May 27, 2012
Fairy/Arrietty
I must go seek some dewdrops here
And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear
From an article on Wired.com, Nanoscience Is at Work in The Secret World of Arrietty:
"According to the book Elemental Magic, Volume I: The Art of Special Effects Animation, from 1935 to 1941, around the time Disney was making Fantasia, there were over 100 artists in the special effects department devoted to drawing every type of “natural” phenomena from rain falling to pixie dust glittering.
And special effects of nature played a big part in The Secret World of Arrietty, the new Studio Ghibli animated version of the children’s classic series The Borrowers by Mary Norton. Arrietty and her dollhouse-sized family live in a very different world than you and I, as the hand-drawn special effects animation made very clear....
One aspect of this micro-world is the way liquids behave. When Arrietty’s mother Homily goes to pour a pot of tea, it doesn’t just pour out of the spout. Instead, it squeezes out, giant drop by drop.... Even though Arrietty and her family are smaller than we are, water molecules are still the same size. So water tends to form into drops of about the same size as in our world, and behave the same way."
Another article, this one from The Telegraph, titled Sandman meets Queen Mab:
"How big is a fairy? [A British stamp designed by Dave McKean]... represent[s] what CS Lewis, in his literary-historical persona, calls 'the minute and almost insectal fairies of the debased modern convention with their antennae and gauzy wings'. In the medieval tradition, fairies were noted mainly for their preternataral status rather than their size.
Lewis blames 16th-century artificial writers such as Michael Drayton (whom most people do not read today, though I recommend Poly-Olbion) and Shakespeare (whom most people do not read either, but suppose that they do). Queen Mab's chariot is described in Romeo and Juliet:
Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider's web,
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams,
Her whip of cricket's bone; the lash of film;
Her waggoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid:
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or an old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
Very nice, if you like that kind of thing. But it has little enough to do with any ancient folklore or myth that Britain boasts. I'm afraid that McKean's... images come from the genre of modern 'fantasy' playing on the wreckage of tradition moulded by vulgar secondary imagination."
Christopher Howse probably would've harrumphed about The Borrowers, too.
Posted by Alison Humphrey at May 27, 2012 04:06 PM