Justin Achilli

You can't go back. You can't ever have that first time (or those first times again).

This weekend I watched Rene Laloux's Fantastic Planet and thought to myself that this must have been visionary at the time, but given the current state of the genre, if it were released today, it would pass without anyone's notice. The animation is charming. The story is harrowing. The fantastical world is so weird that no one would touch it today -- it wouldn't fit into the prepacked trilogy-with-maps model of the printed fiction world, the clear morality of modern movies, or the "what do I do?" ethic of games.

(Speaking of games, the graphic style reminded me a little bit of Quirks, which was one of the tone-setting hobby games of my youth. I found a copy at Origins a few years back, and I played it with my mother when I visited for Christmas.)

Laloux's Fantastic Planet would be an amazing place to explore, mostly for the reason that it was shaped in a context that didn't rely on everything that went before it. Its world is a weird place, with enough of the familiar to stick a concept in the watcher's mind, but with enough freshness of outlook to make it interesting or believable. One particular idea resonated with me: The fugitive humans of Fantastic Planet hid out in an abandoned park. An abandoned park? It worked great. When was the last time you got excited about the phrase "abandoned park"? Who even knows what an "abandoned park" is? The illustration here (Untitled #817 by Douglas Walker) isn't from the film, but is similarly evocative. Familiar but strange, identifiable but alien.

The sense of wonder imparted by a first visit to a fantastical new world, in whatever medium, gives me an emotional buy-in that I don't get in, say, Oblivion or the Belgariad, where the worlds are essentially derivatives of genre foundations. And, weirdly, too much wonder puts the experience beyond one to which I can relate. Morrowind, for example: The city built in a giant crab shell was dazzling, but the fact that long-distance travel occurred on the back of giant bugs whose "pilots" climbed inside their guts and manipulated organs... huh?

The New Weird movement terms this "radical estrangement," and that phrase carries the Other beauty of the experience. The fairy-tale feel of the original Legend of Zelda had a lot of this. You knew you were in a kingdom, because the lore told you, but you never saw any of the people around whom the kingdom existed. You needed to save it, but it was far-off, seemingly surrounded by mists, withdrawn from your experience. It felt isolated, characterized by a bit of bittersweet loneliness. That's surely more than the creators wanted to put in place, but the broad-strokes treatment of the world let me know the blanks were there, and that felt innocent and grand. I get the same feeling from Nausicaa's Valley of the Wind (and a lot of Miyazake's work, actually). Ico and Shadow of the Colossus have this same sort of mystery world behind the scenes. Hopefully The Last Guardian carries on this tradition.

Contrast that with, say, American McGee's Alice, which takes a deliberately innocent subject matter and then goes for a shock treatment of darkness. It's almost crass -- playing to the cheap seats -- and there's a reason that you don't hear many people who have the same sort of acclaim for it that they do for Miyazake films or the Ico series. Alice took an obvious shortcut, as did China Mieville's King Rat. They trade in the innocence of those children's tales without the wonder that the tales originally invoked. You can't have wonder with cynicism. Innocence carries the amazement. Cynicism traffics in world-weariness, not grandeur.

(Another aside: I have high hopes for Brom's treatment of Peter Pan in his upcoming The Child Thief.)

I've been banging my head against the rock of creating this experience a few times in a tabletop environment, and I've reached the ultimate conclusion that I can pull at the sense of dawning wonder for a brief period, but it by definition couldn't sustain a traditional "campaign" or an MMO that requests hundreds of hours. Weird tales work best in the short form. Skilled hands can carry the feeling through a bit of a longer presentation, as in China Mieville's much better Perdido Street Station, or in the collected Dying Earth tales of Jack Vance, but I couldn't get a game group together on an infinite, open-ended schedule and hope to maintain that wonder. Eventually, the details would fill in and the wonder wouold become backdrop.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite H.P. Lovecraft stories, "The Outsider," which turned the innocence and isolation of wonder toward a horror end. I've got a collection of Clark Ashton Smith stories in the mail, too, so I'm looking at spending more time being lonely and dazzled by it.