I’d planned to follow up Macbeth and Hamlet with yet another tale of obsession, vengeance, and fate, namely Moby-Dick (2000), part of the Middelboeverse “Animated Epics” series.
But although I’ve seen it (it’s really good, and features Rod Steiger voicing Ahab), it seems not to be available online at the moment, so instead I’ll jump to the whale of a tale I would have gone to next after Moby-Dick, namely the biblical story of Jonah (1996), part of the Middelboeverse “Testament: The Bible in Animation” series.
Following Macbeth with another tale of a murderous, usurping king and his comeuppance: an especially beautiful, every-frame-a-painting Hamlet (1992), likewise from “Shakespeare: The Animated Tales.”
It begins, like both Olivier’s and Kozintsev’s versions, with waves crashing on the rocks below Elsinore; but the ghost is clearly based quite directly on the Kozintsev ghost – not surprising, given how many artists involved with these projects are Russians, for whom Kozintsev’s work is presumably more familiar than it is to many in the Anglophone audience. (If you get a chance to see the Kozintsev versions of Hamlet and Lear, don’t miss them!)
Continuing the theme of Scottish tyrants and female magic-workers, we turn from The Green Man of Knowledge to Macbeth (1992), part of “Shakespeare: The Animated Tales” (another series in the Middelboeverse):
With (for some reason) a special appearance by Gandalf in the final scene!
If Gawain made an apt pairing with Beowulf, so this adaptation (2001) of a Scottish folktale makes an apt pairing with Gawain, as this story’s magical Green Man with his three sinister tests and his magically helpful female relative seems akin to the Green Knight (though the tropes of three sinister tests, and magically helpful female relatives of the villain, are not exactly uncommon in folklore). Once again, as with Beowulf and Gawain, the animation is lovely and atypical.
I’m not sure that Middelboe was involved with this particular episode, but it’s part of the ”Animated Tales of the World” series (most of them Welsh/Russian collaborations) on which she worked as editor, and I’m really just using her name as a handy tag for these various animated-adaptations-of-classic-stories series which share both a common sensibility and a number of recurring artists and actors, usually but not always including Middelboe. And because it’s a cool name.
Yesterday’s entry, Beowulf (1998), was from the Middelboe-produced series “Animated Epics.” This next adaptation, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2002), actually written by Middelboe, is sometimes treated as part of that series and sometimes treated as a standalone project.
A nice touch here: all the characters and scenes are stained-glass windows come to life.
At a certain level of abstraction, the structure of the plot is strikingly similar to that of Beowulf, despite the vast difference in tone and culture: a ruler and his men are feasting in their hall when a monstrous figure appears and challenges them; our warrior protagonist responds to the challenge, engages the monster, and subsequently tracks him back to his lair, where he must also face the monster’s female relative. There’s even a decapitation and a head being carried, although the circumstances are radically different.
As to the differences, Gawain’s atmosphere is both more thoroughly Christian and more erotically charged – a seeming contradiction that seeks resolution within the complex maze of rules of “courtly love” that would probably seem rather alien to the world of Beowulf. (One also suspects that there were probably bawdier versions of the “exchange of gifts” portion of the story to be found in circulation.)
An interesting feature of this story is that while the behaviour of the protagonist is decidedly dodgy by conventional Christian standards – he engages in a romantic dalliance (albeit an unconsummated one) with a woman who is not only married, but married to his own host and benefactor, plus he cheats his host by withholding one of the gifts he agreed to exchange (namely the enchanted girdle) – yet it is only the matter of the girdle that is condemned, and that only glancingly; the dalliance itself, as Gawain carefully negotiates it, is treated as an honourable middle way between, on the one hand, the sin of violating the requirements of chastity and hospitality, and on the other hand, the discourtesy of spurning the (not exactly unpleasant) advances of a fair and noble lady. Yet Gawain is not an anti-Christian tale; the hero carries an image of the Virgin Mary on the inside of his shield, and regards his commitment to the courtly ethos as continuous with his Christian duty – another example of the way that the mediæval Church’s claim of sole authority to decide on such matters did not go unchallenged in popular Christian culture.
The pumpkin jack o’lanterns in the film are anachronistic (jack o’ lanterns are in fact a fairly old Celtic tradition, but pumpkins are native to the New World), but may be a nod to the literary affiliation between Gawain’s Green Giant and the pumpkin-wielding headless horseman in Washington Irving’s Ichabod Crane.
My favourite adaptation of Beowulf – beautiful animation, plus narration by Derek Jacobi:
An interesting choice to make Grendel and his mother look so much like Swamp Thing and/or Man-Thing. (Of course the original poem is quite vague as to their appearance.)
This film is from producer Penélope Middelboe, who’s been involved (as producer, writer, and/or editor) with several series of high-quality animated adaptations of classics; Beowulf is my favourite of the episodes I’ve seen, but from a glance at those available online (both those I’ve seen before and those I haven’t), my impression is that while they vary a bit in quality, for the most part they look really good. So I’m thinking I might view and post one of these per day, alongside my SciFi SongFest.
This one counts for July 11th, since I already posted it to Facebook on the 11th.
