Monster Multimedia: Hilda

One of those useless thoughts I’ll sometimes have when taking in something aimed at a younger demographic is asking whether I’d have enjoyed it when I was a kid, rather than the wan and decrepit skeleton beast I am currently. My youthful tastes were so contextual and arbitrary that I can never hope to have a definitive answer, but as someone who got really into reading about mythology and folklore in grade school (with, as I have mentioned in the past, their own ambitions of creating the ultimate bestiary of mythological creatures—I still have all my notes in a manila folder), and who then loved to see those stories and creatures I was reading about referenced in the wider culture (so I got to think “I know that one!”), Hilda endeared itself to me very quickly. Created by illustrator Luke Pearson (who has also worked in animation as a storyboarder on Adventure Time), Hilda began as a series of graphic novels, starting with 2010’s Hildafolk (sometimes titled Hilda and the Troll), carrying an adventurous and whimsical spirit that brings to mind both the work of Hayao Miyazaki and Tove Jansson (the latter can especially be seen in the clean, wide-eyed characters Pearson draws), reinterpreting and modernizing (mostly) Scandinavian legends in clever and often beautiful ways. In 2018, Netflix released an animated series adaptation, capturing Pearson’s art with its very smooth and colourful animation (and its ethereal soundtrack, with a theme song provided by Grimes), and expanding on the world presented in the comics, mixing direct adaptations of the books with original stories that fit the tone. I wrote briefly about watching the first Netflix season back in 2019, but after going through the second season that premiered last month, I have an even greater appreciation for the whole series, especially in the way it thoughtfully introduces all the fun stuff about folklore (the silliness, the scariness, the endless possibilities they present) to a new generation of kids.

Jellyfish Eyes (2013)

There have been more than a few more intelligent, revisionist takes on monster tropes in the past, ones that take the basic idea and attempt to add a more human dimension, or use it to directly commentate on what the monsters actually mean—I’ve written about a few of them here. Jellyfish Eyes is the cinematic attempt to give that sort of treatment to the monster collecting/kids-and-monsters subgenre (Pokemon, Digimon, et. al.), which by 2013 had become a part of the lexicon, something with a near-instantaneous draw for the youth of the world—I’ve said before that the fantasy of having your own monster friend has been something of a near-universal one for kids for decades now, with the monster collecting games simply being the purest distillation of it. Directed by contemporary artist Takashi Murakami, this movie really does get the emotional attachment kids have these fantasy creatures, and presents them in a story that outright describes them as what they are—a personal expression of their hopes and dreams, and something to protect them from cruel realities—in a story that vacillates from child-like simplicity to hard social commentary on the edges. While my previous Criterion Channel watch, The X From Outer Space, fit into that channel’s ethos for its historical interest, this is definitely more in line with their support of smaller, independently-minded films, and despite taking on fairly mainstream ideas, it does so in a way that’s way more interesting than the norm.

Monster Multimedia: Serendipity

Lost childhood memories have a way of being dredged up in unexpected ways: in the book Abominable Science!, which is a skeptical analysis of cryptozoology that I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned a few times before, co-author Daniel Loxton has an aside in the section about the semi-legendary Canadian sea serpent Cadborosaurus where he mentions the children’s book Serendipity, which is about a pink sea serpent. He even contacted the author of that book and got a short quote from him. This reference was part of a larger point Loxton was making about how sea serpents, both fictional and “real”, are modelled after the horse-fish hybrids regularly depicted in Classical Greek art, but as soon as it was was mentioned, I was instead struck with familiarity, and thought to myself “Wow, someone else remembers that thing, too!” The wide world of monsters seemed a lot smaller in that moment.