later.

Now I could forgive you for considering this to be a pony as it’s quite small and therefore not quite fulfilling the horse quota. But what I can’t forgive is blatantly ignoring this

The beautiful white horse featured in one of the most iconic moments of the film, Fantasy’s fantasy about being rescued by Mr Togo in which she imagines him riding in on a white stallion to save her from the titular House.